The manpain of the protagonist is supposed to feel ridiculous and overblown, and it does, but it still gets kind of grating when it keeps coming back again and again. The sad man obsessing over a bunch of nothing was by far the least interesting part of the story for me.
This is just the reality of having depression. I see this complaint about a lot of depressed characters in fiction. Beyond his addiction Harry is clearly ill and has terrible coping skills, but it’s not like there’s a therapist in rechavol. Harry is depressed, lonely, and anxious so her pushes all that energy into being the kind of cop that solves the case leaving a giant mess behind him. His lack of treatment causes him to have a giant ego death.
Anyways I totally screwed the confrontation as well, I never got my gun back. Kim got shot and I took cuno with me. No one believes you, especially after cuno tells the cops that’s right not only is cuno on the island, he’s on the final cop huddle. Also I almost died to the shitty chair
I had the same dilema after realizing how much I had missed after listening to podcast about the game (Savoir Faire for anyone interested). I ended up going back to an old save to catch everything I missed, and I’m glad I did. The thing about the side stuff in the game is it all connects thematically if not directly with the main mystery, so it actually didn’t make me feel like I was betraying my previous Harry to go back and finish it up. I was able to see what I wanted mostly without save scumming, and everything in the end felt more complete and thematically relevant. Also, I was able to save Kim the second time around, so the epilogue was quite a bit different.
Meanwhile, I started a second playthrough with a slightly cheated character - I did a little save editing immediately after the start of the game so I could make a Harry with good (but not impossible, individually, 6 or 7 in each) values in every skill. That way, I am getting most of the stuff I missed the first time, whilst still being able to fail stuff if it’s hard to do.
It’s amazing how much stuff I missed from having 1 Physique the first time…
I also almost got killed by the shitty chair. Also, qua weird skill checks, the billboard and Ruby confrontation was just a series of save-scummed skillchecks for me, which I found disappointing in a game that was in general so willing to let me move past my mistakes. I will say, with regards to false endings, I actually loved what happens when you open the clipboard-case. It’s beautiful writing and felt like it addressed some of the genuine pain of recalling legitimately huge mistakes.
All that being said… was anyone else disappointed in how the game was received on this site in particular? I think some of my disappointment has to do with the too-high standard to which I held Waypoint from its very inception (being an old GB fan of Austin and Patrick), and so, seeing the not even orthodox Marxist but very much early-21st century American left perspective on the game’s content (again, I agree with the idea that the game is addressing political ideologies from a pretty shrewd, almost grassroots-level perspective that is full of suspicion and bitter humor) be so relentlessly negative… it felt terrifically disappointing because I think this site is so frequently advocating for good writing in games and good representation in games and Disco Elysium I thought had both of those things in spades. Yes, it lets you be a fascist or a scientific racist because both of those perspectives existed concurrently with the sort of too-much-too-fast left-wing politics that occurred in the game’s history (a politics that was explicitly torn down by outside influence), and both of those (wildly unequal) politics lost out, as they do in the game, to milquetoast centrism.
I haven’t done a bad politics runthrough. I actually haven’t done anything other than a Big Communism Builder runthrough because it’s an exhausting game in the same way that Madame Bovary is an exhausting novel. But I have the sneaking suspicion, and maybe someone can confirm, that those politics bear no fruit because they’re unfounded, unproductive politics of hate and reaction in the game as in real life. Communism, in the game, at least has enough genuine empathy mixed in with the (sometimes empty, sometimes LARPy) revolutionary rhetoric.
I wouldn’t say I was disappointed by the Waypoint’s criticism of the game’s political message, but I don’t agree with it, or at least I don’t think I agree with it, but I don’t think they articulated why they think the game’s politics are too pessimistic and/or fatalistic.
Personally, I think it would be weird for the game to have the energy/vibe of say, Drew Magery’s Bernie’s Gonna Win (would post a link to that, but I’m new here so I don’t think I have link rights yet). I saw an interview with the lead writer/designer of the game where he talked about the experience of how his country of birth is the Soviet Union. And that experience clearly informs so much of the historical perspective offered by the game.
