[archived from a cohost post, originally made on february 8, 2024]
this game is heavy. heavier than I would've been capable of dealing with over the last few years, I think, and it shows, from my multiple attempts to play the game through only now finally resulting in something resembling an ending. now that I'm in a better (and more stubborn) place, I can appreciate it, but it's not world-altering for me or even like, a masterpiece. it's good! but it felt lacking in some ways.
some days, bad days, part of me wants to not exist. to have not existed. I don't want to take my life. rarely has that thought been any part of my brain's calculus for how to deal with the lows in my life, and it's never anything I take any steps toward, even in those, my worst moments.
but at times I have thought that... if I could just opt out, let someone new take over my body and my life, things might be for the better. that there was something baked into my history of existence that, if I could excise it, could make whatever consciousness inhabiting this body that came after that breakpoint... more suited to being than me.
disco elysium, if nothing else, has convinced me that such an idea is incredibly fucking stupid. if my consciousness, if I went kaput, whatever woke up in its ashes would have all the same problems, with even less clue about how to work through them. while this would not be my problem anymore in this hypothetical scenario, it'd still suck. don't need to foist this life on anyone else.
it's a fascinating game. I ended up just rolling with the blue starter build, to let the game feed me facts via encyclopedia and put myself in a position for, mostly, following the actual threads of the investigation that made sense. ended up going communist apocalypse cop, but had to kick the sorry cop accusations for showing basic respect to people a few times. rounded out as many tasks as I could manage, kept kim alive, and discovered a new species at the end....
the city is interesting, and the small scope keeps things from being super overwhelming overall, but the fact that the murderer still ends up being someone you don't get to interact with until The Very End, and afflicted with some neurodegenerative bullshit because of a fucking cryptid... all comes out of left field and retroactively just made me kind of feel like most of the game was spinning my wheels. not helped by the fact that half the geography doesn't open up until day 3.
the most aggravating part of progressing is the fact that, because skills are based on stats, and so are their learning caps, the skills I was most likely to fail a check with (and thus want to spend a skill point on a retry for) were also the ones with the fewest available rerolls via skill points... and it was a crapshoot whether those checks were also ones that had worthwhile bonuses to uncover/unlock with. some checks were just suffering, even if they were ostensibly something I could reroll. and that's fine in theory, but really a momentum-killer for me in practice when those get in the way of things I'm trying to pursue, which they almost always did!
so I savescummed a couple of things to make the most of my One Playthrough. that's all this game is getting out of me, thanks. it's good, but I have other things that won't make me tired to think about playing.