Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is a dream come true for some gamers. The original version was a weird, offbeat critical darling of an RPG that was almost universally adored, but it featured a lot of reading. A LOT. The Final Cut, however, cuts through all that with full voice acting not only for the city's cast of weirdo characters, but also for the voices inside your head. The game, which was developed off the back of a tabletop RPG its creators had been playing together for years, casts you as an amnesiac, alcoholic cop with a lynching to solve and a banging hangover. Your beat is Revachol, a failing city that suffered through a botched communist revolution a few decades back and separated from its neighbours by some sort of existentially-dreadful fog. There's a strange vibe that's sort of steampunk but sort of 1970s at the same time, and that manifests as some exquisite and deeply idiosyncratic world-building, replete with crumbling infrastructure, faded beauty and notes of the supernatural. At the heart of Disco Elysium is its unique skill tree. You can mix and match from 24 different skills, some of which will make perfect sense to you (endurance or logic, for example) and others that are deeply opaque ('shivers', 'savoir faire'). All will impact how you play the game, though, having unexpected consequences for things like interrogations (to be fair, sometimes it's more interesting when these things go wrong anyway). The main murder is a huge case in its own right, but you could sink hours and hours into the side cases if you like. The NPCs you encounter are all deeply realised characters in your own right, making for a rich, weird ride through Revachol.