Also, I think this game offering some positive vision of change from the perspective of this character would be horribly misplaced, at least in terms of how the game ends. It is easy to lose sight of this because the game lets you roleplay this as this goofy screwup who is down with communism, but at the end of the day he is a cop. The “good ending” for the game is you getting taken back by your unit. You’re a defender of the neo-liberal order despite whatever rhetoric you might articulate in the game. Personally, I think there is a very strong message from the game that expecting change from reform on the inside of structures of powers is a fool’s game. I find it hard to disagree.
Yeah, I said that this is a very “Baltic States” game in the What Game are you playing thread, and a lot of that is the experience of their annexation by the Soviets, their dissolution, and their current relationship with the EU, all of which are reflected in the game.
Having not listened to the podcasts in questions and only read the digests, it’s possible that I’m missing a key articulation of their criticism.
I appreciate that the game was willing to be so even-handed, even with a politically-skeptical base premise. There’ve been a few games which have come out of the former Eastern Bloc in the last ten years or so (Black the Fall comes to mind, and so does that one that’s a survival horror game but with Volgas) and, while neat, while not wrong in their representation of left-wing politics (it’s super unfair for me to make that sort of accusation), I think release over here and then play directly into the hands of bad-faith criticisms of left-wing poltics from right-wing talking heads i.e. capital-G Gamers (this is a weird timeline).
I guess it was nice that, as bleak as some of DE’s writing could be, I never felt like an idiot for playing as a communist. The world was skeptical of my position, but hell, that’s totally reasonable. And maybe that’s where I differ so greatly with Waypoint’s earliest critiques, is that I never felt that it had a cynical narrative or even cynical themes. It was far too, I don’t know, I guess in love with the impermanent, transient effects of human life in spite of big political machines.
I’m in the middle of the pod and I just wanted to chime in and say I totally missed all of the Dolores Dei/ex stuff. Like I knew those plot threads existed, but as much as possible I played my Harry as someone who wasn’t looking for closure and I only passively interacted with stuff related to Dolores Dei because I wasn’t that interested in the religious aspect of the game. So I never got any dream sequence after the mercenary confrontation
Just finished the main podcast after finally finishing this game last night, and I liked the criticism but I do agree with some of the additional comments here that the takeaways missed some things for me.
Quick notes since I only just finished and wanted to get my own thoughts out:
It seems I missed quite a chunk of this game (mostly side stuff) and I chalk that to triggering the end game earlier than I probably needed to, combined with not exhausting as many dialogue choices as I could have. I definitely felt the pressure of the clock, both the daily “each dialogue option takes time” and the large scale “we have less than a week to solve this thing” as well as the fact that you can miss dialogue choices by saying the “wrong” thing left me being choosey with what I brought up with people if I didn’t think it was relevant/within the character I was roleplaying. Does anyone know when the cutoff is for the standoff? I hit it on Thursday (day 4) but I had barely any quests left so I went ahead, but I think there was some I missed/ones that occur on later day(s). I figure the fight triggers once you confront Ruby but if you never confront her or take more time I’m guessing you must hit a hard cutoff on a day though, anyone know what it is?
Now if I’m honest with myself partially because of that I do have this slight pang of annoyance when I hear Patrick or others talk about save-scumming or looking up walkthroughs on a first playthrough, because it does feel really antithetical to what that game is about an communicating to the player. The game does such a good job of using fail-forward mechanics and saying so many things about moving on and living with mistakes or not trying to “get” everything that it really rubs me the wrong way for some reason. That said, I do completely acknowledge part of this comes from simply me missing stuff and being bummed and I would never want to be the “you’re playing it wrong” guy who claims you can only enjoy a game the “true” way. Patrick’s and anyone else’s game who played that way is totally valid, as is their enjoyment.
Lastly I do not agree with the take from both of them on the Delores Dei ending stuff. To me it is tortured because so is Harry, and yeah a lot of the options are shitty sadman options because who do you think Harry is? Like the game makes it so clear that it does not matter how you’ve been playing him for the last week he is a fucking TERRIBLE person. This affected him so much that he literally drank himself into amnesia, lost his gun and badge, tried to or at least talked about committing serious self harm, like yeah he fucking sucks and this whole relationship situation is him just holding onto a thing he should have let go literally years ago, and the other characters tell you exactly that!
