#planescape torment spoilers

[paragonrobits]

thinking about Dak'kon in Planescape Torment (initially because Lae'zel's popularity in Baldur's Gate 3 has me thinking about how the contrast between her and Dak'kon is a pretty good description of how thier respective peoples have diverged and also why they hate each other so much) and specifically his statline in how that nicely corrosponds to his own personal conflicts

Dak'kon is a zerth, a sort of warrior monk that practices martial skill and magical ability and serve as guardians of the githzerai cities, and due to a partially manufactured crisis of faith, he no longer truly has certainty in anything; not in the teachings of his faith, and not in himself. This is reflected in him being the only multi-class character in the game in a traditional sense; he is a fighter/mage, leveling up one after the other.

Dak'kon's stat layout is, after he is fully upgraded: Strength 18, Dexterity 18, Constituion 18, Intelligence 13, Wisdom 13, and Charisma 13. On the one hand he has high stats across the board; mechanically, he's both a capable spell-slinger that can act in support or as a combat caster, and he's a frontline tank. In what is most likely intended to be the canon-ish playthrough, he is the ONLY front-line damage dealer in a traditional sense. He can hit like a truck, once you add him to your party he is likely to be your main damage dealer, and he's just very strong across the board. This is an excellent stat line... for a fighter.

But he is also a mage, and for this, his intelligence isn't AWFUL (in fact, he's significantly more intelligent than an ordinary person would be, which is also reflected in interactions) but its not as high as would be ideal for a more specialized mage. His intelligence is significantly lower than it should be for anyone that is taking any kind of levels in wizard (and Torment's mage class is very much a wizard); his spell slots are notably less numerous, and he's most likely to be a fighter with some casting capability.

This reflects his in-game story. Dak'kon's crisis of faith was exacerbated by a holy writ of sorts that takes the form of a complex puzzle, and one of the accounts is of how Zerthimon, the prophet revered by Dak'kon's people, deceived his illithid masters by pretending to submit to them. Dak'kon has his doubts because another such teaching concerns a traitor, and then what he assumes to be the final teaching is of Zerthimon's conflict with Gith, founder-queen of the githyanki, when their peoples split. Dak'kon has come to fear that Zerthimon gave in and became a slave to their illithid captors, which was why he divided their people at the eve of victory, and if you ask him about this, he gives one of the VERY FEW impassioned and furious speeches he makes in the game, when normally he is very calm and detached.

If you have a high intelligence and wisdom scores (significantly higher than Dak'kon's, in fact) you can puzzle out more combinations to the teachings and unlock further ones Dak'kon had not found; these provide him an answer to his crisis of faith and ease his soul; Zerthimon did not give in to the illithids, but he recognized that should his people follow the path of war and conquer all that might threaten them, they would lose who they are. But the mechanical bit is that Dak'kons stats are too low to do so; he has no idea these teachings exist at all.

Furthermore, to recruit Dak'kon at all, you must speak to him on philosophy; its not difficult to have a fairly high Wisdom and Intelligent stat combination to pass this without much trouble, and this further indicates how his statline is a bit sub-par for someone in his line of work. He expresses some profound philosophical attitudes and says them well, but he's hard pressed to defend them when you poke holes in them, and he just gloomily concedes. Part of this is that, again, he IS having a crisis of faith and he has difficulty reconciling these problems to other people.

#planescape torment #planescape torment spoilers #dak'kon

[appendingfic]

The Nameless One and Karlach meeting in the Blood War and just going "same hat!"

#bg3 spoilers #planescape torment spoilers #did you accept that going to hell was your destiny but decide to make that Hell's problem or are you normal?

[leomonae]

If you have not yet done so and think you may want to play Planescape: Torment (released shortly after the first Baldur's Gate and developed by the people who published the original BG games, who later went on to found Obsidian of Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity etc fame) yourself at some point, do not click through!

(I'm recommending PS:T to you at the moment, if you can't tell. BG2 may be my enduring favourite, but PS:T was incredibly influential for me as a gamer. Many people also enjoy its various takes on philosophical questions!)

