Disco Elysium is one of the few video games that has been recommended to me over the course of my young adult life. Notably, it was maybe the only game folks encouraged me to play during the years that I wouldn't have counted gaming among my hobbies. After playing Disco, I can see why my friends thought it might be a good fit. A sadboy English major's dream. The game is nihilistic, funny, verbose, and completely absurd in so many of its most notable moments it feels less like a post-modern murder mystery and more like some kind of cross between an S. J. Perelman story and film noir.

Disco was - somewhat famously - created by an Estonian group of authors and artists who founded the collective ZA/UM as an outlet for collaboration on music, paintings, books, and... Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, the game sprung from a setting and character set that lead designer Robert Kurvitz had been playing around with in a D&D campaign long before Disco came into being. It makes sense, then, that the game retained many elements of a tabletop RPG in its mechanics, including constant skill checks and gobs of dialogue with NPCs.

You play as a detective who can't remember his name. You're tasked with solving the murder of a man who has been hanging from an industrial line of yellow tie-down ratcheting in the back of your hostel for almost a week. As you move throughout Disco's grimy, vaguely French, post-post-post-capitalist world - whose populace is obsessed with socio-political, economic, and racial theory in bafflingly equal measure - you uncover the mystery of your own identity alongside that of the murder. Un double, if you will.

Disco plays out in dialogue panels. You create your character's strengths and weaknesses to begin. Then, you're cast off into the world to investigate. You jog around through the lens of an isometric camera angle and interact with people and objects. The object interactions are relatively simple, picking up hidden items or thinking through their meanings by selecting options in - you guessed it - a dialogue panel. Meanwhile, actual dialogue with other characters is full of extremely dense rhetoric pretty much without fail. Every conversation is a new opportunity to have your mind opened by yet another NPC with bold, strange, or downright maniacal notions of what it means to exist in Disco's world. That, or another chance to skip a lot of cruft, depending on how much you like reading.

Luckily, reading's not the only option for you in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, as the game is fully - and beautifully - voiced. Once you've made it through a conversation, you'll often be given the chance to do a skill check to unlock more of the game's story. If you fail a red check, you are permanently locked out of the check's outcome. If you fail a white check (the vast majority of checks), you'll have to put upgrade points into a certain skill before you can retry it. The way you earn these upgrade points is by leveling up. You level up by earning experience by completing quests and... having more NPC conversations. As an alternative to boosting your skills directly, you can also put upgrade points into unlocking more slots in your character's "thought cabinet."

A mystifying mechanic at first, the "thought cabinet" turns out to be a place where you can place the various thoughts that your character collects throughout the game. Once a thought is fully-baked, after taking a prescribed amount of in-game time to do so, your character gains that thought's effect. These effects usually have something to do with skills, the game's upgrade system, or your character's interactions with the outside world. You can also change your prowess in certain skills by changing your outfit. But, if I were you, I would worry more about looking stylish first. There are so many opportunities to do so in Disco that you'd be doing yourself a disservice not to explore its wardrobe.

Miraculously (just like in real life!), time and money are resources of consequence in Disco. As days pass, different characters and story beats come and go. Money can be used to buy things. Not having enough of it is generally bad. You'll need it to progress your story in some cases. The game is very aware of money due to its post-capitalist themes and the designers' apparent desire to ponder complex socio-economic issues from a somewhat parodical lens at every possible juncture. It's all a bit mesmerizing. Charming at times, disorienting at others.

As you can probably tell by now, Disco is so many things.

I love detective fiction. I love to feel slapped in the face by cynical ideas that my admittedly very square brain could never initially think up on its own. I had such high hopes for this game, and - to a degree - Disco fulfilled them, especially in the first few hours.

The writing in the game is for the most part uniformly fantastic. Each NPC has something to say. I found myself laughing at multiple wry comments, and the player character's detective sidekick - Lieutenant Kitsuragi - springs to life in his nuanced interests and motives. He's not just an ace detective. He also loves souped-up motor carriages and is a patient and nurturing friend, even to someone as broken as you. Sometimes - in the game's opening, for instance - this brokenness overcomes you, and you succumb to comments from your interiority. These voices, tagged creatively with monikers like "Ancient Reptilian Brain" and "Limbic System," argue over who you are and who they want you to be, simulating internal monologue in a fascinating recreation of multifaceted human thought, both conscious and primally subconscious.