That moment for me felt like a chance to really show where you came from and what you will do going forward, that you could choose to keep wallowing in this moment in your dreams every couple days for the rest of your life, or choose to move on. And yeah, it’s bad, it’s overblown, because your character has overblown it. At a certain point I was wondering if there would be some key significance to this break up that kept getting hinted at, and it’s like “nah, your dude just sucks, and it was a bad breakup.” I do not think it feeling “not like your character” makes much sense here because you aren’t playing a perfectly blank slate with Harry, and there are things from his past that he couldn’t drink away. Plus I do think it doubles as a clever metaphor for other political things the game is talking about, which Austin did mention, and I think that works well especially with ending with the cryptid.
Lastly and hilariously, I totally missed finding the clipboard until the last day, just didn’t see the thing to click on, so when I finally found it and it just confirmed a bunch of stuff I already knew and then got a late title card 20+ hours in I was VERY confused.
I think I’m gonna do something like this for a second playthrough, to see stuff I missed, maybe do a different role-play, is there a guide or mod on how to do this?
You have two files per save - one is the preview image, and the other is a compressed folder (zip file) which contains all the save data.
If you open up the zip file for the save you want to edit, you will see several json files, and some scripts.
You should open the second json file (alphabetically), it’s also larger than the first one as a check.
This file contains a bunch of data about your character, their stats, and what they’ve done.
The most reliable way to change your 4 basic stats seems to be to search for ‘AbilityModifierCauseMap’ for each stat, and set it to the new value you want.
If you want to adjust skills, the easiest way is to give yourself more skill points to spend (you can find this by searching for ‘money’ in the file - money is money, but skill point pool is the value under it).
Remember to save the file back to the zip file (and if you unpacked the zip, recompress it).
Yeah, the US-centric perspective at the end of the Spoilercast really bothered me. It’s Euro-centric, rare enough in a high-profile videogame but I expect better from Waypoint. It’s about post-Soviet Eastern-Europe, about the moralist European Union condescendingly telling others how to run their countries without actually listening, and the fascism part is most likely Putin, Orban and Kaczyński. Maybe a bit of Brexit in there as well?
Not everything is about the US and Trump, guys. And not everything that happens in the US is trend-setting and unique. This already bothered me in the runup to the 2016 elections, when almost nobody thought of the simple fact that a sly simpleton like Berlusconi had already won three elections by then, not to mention Orban and Kaczyński again.
One thing I’ve seen absolutely no one mention of in discussions around this game is that the very final line (which was an easy Espirit de Corps passive check) implied that that bosses at Harry’s precinct were putting together a plan to support some kind of uprising? I also got a shivers check near the end implying people all over the city were gearing up for something. It’s left very vague though so my assumptions may be incorrect, but I assume this all ties into “The Return” you can get Klassje to open up about and the skull woman graffities outside the Whirling Rags.
My biggest complaint about the game is how it goes in hard on the communism but forces you to be a cop and then only pays lip service to the politics of policing. The idea there’s going to be this big uprising and the local cops are actually going to be in on it is a kind of naive, optimistic thinking the rest of the game stridently pushes back against.
I thought it was entirely inappropriate when Austin started talking about this game in the context of a “resurgent left” that’s only really a concern in the U.S. He then bought up Bernie Sanders as the point of reference which I thought was amusing since the democratic socialist union in this game is explicitly corrupt if possibly well meaning. Whatever “The Return” signifies, it’s probably not Bernie Sanders in and of himself.
I truly hope for Bernie to win but even if he does it doesn’t mean a whole lot for workers globally, at least in the short term. I have a feeling this game’s politics are going to remain relevant for a long time yet, just as long as capitalism and its institutions ike the UN, European Union etc. exist. More relevant than Mass Effect 2, anyway.
I mean, a lot of people talked about that end-game hint, so I don’t know why you think we were brushing over it.
I think the politics of policing are super situational and local-political too, so it’s hard to talk about them ‘generically’ (which, too often, in English, means 'in the context of the USA).