#planescape: torment #d&d tattoo #planescape: torment spoilers #this was taken maybe two hours after it was done? #really great artist almost zero redness or swelling #if only i didn't live like 3000 miles away from his studio :(

[ddarker-dreams]

yooo lock from one gamer to another, any recs for the steam summer sale? i've got most horror jrpgs down like misao, ib, and witch's house

ANON FORGIVE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE i was thinking about this ask for a few days and. ahem. in that time, the steam summer sale ended. 😦 just keep this in mind for the next sale perhaps?? alas. here are some of my favorite games on steam .

disco elysium

one of my favorite games of all time. i replayed it recently and have a newfound appreciation for every element of it. the extensive worldbuilding can be overwhelming at first, but i personally enjoyed how fleshed out the world is. the writing is sublime and i've never experienced anything like it across any medium. also it's the only game to have kim kitsuragi so that automatically makes it a 10/10

divinity original sin 2

this game is another favorite of mine. there were multiple times when i was playing it where i went 'huh, i wonder if i can do so and so' and i could. i killed a giant ogre with like 10k HP by sneaking an invisible character into its vicinity and teleporting it into lava. before leaving an area i killed a character who i bought tons of equipment from and got all my money back. it's just a really entertaining game. you can also play it with friends so that's fun. the game can be as dynamic as you want it to be. i like spending hours researching the most optimal builds but you don't have to be a nerd to make it through the content. or you can be like me and spend thirty minutes setting up explosives and perfectly placing each party member before every combat encounter because i've never felt the touch of a woman

hades

fast paced, fluid combat, greek mythology, killer soundtrack, pretty graphics, and bisexuality. what more can i say. i got such an adrenaline rush after beating the final boss that i almost collapsed onto the ground and rolled around like a pill bug. very very fun and addicting

hyper light drifter

HNGNNGN PRTTY and the soundtrack also slaps here too. the color palette is so gorgeous. once you get into the rhythm of the combat you feel like a god among men. zooming all over the place. nyooooooom.

omori

this game took my heart, ripped it out of my chest, stomped on it, slapped it back into place, then closed my open ribcage with a hello kitty bandaid. i cannot praise it enough. it's charming, the psychological horror is one of a kind; it's a game that seeps under your skin and stays there. if you haven't played it yet and you're comfortable with the dark themes it explores i'd recommend it 100%. go on without any spoilers.

pillars of eternity

i uh. i like CRPGs. pillars of eternity has a special place in my heart because it went onto influence how i do worldbuilding. the game has one of my favorite stories from a CRPG, it's overflowing with creativity that's explored to the fullest. it's also made by the folks who created fallout new vegas so that's a bonus. the combat isn't my absolute favorite when compared to something like divinity original sin 2, but i still found it enjoyable overall. interacting with the characters and the fleshed out world was what i had the most fun with.

planescape torment

this game's combat is scuffed but the story is one of the best across any medium. play on easy i'm not joking the combat does not matter. but the world, the characters, the factions, how it dabbles into philosophy, the story that leaves you with more questions than answers as you progress,, it's just so good. when it's on sale it's ridiculously cheap and so worth the price of admission. there's lots of reading but if you're into the type of stuff you'll love this game. also there's a floating talking skull

va-11 hall-a: cyberpunk bartender action

ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVS THE VIBES ARE IMMACULATE THE WRITING IS IMMACULATE THE ART IS IMMACULATE THE SOUNDTRACK WOULD MAKE BEEHTOVEN JEALOUS and there's also bisexuality here too. this game is an example of the writing i wanted to aspire towards after i played it for the first time. it influenced me heavily.

#recommendations #answered #Anonymous

[sqbr]

Dreamwidth Crosspost: Initial Basic Thoughts on Baldur's Gate 3

I only just started but thus far I am having a great time, the non binary inclusion is reasonably good for this sort of AAA roleplaying game and I'm enjoying the weird, darkly humourous dark-fantasy-horror and old school D&D inspired RPG vibe, it reminds me of playing Dragon: Age Origins, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights mods back in the day, but as a modern game (albeit with all the graphics settings at lowest quality so my computer doesn't fall over). I continue to not be very good at this sort of combat, but that's what story mode is for! (It's presumably even more like other Larian games like Baldur's Gate 2 or Divinity Original Sin but I never really played those) ( No spoilers. Brief genital mention )

#dreamwidth crosspost

[self-loving-vampire]

2, 8, 18, 23, 25?

2. Do you like playing with mods?

Generally I do, but I don't usually install them immediately. I usually prefer to play a game without mods first, at least for long enough to know which parts of it I'd rather change.

Depending on the game, the modding may be pretty mild (just quality of life changes) or more major, such as new spells, major balance changes, new weapons, new mechanics, and so on.

