Lead designer Kurvitz claims the game 'can be played for 120 hours without uncovering all its secrets', but it's not obvious when you've funnelled yourself down a certain skill set and some checks simply aren't possible. I'll likely be picking up the translation of Sacred and Terrible Air if and when it arrives because Disco Elysium's setting is a breath of fresh air. There's no questioning the ambition of the young bucks behind it or their faith in the project. Platform: PC, coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2020 Travelling became tedious towards the end, when I had exhausted all the other points of interest on the way, and despite its bijou size Disco Elysium could have still done with a fast-travel mechanic. Though the area isn't huge, some quests make you stumble from one end of the map to the other only to then have you traipse straight back again – and character movement is not fast. Martinaise is a shithole and it's the only part of Revachol you get to see. With Disco Elysium's pedigree in the great Dungeons & Dragons RPGs of yore, which we touched upon in October's column, I was hoping for something along the lines of Baldur's Gate 2 – multiple, beautifully rendered locations and an epic adventure. Then there's the drab, bombed-out, depressingly small map constantly battered by wind, snow and rain. It looks deep on the surface but, as is often the case, it's smoke and mirrors. You can piss people off beyond recall if you decide to be a total idiot – hey, that might be your play style – but otherwise you can explore every branch of a dialogue tree with little repercussion, meaning that what you say rarely matters. If you speak to the right people or stash points in the right skill, you can reopen a white check, but the payoff isn't always worthwhile so I had a bunch left over by the time the game ended. There are white checks that can be retried and red checks that cannot. Sure, somehow I managed to pull off some checks with a sub-20 per cent chance of success, but I still didn't feel like I achieved anything.

There's only so much excitement I can squeeze from a skill check-based system, where the amount of points you have in a certain attribute will make the simulated dice roll more favourable.

Twenty years ago I might have thought this was a neat focus, but Planescape: Torment, clearly a huge influence here, has already done it and these days I tend to enjoy having to do more in games than mouse 1 all the things. At times I found myself clock watching for how much longer a conversation might take. That's another problem – there is just so much dialogue. Union boss Evrart Claire, the big cheese in Martinaise That's pretty weird straight off the bat, but your various mental faculties interjecting during conversations and observations is a central theme of the game and they form a colourful cast of secondary characters as things progress. You do, however, because there's a game to be played. Once you have selected or created a 'play style' of sorts from a character sheet with biases in intellect, psyche or physique, you begin your adventure bathed in the soggy, stinking darkness of the mother of all hangovers, splayed out on the floor of a trashed hotel room with your ancient reptilian brain – a terrifying disembodied cockney growl – and limbic system – a simpering, snake-tongued spectre – whispering riddles in your ear, urging you not to get up. Motorics: Hand/eye Coordination, Perception, Reaction Speed, Savoir Faire, Interfacing, Composure Physique: Endurance, Pain Threshold, Physical Instrument, Electro-chemistry, Shivers, Half Light Psyche: Volition, Inland Empire, Empathy, Authority, Esprit de Corps, Suggestion Intellect: Logic, Encyclopedia, Rhetoric, Drama, Conceptualization, Visual Calculus You can temporarily raise them through drug and alcohol usage, but with a penalty to your health and morale. What's left of your mind will be bombarded by checks testing these areas during conversations and interactions.

Disco elysium communism