Clothing can give '+1 Drama' or gloves can give '+1 Interfacing,' but you have no idea what abilities you'll need before a conversation. There's also gear that enhances your abilities, and it's also meaningless. Like the twenty abilities, the writing describing the thoughts was excellent, but they didn't affect gameplay enough to care about. There's also 'thoughts' you can internalize for the cost of a skill point. Disco Elysium took away the thing I like most in RPG, the satisfaction of grinding up levels and becoming more powerful. I finished the game with 5 skill points in reserve. I literally stopped leveling my character at the midway point and saved up my skill points to add to an ability check that would come up in a conversation. The sad thing is, they don't lead to me feeling like I've crafted a character that plays a certain way. 'Inland Empire' gives you a lens of mystical imagination to see the world through. 'Interfacing' lets you use machines and tools better. 'Electrochemistry' lets you experience drugs and pleasure more effectively. You have twenty different abilities to level up with your skill points - and oh are they creative and cool. The 'skill tree' in this game is ultimately meaningless.

In practice, I simply clicked every dialogue option and had no idea why certain decisions gave me experience. The failed promise of this game was that it innovated dialogue trees into a 'combat' system where your dialogue choices matter and you gain experience from conversation. So the story is good, but the role playing is shit. You're really playing this game for the story, and the in-game tasks do well enough to move it along. It gives you the solid feeling of knocking things off of a to-do list. I enjoyed the efficiency planning of it-knocking off certain quests in an area before I looped back to another. They're mostly fetch quests and 'go-talk-to-this-person' quests. You work out of a journal with quests, and you have a set amount of time each in-game day to run around and complete them. The gameplay loop is nothing to write home about. It was refreshing to hear a post-Soviet bloc take on Marxism, capitalism, and liberalism. As an American, I come from a country with the most moronic political discourse imaginable. It's a game will make you laugh out loud frequently and think constantly. The monologue and the dialogue are dripping with wry intellectualism. The writing is worth the price of admission (if that price is under $20).

Some people have poo-pooed the plot, but it has a sufficient story arc and it made me feel things. It's a good story, with possibly the best writing I've seen in a video game.

In short, Disco is an interactive story and not really a game.

Disco elysium fast travel