Skyrim is an example of a game I always play with a ton of mods. In my opinion the base game is kind of mediocre. It's not super unpleasant to play, but it's kind of shallow and tedious. A lot of the things I'm interested in, like the vampirism, are also super inconvenient in the base game (you can't even loot corpses in vampire lord form!)

But with enough mods it can actually be a fun time. I make it into a sort of vampire simulator since there's actually not that many vampire RPGs (especially ones set in medieval fantasy settings as opposed to something more modern, like VTM:B).

8. A game you played completely blind with no prior knowledge of and enjoyed/loved?

I think this is pretty much the default? I personally don't really mind spoilers in most contexts, though.

18. A game you’d like to replay that you haven’t

I want to replay every Touhou game sometime.

23. A game ending that’s really stuck with you

Surprisingly enough, the ending of Wizardry 8. You spend the game gathering artifacts that will grant you access to the Cosmic Forge. There's multiple possible endings, but in the one I got you actually do use it.

It's a magical pen that can be used to re-write the universe, which your party does to make it a much kinder place. Your characters all ascend and become the benevolent deities of this universe.

In addition to the meta implications of the final Wizardry game handing the player the pen and telling them to create a new world themselves next, I just really like that there's a game where your objective is to become god and fix the universe and it actually lets you do it and nothing goes wrong as a result of your "hubris".

Sort of related: I have been thinking about the ending of Mary Skelter 2 lately, months after I finished it. For reasons that... well... spoilers.

The ending of Planescape: Torment is also worth mentioning but that's a whole essay in itself. I think the ending of Fallout: New Vegas is also really cool aside from how buggy the final sequence tends to be (the game as a whole, really).

25. A game with a cool art style

There's really a lot that I like, in different ways. I like a whole lot of the environments and monster designs in games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, for instance, and I'm also a fan of anime art styles in general for other reasons (they're cuter and make characters look more appealing to me).

But I think if I'm going to mention anything specifically it should probably be the first Fallout. While some of the animations were kinda crude, I think the general way the game looks and sounds is still fantastic and extremely fitting for the feel it's going for.

[mrhorizons]

Playing Planescape: Torment due to Disco Elysium's devs listing inspiration from it (I screwed up the Steam Cloud and lost my Day 4 progress, even on my original computer), and the combat's easily (or at least, one of) the weakest parts of the game. Apparently, it's worse than other Infinity Engine games' (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale), but even in general, real-time gameplay tends to annoy me at best and overwhelm me at worst.

Though, I suspect even if Disco Elysium opted for a turn-based option (which it technically does, but that's sort of a spoiler), I think having a dedicated combat system would make it a weaker experience.

#planescape #planescape torment #disco elysium #rpgs #gaming #video games

[brightephemera]

Planeswalking

I just love the sky in Planescape: Torment. In the game you’re amnesiac. Badly. People keep explaining the most basic things about the world to you because your brain is basically finely blended slurry and you’re re-learning everything.

So Sigil is built on the inside of a big torus (donut), with all lengthwise streets curving up in both directions and all roof lines curving out and up and I love that. Look up and you’re looking into Sigil’s heart. Look to either side and its buildings march up away into the distance.

But look closer. How bad is your amnesia? Have you ever seen another city? Have you ever seen the stars? Is this enclosure the natural state of things, and another plane’s horizon cause for agoraphobia? How scary is it to go to a flat plane and see these soulless lights overhead?

How lonely must it be, to not see your whole world just by looking up?

#planescape: torment #planescape #bright likes video games #planescape: torment spoilers

[earlgraytay]

honestly in the interest of good inventory management I should probably get rid of my intestines but it feels wrong not to have them, you know?

#planescape #planescape: torment #planescape spoilers

[paragonrobits]

here's a headcanon that materialzied after realizing that Fall-From-Grace's official alignment doesn't make much sense in light of her characterization; FFG isn't actually Lawful Neutral at all and she's actually Lawful Good, but due to her nature as a demon and fighting uphill against literally being MADE of pure evilness and chaos, despite having spent a while as a genuinely good person it hasn't sunk in deeply enough to ding the appropriate buttons

lets consider alignment as a literal term; a collective weight of your beliefs and actions which determines which aspects of the multiverse you're on the same side as. FFG, as a succubus, is literally made of evil and chaos, and she explicitly struggles with her nature, being described as the most tormented of the party. Given that the party's other members are continually struggling with unspeakable horrors or agonizing emotional horror on a day-to-day basis, that says a lot.

