[limomium]

You're using the term 'adventure' quite liberally. Disco Elysium is, at best, a really drunken, long-winded and exposition-heavy stroll in a pretty mundane harbor area the size of a single city block.

It's not really even that weird of a fiction. Everything is extremely based on reality, with a mere facade of "look we changed the names of everyday things! they are now strange!"

[vorpalhex]

Disco Elysium has a lot of fundamental mechanics in it that are unfamilar to many players - and they are ones I've not seen outside of some very indepth RPGS (text, pen and paper varities).

It is fundamentally less about a story and more about experiencing a world and a character in that world, and in that sense it's a very traditional RPG. One of the reasons that a world builder renames things is to give a clue to the player that things operate differently in a world then they are used to - and that is very true in Disco Elysium.

The physical world in Disco Elysium that we have access to is very small and it forces us to go over the same areas and same characters again and again - because it's not the physical world that changes but our knowledge of it and our ability to interact with it.

[polytely]

>Everything is extremely based on reality

Very much disagree on that one.

SPOILER WARNING:

There are enough weird things in there, it's possible to miss them, but discovering really changes your whole outlook on the world. Things like: the Pale, the Insulindian Phasmid & the Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy in the shipping container.

Some skills are also kinda magical if you invest enough points, Interfacing & Inland Empire could be explained by your imagination, but it's hard to argue that Esprit De Corps (cutaway to what is happening to Precinct 41) & Shivers (Have conversations with the city of Revachol itself) aren't a bit supernatural.

[gorgoiler]

The game is like an episode of Breaking Bad set in New Crobuzon.

The concept of the Pale is utterly horrifying. It pretty much has no involvement with the game at all and I think that’s a brilliant thing.

The concept is there, lurking in the background of various plot lines, but it’s never actually part of a mission. You are left to your own imagination as to, at first, how seemingly horrific it is.

To later learn that the pale is expanding — at an unknown rate you are led to believe is like a rising tide — and will eventually destroy the world and no one really seems to care or talk about it as an issue that much puts all the other noir detective and soap opera plots and subplots in a fascinating light. The citizens of Revechol are a little insane, we get to guess a bit about why and can also deduce they are in denial.

Someone on gamepedia has pieced together this description from expository dialogue in the game:

What does the pale look like? It's acromatic, odourless, featureless. The pale is the enemy of matter and life. It is not like any other — or any thing in the world. It is the transition state of being into nothingness. Where matter borders the pale, the resulting border is an uproar of matter, rising into the pale. Rolling. Evaporating even, a great vision. The area of transition between the world and the pale is called porch collapse: A grey coronal mist, cold vapour, marked by spores of an opportunistic microorganism.

Pale is difficult to describe and measure, as it's something whose fundamental property is the suspension of properties: physical, epistemological, linguistic. The further into pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical — numbers stop working. No one has yet passed the number barrier since the discovery of the pale and it may be impossible.

In fact, one of the few measurable effects of the pale is that it is expanding at an unknown rate.

[maest]

I mostly agree, with one caveat: The Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy is partially an easter egg and, iirc, doesn't really affect the world in any way. At most, it's a commentary on wealth inequality.

The Phasmid and the Pale are fairly core to the world and story, though.

[vmception]

Sounds like something I could be in the mood for.