Oh, well to be clear I was referring to the fact that the cops are in on the upcoming revolt, which I don’t think has been referred to here. It’s kind of a fist pump moment that I think sits at odds with the rest of the game and its suspicion of power structures.
With that, said, they do hint in the game that the RCM are pretty dis-empowered, working class, not paid very well etc. Although they also seem to kill with relative impunity. And plenty of communists will tell you that a traditionally structured police force is inherently fascist and lap dogs of the ruling class, so I’m not sure to what degree “local” politics have to play into it. My gut instinct is that there’s not a single police force on this planet that would conspire a worker’s revolt, but I don’t know everything. I feel like if they end up making a sequel all this stuff will be contextualised.
I suppose, there’s hints of a revolt, but no promise it’s a worker’s revolt.
The precise details of the ‘revolt’ suggest that some of the RCM will be tapped to be part of it, so it doesn’t feel like it’s being run by the RCM themselves, just that the people assumed to be sympathetic to the revolt who work for the RCM are going to be recruited. This is really not that unusual for a planned revolution - you want assets in the military and security services, if possible, to prevent your revolution being stopped before it starts.
In addition, the RCM is a rather unusual ‘police force’ from a modern perspective - they’re explicitly only empowered bu the largesse of the occupying power of Revachol, and its implied that their members are ambivalent about this. I think reading them as a conventional police, representing centralised state control is overly simplistic.
Very good points. I suppose my gut negative reaction to this decelopment wasn’t that there would be assets within the force, but that it would just so happen to be the police chief of your precint. In retrospect this makes some sense since the 41st represents the most working class district. If any RCM would be sympathetic it might be the ones from Jamrock.
As for the RCM’s status and Revachol’s government I am a bit hazy on the practical implications of the whole set up. I don’t know what a real world equivalent is to a police force made up of nationals, given authority by a foreign coalition, in power for a few decades. But my assumption is by this point the RCM would be pretty well embedded into the status quo.
Like any devout Moralist, Both Sides Have Good Points ™!
There’s a tendency in American media criticism–I’ve noticed especially bready games criticism–to read policing almost exclusively from the contemporary perspective of the police as a militarized enforcement wing of hegemonic capitalism. And that’s good! That we have that perspective to apply to any and all examples of copaganda…
But I think it also discounts alternative perspectives of policing, from alternate societies and cultures where, say, the police are not composed of petit-bourgeoises, or where they are the result of revolutionary politics. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any good examples of these from history–to my understanding, even the militsiyas in the eastern bloc were pretty universally viewed with suspicion for their enforcement of the status quo.
But crucially, throughout a number of revolutions, military insurrection has been an integral component of successful revolution–the October revolution springs to mind. And while modern American readings of the military are pretty negative (earned, I might add), I think those don’t get scrutinized as harshly… It seems like we’re more willing to accept the prospect of a “good” or at least not unequivocally bad military across our settings. It makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be willing to accept similar hypotheticals when it comes to fictional policing?
I want to make it clear that I’m NOT defending cops: ACAB(ourgeois), etc. And also, I’ll further admit that I grew up playing GI Joe and Cops and Robbers and Cowboys. It’s hard, to some degree, to break free from the appeal of force applied for an inherent good, especially when our hobby serves to so frequently reinforce that (largely unattainable and propagandistic) perspective… I mean, I love Law & Order, I love Phoenix Wright, and I love Star Trek, and I while I love those things, I still get uncomfortable around cops, and DAs, and ROTC cadets. I’m also not here to tell anyone how to feel–I’m not saying people need to start “giving cops a chance” or anything like that.
But–I recall I think someone’s take on Twitter where they thoroughly dressed down Regina King’s conclusion on the Watchmen show seemingly exclusively because she played a cop, and it seemed like less an appraisal of the show’s politics or hypothetical reaction, and more like kind of an automatic response to the notion of policing. And that’s maybe what I wish that the… the media-consuming left, I guess, would work on avoiding.
Gotta say that the game’s pessimistic message is looking pretty solid right now. Would like to see the crew revisit their thoughts on this game (once the feelings are a little less raw) in the wake of Bernie losing to an absolute husk of a man representing the neo-liberal consensus.