Now, I honestly can't read her as Lawful Neutral despite that being her official alignment because of her stirring support of mercy and forgiveness as essential to true law and order, to the point of her having an argument with Vhailor over it. They ostensibly have the same alignment in Lawful Neutral, and yet their viewpoints couldn't be more different.

A Lawful Neutral person believing in mercy as essential to true perfection and proper law is highly unusual; lawful neutrals may range from robots enslaved to programming fulfilling thier directives, or people who do as the law bids because its the law, while a lawful good person cares about the morality. Lawful Neutral people, in general, do not generally seem to do that; the letter and/or spirit of the law IS morality, or at least stability in society, or acting upon code and/or law, and without active altruism, kindness being involved; if you do, that's where Lawful Good comes in.

That's the big dividing point between being Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral; both may abide by a code or an understanding of law, but being Good means you care about people and get forgiveness. Neutrality doesn't do that.

So FFG's emphasis on mercy feels VERY odd, so it makes sense that she's actually Lawful Good in terms of her actions and mindset, but because she's a succubus she hasn't been able to completely become the polar opposite of what her nature demands she be. (And there is a tragedy in that. She has worked, and labored and done nothing but good, but deep down being a good person HURTS her; she can't escape the monster she was born to be, and that torment holds her back.)

#planescape torment #analysis #fall from grace #planescape torment spoilers #queued

[appendingfic]

Like I KNOW they're different games with different themes, but Dak'kon's (a Githzerai) struggles with doubt and faith, with the meaning of his people's liberation and the meditations to ensure his people never forget their enslavement and war of extermination was so much more engaging than Lae'zel's unquestioning faith and obedience.

Also, you know, having heard the story from the Githzerai side, I have a REAL hard time believing anything the Githyanki tell me

#bg3 #bg3 spoilers #planescape torment

[rpgchoices]

Useless rpgs recs. Rpgs where the main plot revolves around a mystery

(in order of appearance, big spoilers under the cut. There is not a spoiler on what the answer to the mystery but what the main question of the game is)

Planescape Torment: who is the protagonist and what is his past? Arcanum: Of Steamworks and magick obscura: Is the protagonist really a messiah/god? What happened with the dwarves? Pendula Swing: Who stole the axe? Shadowrun Hong Kong: What happened to your dad? Pillars of Eternity: What is happening to the souls?  Heaven’s Vault: What happened to the robots? What are the secrets of the Nebula? Dragon Age: (Game 2: Murder mystery in act 2), (Inquisition: Was the inquisitor chosen by Andraste? What happened to them?) Alpha Protocol: What’s going on? Is it a conspiracy? Torment Tides of Numenera: Who are you? Are you really the remains of a god? Divinity Original Sin: (Game 1: Who are the villains? And a murder mystery at the beginning), (Game 2: What is the Void?) Disco Elysium: Murder investigation Mass Effect: Who are the villains? Enderal Forgotten Stories: What is the sickness? Did it happen before? Fallout New Vegas: Who tried to kill you?

#fallout new vegas #enderal #dragon age #planescape torment #divinity original sin #pillars of eternity #useless recs

[ddarker-dreams]

LOOOOOOCCCCKKKKK, man have you done the newest event ? I cant find my word to describe it but its amazing. What do you think of it :"D. I want to know

I WILL GET BACK TO YOU ON THIS !!! a game that i've been eyeing went on sale on steam (planescape: torment) and i ended up dedicating my past week to playing it... i have to get back into the groove of playing genshin now that i finished it. i've seen some screenshots floating around on twitter but i've been doing my best to dodge spoilers until i could experience it myself ,, it looks like it's heavily xiao focused though? i can't wait to see what more lore they've revealed about him <33

#when i saw the cast for this event it felt so random #yelan... itto... xiao ... #yan fei too ??? #i wanna know how they all do together #answered #Anonymous

[omgnoabsolutelynot]

Alright so I finished Tyranny, and it made me have some thoughts about games and romance. I'll put the rest of this under Read more due to spoilers for Tyranny and discussions of various other games.

