Yeah I felt the same way. I kept playing because of the hype around it, but quit after 8 hours or so.
Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made
FunnyUsername@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
this game was so fucking depressing and bleak and full of downer characters and sub stories i stopped playing after 4 hours.
drama can be good. hardships make adventures exciting. but when the entire world is a hardship, I’d rather play something with more realistic variety.
onceandfuturealice@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sad because I played it a dozen times and found avenues of hope, metaphors for our current lives and generation, bleak and dark views and sublime explorations of acceptance and living in the present. Choices and consequences that can’t be reversed and how we deal with them.
But as I say over and over, it’s a reading experience, it’s a mental/emotional exploration of ideas and settings that reflect the real world. If you just wanna feel good… well there’s a voice in your head for that too, and you can follow that voice and shut out all the others in life, and in game.
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
Maybe you should have kept on playing and you’d have noticed that the game is also funny as fuck…
FunnyUsername@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
i have 8 hours on my steam account. not a single chuckle.
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Hey, it’s cool if you didn’t like it. I just think there’s tons of hilarious things going on. The whole setting appears very bleak and surreal, but there’s some really funny things in the game. I think it’s a good balance to be honest.
4 hours really doesn’t get you far. You don’t even get a feeling for the world in that little time. But you’ve watched YouTube videos on the game, so I guess it’s just not for you.
I grew up with British humor, so it’s kind of weird to hear that dark humor isn’t mainstream, lol.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If it were me, and I had that reaction to a interactive story that so many other people got so many other different experiences from, I would explore that dissonance because it reveals something.
Not saying “go play the game again” if you don’t like it you don’t like it, but I would consider thinking about how and why a dark, bleak-toned reading experience left so many other people feeling one way, and you another. I found it hilarious but also you have the choice in the story to view the bleak world as either a tragedy or a comedy and everything in between… do you feel that kind of agency in life or are you stuck in some way?
Not asking for an answer, just queuing rhetorical questions I would ask myself in that position.
FunnyUsername@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
dude. i am 36 years old. i have experienced and enjoyed tons of dark humo. please don’t assume just because a stranger doesn’t like something you do it’s because they are uncultured or have narrow horizons. it comes across incredibly pretentiously
46_and_2@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If they didn’t notice for 4 whole hours the game is funny as fuck I don’t think it’s for them anyway. Kinda weird they picked up only the nostalgic and sad tones, but nothing else, in a game that basically allows you to react to its world in a myriad different ways.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think it triggers some people because it’s immediately apparent that it is:
Not a “click-splat the baddies” game and you’re not going to be running around grinding levels and powering up your weapons. People barely read more than a paragraph even on social media sites, we cannot expect most people to connect with an interactive novel.
Realistically dark. If you are like a lot of people right now, you are trying to escape thinking and feeling (never mind the damage that does long term) and seeing a setting like Disco Elysium immediately throws you into, of a world torn apart by fascism, greed and human failings, of self-destructive binging to escape pain, of the quiet acceptance of a winding-down world that people still try to exploit and get ahead of others in, you might quickly run away.
This is sad because the story also teaches about finding yourself, of creating identity out of the darkness, of listening to your inner voices and deciding how to treat others and dealing with the consequences of those choices. It feels like a lifeline in places, a nod of hope in the darkness that you still have agency, and it’s wildly quirky and funny, also like life in many ways.