Coelacanth

It also needs to be said that the game has an absolute fuckton of missable content that is absolutely crucial to picking up the point of what the writers are trying to say. Disco Elysium really is just like they wrote a book, scattered the pages across a room, and then put blind faith in the player finding all the important ones on their own.

Like, I’ve seen so many people completely miss the Final Dream just because they didn’t want to take a nap in the flak tower. That scene with “Dolores Dei” is like, the denouement of the entire game. And the devs made it so easily missable. Completely psychotic behaviour, hah.

I agree with you about the yuck about the weird sexual fixation the shooter had, but I liked what that did for his character and the story.

The Deserter is an image of what Harry will become if he does not change, so for him to be hung up on a woman felt completely natural narratively to me and perfectly appropriate for him in his role as the Ghost of Christmas Future.

Lemmy.zip opened up piefed.zip as well.

So Piefed absorbed a lions share of the lemm.ee refugees it looks like?

You’re not alone, it’s a complaint I’ve heard plenty of times before. I don’t personally agree with it, I actually think the ending of the game is pretty perfect. But it’s why I tend to say that Disco Elysium claiming to be a “detective game RPG” on its store page is straight up misleading. This was never a whodunnit. And whether you enjoy the ending or not depends on how well that has become clear to you during the cause of the investigation.

Or, in a sense it kind of is a whodunnit, but the case is actually Harry, not the murder. The game is in large part his story, and using that to deal with larger themes of loss, being stuck in the past and finding hope in the midst of nihilism and doom. These themes permeate the whole game… Hell, the Pale is a case of the past quite literally consuming the present. It’s why I think the communist vision quest is the most appropriate, but I won’t spoil it further in case you opted for another one.

The whole arc on the island was incredibly beautiful and well laid out, at least I found it that way. First you have the Final Dream. Perhaps the single most impactful moment I’ve had in gaming. It’s written and acted to perfection, and it’s where the whole game kind of clicks into place. Harry is laid bare, you realize that literally everything he’s done has been from the lens of winning Dora back, you learn of his neuroses and his way of speaking in trees. You hear the “death blow” of the aborted child. It still blows my mind how Kurvitz managed to distill the whole pathos of the game into three little words to close out the dream. “See you tomorrow”.

And then, the killer. For me, it was again a perfect choice. Remember, this was not a whodunnit, this was never about the murder mystery. This is a story about Harry, and the killer is the Ghost of Christmas Future. After having gone through the dream, you’re faced with the logical conclusion of Harry: The Deserter. A man so utterly consumed by his past, by his failures and his losses that nothing remains but pure unadulterated bitterness. Unable to let go and move forward he is a black void of contempt.

And then, at the darkest hour, as you’re faced with a grotesque mirror image of what’s to come - a light. After all the trials and tribulations, after all the doubt and the resignation to the mundanity of it all a miracle unfolds out of the reeds. A proof that even on this depressing, perishing world, even in the face of all that nihilism there is unknown wonder hiding just out of sight.

There is hope.

I had no idea that existed but that looks absolutely fantastic. It’ll wishlist that one for certain.

Har haft samma upplevelse. Får lite för regelbundna driftstörningar och har aldrig sett något skrivet om det av Bahnhof själva. Får bara titta efter spikes i rapporter på Downdetector.

Är dock ett överkomligt problem att dras med under omständigheterna. Jag gillar fortfarande vad Bahnhof står för och stöttar de gärna.