I noticed that people said that romance options had been added with the DLC. And me being a sucker for some romance, I decided to go with the walking septic tank Barik. And what I got was a scene where the Fatebinder says "hey I'm into you" and he replies with "oh ok, no thanks :)". So of course I thought I messed up and decided to look it up on Youtube instead. And ... that's it. That's the romance, except I missed the part where you can have sex with him anyway.

And I'm just sitting there like ... that's not a romance, that's a sex scene. It was fairly cute, I'll give them that, but a sex scene all the same. Do gamers not know the difference? Do people who MAKE games not know the difference?

Like, I get it. Maybe Tyranny isn't the best choice for romance considering they're all sort of horrible people, and maybe the vast amount of choices complicates it. But I feel like there was a bunch of missed potential, at least with Barik. They could have intertwined the romance subplot with the quest to remove the armor. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? I mean, he questions why you’re going against Tunon’s orders and you get the option to confess your interest in him right then and there. And that’s just the start! That would have been way better than a tacked-on sex scene two minutes before the end.

But generally, I feel like so much of romance in role-playing games gets confused with sex, or at the very least so intertwined that you can't get one without the other. Consider Dragon Age. Same problem with Neverwinter Nights. While Baldur's Gate 2 had pretty good romance, I believe they had the same issue - if you don't take the sex when it's offered, then the romance ends. Even if it happens while you're camping in a sewer. Or while you're only resting to sleep off 17 stab wounds. How come we can’t get the option to just say “I like you, but let’s not do this now?”. Or, hell, why not “I like you, but sex isn’t a thing for me?”, but I guess that would piss off the dudebros too much.

I do think that sex has a place in games, just as romance does. I just wish they'd stop making it a requirement for the romance subplots to happen, or stop confusing sexual desire with love. There are plenty of sexual scenes without love. Why does it seem to be so tricky to get the romantic scenes without the sex? I mean, Planescape: Torment and Kotor 2 got some really touching scenes with Fall-From-Grace and Atton Rand, respectively. Why can't we have more of that stuff?

Maybe this is why some games just don't include romance options at all. It can’t all be due to lack of time. I don't know. I just wanted to get some of the thoughts out.

#tyranny game #role playing games #romance in games #sex in games #barik #look I just had some opinions #I went looking for some fic involving this and there's like one

[zigzagzoom94]

Hey! Do you like tabletop rpg actual-play shows that are equal parts audio drama and improv comedy? You should check out the criminally underrated DnD podcast 'Dice Funk'. It manages to combine the comfy vibe of good friends chilling out together cracking jokes with some legitimately interesting worldbuilding that examines existing DnD lore and conventions to put its own spin on them.

 Each season is a self-contained storyline with new characters so you can jump in at whichever one sounds interesting (you might get spoilered for some stuff 'cos the PCs have a tendency to make world-altering decisions that still have big repercussions, even with the substantial timeskips between seasons, but otherwise they limit any references to earlier seasons to non-essential easter eggs to keep things accessible).

 Personally I started with seasons 3 & 4 and they served as a good introduction to some recurring concepts like "the World of Forms".

 Below the Read More I'll break down each season so you can see what appeals to you:

Season 1, "Stoneroot": A noir-esque black comedy that follows a trio of varying levels of competence attempting to solve a simple missing person case that spirals wildly out of control.

 I kind of think of this as the 'Here There Be Gerblins' of the show since it's the only season with a different GM so it has a pretty different feel to the rest of the show and takes a bit longer to find its feet.

 Personal Highlight: One of the PCs rolls a 3 Intelligence, leading to a running segment where that player brings up monsters from the Monster Manual and asks the other players if they think it has a higher or lower Int than that PC.

 Season 2, "Lorelai": A more lighthearted romp in which a cast of interplanar travellers explore the world trying to figure out the cause of a catastrophic flood and put a stop to it. According to the creators this was conceived as a cross between 'Princess Bride' and 'LoZ: Wind Waker' but morphed into more of a "moist Undertale".

 Personal Highlight: The first time the GM has to portray a mysterious entity making deals with lower life forms he decides to portray them like a wheeling-and-dealing used-car salesman and it honestly made every scene they're in a delight.

 Season 3, "Ilium": The party are trapped in a strange city that people can enter but never leave, taking whatever jobs will make ends meet. Inspired by 'Hot Fuzz' and 'Twin Peaks', this series places a lot of emphasis on how the supernatural elements affect people's normal lives and uncovering the many dark secrets these characters hold.