Before we get into the bad stuff, the art in this game is luminous. You should see it, and Disco is probably worth buying just to support whoever drew it. Full stop.

All told, the game's script includes over one million words. One million. And while most of them are great, one million is too many. I often found myself skipping large parts of non-crucial conversations because each character you talk to in Disco seems hell-bent on getting their little slice of million. It's too bad, because most of this writing and voice acting deserves to be heard. That said, the game could have definitely done with more editing.

Skill checks determine your ability to progress in Disco. Each time you come across a check, your percent chance of success shows up on the screen. If you opt to try the check, the game rolls two six-sided dice at random and adds/subtracts from the resulting number based on your stats in relevant skill(s) to determine the outcome. If you succeed, you are able to progress in your conversation/object interaction/quest. If you fail, you sometimes lose morale or health and will have to come back at another time to retry the check. The main way you're able to retry checks is by putting upgrade points into the skill the check pertains to. For instance, if you fail a rhetoric check, you'll have to upgrade your rhetoric skill before trying again. On the surface, this seems like a decent way to encourage exploration and completion of side-quests. However, in practice, it feels like you're being forced to run around and do things you otherwise wouldn't do just to come back for another randomized chance at success. And - while you are able to influence the amount of randomness in each check by beefing up certain skills - sometimes you end up failing time and time again, even when the chances of repeated failure are statistically minute. When this happened to me, it left me feeling like the game was wasting my time. Which sucked because I wanted to see where the story was going. It felt like the designers were purposefully introducing the possibility of the wind being taken out of my sails at crucial times. For this reason, I think I would have enjoyed Disco more if it were an interactive visual novel with branching decision trees, rather than a game whose genuinely enticing story beats are gate kept behind arbitrary dice rolls.

Another reason why I wish Disco was a visual novel is because of just how bad movement feels in the game. Whether playing with mouse and keyboard or a controller, running around feels about as "meh" as it gets. And this is coming from someone who grew up playing games like Shark Tales on the Gamecube. I'd trade Oscar the Fish's jerky fins for anything Disco has going for it in an instant. At least swimming is smooth. On the other hand, in Disco, you jog at the same pace everywhere you go. You can't jump or interact with objects without opening a dialogue panel. You glitch down staircases, around doors, and are constantly blocked by invisible barriers and shrubs. The game wasn't made with movement in mind, and it shows. And I'd be okay with this if many of Disco's skill check failures didn't necessitate at least another fifteen minutes of running from person to person to farm side quests for experience. But they do. Often. While unlocking fast travel does ameliorate some of the movement pain I felt from this game, it's nowhere near enough.

Disco's most glaring fault, however, is its trivialization of topics that tote an immense amount of trauma for many people. The game treats death by suicide and mental illness with levity and half-baked humor. It pokes fun at substance abuse. Homosexuality is caricatured and used to proffer the stupidity and/or brain damage of the player-controlled character. While ZA/UM does successfully satirize many topics in its expansive manifesto, these instances shall not be defended through such a lens. It is completely unacceptable to bandy about such triggering and often grief-laden subjects in service of being the hippest intellectuals in the room - a pitiful identity this dev obviously jumps at embracing in their insensitive and bloated prose.

The score I was going to give this game decreased throughout my time with it. After the first few hours, I was fairly certain it would achieve a nine if it had stayed the course. Then, after it forced me to run around a bit more than was fun, I thought I'd have to bump it to an eight. The complete disregard for the way Disco's content could make affected individuals feel really turned me off. It was laborious to finish. It's too "smart" for its own good. 7/10.

Where it shines:

• Art
• Quality of writing and characterization
• Voice acting
• Player's ability to become a style icon
• Steampunk but cool

Where it fades:

• Trivialization of traumatic topics
• Too many words
• Randomness
• Movement feels bad