I was going to write this review halfway through the game but I elected to wait. Not because I was worried my opinion would change, but because I wanted to sing as many of the game's praises as possible.

The game has been compared to Planescape: Torment many times, and I have to agree. Like P:T, Disco Elysium is heavily dialogue focused. However, unlike P:T, Disco Elysium has dodged the CRPG bullet of dealing with combat by ignoring it entirely. Any sort of combat encounter is dealt with my ability checks. Want to punch a kid? Ability check. Want to shoot a guy? Ability check. I say this only to warn people that this game *IS* reading. If you aren't prepared to read a conversation that can last tens of minutes, this game probably isn't for you. That being said, I would recommend this game to anyone that likes RPGs of any kind. Here's why.

This game is a nearly perfect recreation of a pen and paper RPG. Like P:T, it's pretty much the closest thing you can get to the freedom of sitting down with your friends and playing a session of D&D. This game lets you be as shallow or crazy, boring or interesting, sane or insane, fascist or communist, etc. that you want. The roleplaying in this game is complex and simple in incredible ways. For those who are more into the "numbers" side of roleplaying, the game keeps track of what kind of cop you are (sorry cop, superstar cop, etc), but for those who are confident in their roleplaying you can ignore the game's tracking and go hog wild. It's a perfect system but isn't the most creative thing this game does by far.

That achievement would belong to the game's stat and "idea" systems. The points that you put into your various skills don't just determine how good you are at that skill, but how "talkative" that skill is. For example, having many points in the "authority" skill will make you very authoritative, sure, but will also make the authority skill "talk" to you more. Chiming in with its opinion in more and more situations. The most interesting thing by far about this system is that having more points in skills can have negative side effects. For example, having more points in the "encyclopedia" skill will give you more knowledge about the world around you, sure, but it can also bog you down with needless information. Sidetracking you from your goals, slowing down investigations, or just confusing the world around you. It's an ingenious system and the first time I've ever seen anything like it. You owe it to yourself to experience this system first hand.

I'm not going to get into the plot because nearly everything is a spoiler. That being said, the writing is phenomenal and the only issue I have with the plot aspect of the game is that the ending feels weak in comparison to the rest of the game's structure. It's still a satisfying ending in some ways, but it does seem like there could have been more.

This game will make you laugh, it'll make you cry, it'll make you tense, it'll make you talk to your necktie. This game is my Game of the Year, and I'll bet it'll be yours too.

Just come on in and start dukin' it out.

Final Cut update: After finishing the game when it came out it became one of my favorite games of all time. It manages to achieve the synchronization of tabletop RPGs with the world's most adaptable DM. Seriously. The game is as weird, as serious, as political, as supernatural as you want it to be.

Now we've come to the Final Cut update and the game is even better. ACG said it best when he said one of the biggest flaws of the original was that it felt "lonely." The amount of voice acting resulted in you spending hours upon hours of reading without any voices to break up the, sometimes very dense, reading segments. Now we have a stellar cast of voice acting to voice every single line of NPC dialog, including the voices in your head. This game is a genuine masterpiece and I cannot recommend it enough.