 Personal Highlight: The GM wrote a custom "Wild Magic" table for the party sorcerer with some absolutely buckwild shit on it. I was on the edge of my seat every time it was rolled.

 Season 4, "Valentine": A cyberpunk urban fantasy with near-future technology levels in which the cast struggle to make ends meet while doing shady jobs for uncaring megacorporations. If your familiar with DnD, this season's based on 'Shadowrun'. Probably the season most explicitly about how capitalism sucks.

 Personal Highlight: One of the PCs is a wizard who uses yugioh-esque trading cards to cast their spells instead of a spellbook. I did not anticipate being so invested in their rivalry with not-Kaiba and neither did the player.

 Season 5, "Markov": If you love unlikely found families then this is the season for you! It's a space-faring sci-fi story in a galaxy reeling from war with the colonialist Mind Flayers, setting the stage for a lot of political turmoil. If you're familiar with DnD, this story's based on 'Spelljammer' and absolutely riffs off of a lot of the bizarre ideas that setting introduced.

 Personal Highlight: The Son Gun. I will not elaborate on what this means but you'll know when you get to it.

 Season 6, "Purgatory": The season opens on a group of mortals who have just been resurrected and tasked with taking up the mantle of the Furies; interplanar assassins who traverse the various afterlives dealing with whichever god-like entities threaten the balance of power between the planes. If you've played 'Planescape: Torment' or are familiar with the city of Sigil you know what to expect.

 I honestly think this might be the best individual season of 'Dice Funk'? Everyone's really firing on all cylinders.

 Personal Highlight: King Badass has my heart. Y'all can't claim to support himbos and then not be supporting my favourite dumbass bae.

Season 7, "Wormwood": After all the previous seasons deconstructed a lot of elements of classic DnD ("what's up with certain species automatically being evil?", "isn't delving into a dungeon to murder its inhabitants and steal their stuff kinda colonialistic and messed up?", "how would access to magic actually affect the way a society functions?", etc.) this seasons brings this all together by having the closest set-up to a conventional DnD adventure. The world is post-apocalyptic and draws a lot of elements from the 'Dark Sun' setting.

 Personal Highlight: Two of the PCs are a cult leader and his follower and I thought I knew exactly what direction that storyline was going...then it absolutely surprised me.

 Season 8, "Grendel": I can't comment on this one yet since it's only just started but so far it has had a very cosy, 'Animal Crossing'-like vibe with a focus on a small community, in contrast to previous seasons' much higher stakes.

#dice funk #tabletop rpg stuff #podcast recommendations #dungeons and dragons #dnd #dnd 5e #ttrpg actual plays #the adventure zone #taz #friends at the table #naddpod #dimension20 #fantasy high #critical role #rollplay #dungeons & daddies #campaign skyjacks #20 sided stories #the critshow #the unexplored places #dames and dragons #happy jacks rpg podcast

[egelantier]

disco elysium

i fall into a proper gaming binge every half a year or so, and then forget that computers games exist altogether. my last bout of addiction was hades, a gorgeous roguelite about trying to get out of the underworld and dealing with family, bigger on the inside than it seemed outside. now i've spent a week headfirst into the beautiful madness of disco elysium, and i'm nowhere close to done. middle of the second playthrough, at least a couple more ahead, maybe three, maybe five - this kind of not closer to be done. finally, almost a decade later, there's a spiritual successor to planescape: torment, perfect, unique and compelling like nothing else. i'm head over heels in love.

(and a note: it's very much a game that can and should be played by non-gamers. it's a true click-and-pointer; the entirety of its action happens through dialogue. give it a try.)

in disco elysium, your character wakes up in an absolutely trashed hotel room, coming off a bender of epic proportions, fucked up beyond recognition, and fully amnesiac. it turns out you're visiting a (very much not) sunny town of revachol, a slowly decaying remnant of revolution and consequent war, and, well. you're a cop, and you're here to investigate a murder. namely, a murder of somebody whose dead body is still hanged in the backyard…

this is a horrendous mess, and you are a horrendous mess - bloated, amnesiac, confused, weird, pathetic, with a host of warring impulses and demands fighting for space in your head - but thankfully there's a pillar of stability and light in your dark world, waiting just downstairs: lieutenant kim katsuragi, your assigned partner from another station, a man with godlike sense of dignity and practically endless amount of quiet patience for your bullshit. together with him, you can investigate a crime, try to stop a small civil war, solve a couple of questions of the universe, and maybe, if you play your cards just once, dance a truly epic dance together in a shot-up church. there are also cryptids, karaoke, board games, collecting bottles for money, a mystery of a crashed police car, discovering your own feelings about the homo-sexual underground, and many, many other things.

