Disco Elysium: The Final Cut
An hour in and so far mostly the same game, except fully voiced and sometimes re-voiced. Perhaps, original voice actors were unavailable due to covid and such. Not sure how I feel about new voice actors performance. It’s not like they’re bad (the guy who reads all inner dialogues for example is great) but I remember original voices and it creates a weird feeling of something being not quite right. Also, they had unprofessional people (mostly American socdem podcasters, which is fine with me) do voices before and it added sort of an endearing DIY feeling to the game. Again, I’m only hour into the game, but at least I must praise new voice actor (pro or not, I don’t know) who did all inner skills voice acting - really good comedic timing, noticed I’m chuckling much more often then when I was reading it back in original.
The ability to instantly switch in-game text from language to language is GREAT. All games should have it. I usually understand 99% of written English text but sometimes I get a word I don’t know, although I understand the meaning in context most of the time, I get paranoid (happened before, gauging meaning of the unknown word from context went horribly wrong couple of times, embarrassing stuff), now I can just check by clicking one button and changing everything to Russian for a second, also sometimes I want to see how they translated some jokes/puns. It’s great to have such a simple yet powerful ability! Can’t overstate this.
For a laugh I created a kind of combat-focused character in a game with no combat. And then I decided to sequence break and see how game handles it. Surprisingly, it went well enough. I skipped pretty much every early game interaction by rolling a few 40% chances, managed to sneak into the harbor to talk to Ervart Claire before examining the corpse, before talking to Cuno, before creating a fake name for myself, before talking to Measurehead. Just grabbed a pack of cigarettes’ in a 24hour beer/tobacco shop from a 15 yo clerk (been there done that, sold and delivered magazines for a bit) and a plastic bag to collect glass tare. Yeah, this game is a 90s flashback to me, I remember seeing old people with those plastic bags with beer bottles all the time, sidewalks were littered with used syringes too. Good old 90s… good old shock therapy, everyone’s lifetime savings gone in an instant (except for connected people who became oligarchs or died trying), salaries for those who didn’t lose jobs delayed for YEARS or given with whatever their factory produced (go sell it, lol), good old rotten Yeltsin regime (but supported by US, which means it’s all good), old people selling their jewelry on the street to feed their grandkids, BUT X-files, Babylon 5 and softcore pron on TV after 23-00! Bubblegum, coke and jeans! Members of international community at last, The Free World! My first PC with DOS! What a time! October 93’ Moscow massacre, First Chechen war, apartment bombings, assassinations of a few successful business people right in my apartment block godfather-style, some local gangster car exploded 100m away from me shattering glass in my micro district, living partly on subsistence farming from grandfathers dacha, cheap noodles’ for dinner for years upon years, fake 96’ elections, mafia combat in broad daylight, financial crisis that destroyed EVERYTHING in 98, oligarch media kompromat wars ALL DAY, a lot of dead journalists (well before Putin, btw). All that stuff no one wants to remember. And that’s in Moscow, people had it much worse in smaller cities and provinces. I had a rather happy childhood, all this stuff was my parents’ problem (except for DOS, that was MY problem).
So yeah my rambling aside this game is pretty good.