(the gameplay: you have four sets of stats (intellect, sensitivity, physicality, interacting with objects) and, depending on how you distribute them, you play a wildly different character every time. there's no way to fail: your detective can be dumb as a bag of rocks but able to get by on intuition and muscle memory, or smart and horrible with people, or empathetic and weak, or - the combinations are endless. the game is conducted via a combination of red stat checks that you can do only once, and white checks that you can try, fail, up your stats and retry again. aside from a handful of cases, a lot of time it's easier - and funnier - to accept failures rather than try for a perfect go every time. you are a hot mess, after all. there are ten game days, a variety of sidequests and tasks, and almost endless variability in how you approach them. everything is connected, except for that one door.)

(there's also a political system, where you eventually pick up your political affiliation: a communist, a libertarian, a fascist, and a wishy-washy uncommitted liberal. the game has a lot of things to tell you about all your choices, most of them funny, some of them horrendous. there's no innocence here, and no way to weasel out of the consequences of your worldview; and you could also see that it was done by eastern europe people.)

and the thing is. the thing is, it's very much the kind of a game where you perform a field autopsy on a three days old corpse while a couple of preteen kids are watching avidly and offering their color commentary, and at some point you have to rummage in the corpse's mouth and feel its brain stem. a lot of very, very bad things happen or happened - to you, to the people around you, to the town around you, to the world around you. where in fallout you rolled into town with your stats jacked high and your blaster in hand, and solved ancient disputes and established peace, here the weight of the history is very, very heavy, and you're very, very small. you can't solve the decades of violence and war and trauma and colonization and poverty with the power of your save-scumming and pithy one liners, alas; but you can solve a murder. you can help a sweet and worried old woman. you can put your cheek to a kid's fuzzy plush toy, when offered. you can tell a person, gently, that their loved one is dead, and lie about how drunk they were when they did that. you can replace a taxidermied bird you broke. you can sit on the swing with your partner, waiting for the low tide, and whistle together - two birds on the wire…

it's the gentlest, kindest, sweetest, most hopeful game i've seen in the last decade. it's a goddamn manifesto to human spirit, and to how only - well, love - holds the world, always falling apart, together. a huge part of it is your relationship with kim, because believe me, whoever you are, most of your playthrough would be dedicated to chasing kim's approval and to winning his trust. but it also sneaks into all the cases, all the dialogues, all the little throwaway details. everybody is human; everybody is awful; everybody is holy, even you. oh, even you.

(there are storylines you can or can not discover. about why harry is such a mess - and it's awful and i loved how it was done, with empathy and grace and no judgement; about the state of the world, a bit of eldritch horror so throwaway and beautiful i would read entire volumes just about that; about the city of locusts; about a small girls' memory of playing in the reeds; about the scar of the revolution. suliram, ram, ram…)

(it's also brilliantly, awfully, absurdly, hysterically funny. Art Cop run alone makes me just about die. every failure is funnier than the other. you can be as weird as you want to - in fact, the game encourages you to be as weird as you want to be - and the world around will react accordingly, outperforming you in sheer absurdity. there's a war-and-peace sized amount of dialogue and description in the game, and it's written by some damn genius of pratchettian caliber.)

and, and and. honestly, the best way to get sucked into this game is not reviews, it's random quotes and screenshots, out -of-context spoilers - it's more or less impossible to resist. but please, oh please, give it a try.

>Someone's been walking around in your dreams lately, looking for something. Tidying up, rearranging. Storing away all the unrealized dreams, putting old pains in boxes. The worst nightmares have settled down for a while. A spot of light on the bedroom door after the dark. The fluttering of eyelids in the spring sun. A thought that arises, only to disappear again. And yet there's a pattern emerging…

>What if you didn’t lose your memory? What if something in Martinaise came and stored it all away. For you to slowly open one box at a time. So you can choose which parts to keep. Keep almost none of it. Only the flowers on the windowsill. Only the distant sound of a radio. Lose all the actors, the dark shadows, leave only the still lifes, the blissful distant wash of waves. If everybody knew -- you never did. She’ll be coming soon. That is all.

#disco elysium #recs