Disco Elysium

My favourite game of all time. Every character has so much depth in their being. they each have something they care for, people they know, and have their own deep histories that led them to being stuck in a conversation with you. The game sets this cruel world in a way that reflects most of the real world's politics. Child eating billionares have taken over every part of the globe through any propaganda, war, and endless corruption scandalls. All who aren't these child-eaters are stuck trying to get a fraction of their power through working until they retire. You play as a detective in the worst district in one of the many wartorn countries, controlled by global superpowers. He is also an addict to everything, hung up on a long gone ex-something, and has been mentally plummeting for years. You take control of him after he drinks on the job until total retrograde amnesia (so bad he can't remember his own sexuality) and change this blank slate into whatever the fuck you want. Make him worse, make him better, make him a commie, make him obsessed with art, just so long as you can solve the murder of the hanged man who has been waiting to be taken down for a week.

The Witness

This game is 80% having no fucking clue whats going on, 10% feeling like einstein encarnate, 9% listening to quotes, and 1% getting what the hell was trying to be said. At it's core, the game is about understanding your perspective as incomplete and requiring you to break down former misconseptions in order to complete puzzles with zero word-based help. The only words that can be found in-game are recordings from voice actors reading quotes that are loosely related to the overall story of the game. The quotes are from a range of figures who are scientists, rulers, and religious figures. A series of these quotes are focused on zen koans. Questions made to break down your understanding of everything as far as it possibly can, much like the puzzles set about in the game. So clearly with all the varying perspectives the game shows along with the puzzles making you get used to breaking down preconceptions shows a story about open-mindedness and the many branches of trying to achieve it.

But the game seems to have so much more than that. Like the statues of people that seem to have been living on this island when suddenly a medusa ray hit all of them. Some of the stone strangers even have their own special angles to view that adds a little story to them. Similarly, the perspective puzzles that make it seem like the game's elements are bleeding into the world that you move between levels are littered everywhere. finding and interacting with them adds to pillars that points towards more perspective puzzles and a counter raises every time you find one. It all seems like it must mean something more. They can't just be there for nothing, so I kept digging with them. Only one of the perspective puzzles actually does anything though. At the very beginning of the game there is a perspective puzzle that unlocks a secret ending. In the ending you go through a resort looking over the island that isn't visible from the island. At the end of the resort, a door can be opened to the exit. The main character takes off a vr headset, heads outside, presses on some circular objects, then lies down, and dies. Now it really really seems like there must be something really really deep going on in the lore. So I dig deeper.

By beating every area in the game, the final challenge can be unlocked. Completing it rewards the player with a 100% completion trophy and a little recording. Other recordings were findable throughout the game. Some of them are really interesting on their own and I can't be bothered to figure out its connection to the story because of that. But none of that matters because the final recording is The Secret of Psalm 46. It's an essay about people making large leaps of faith based on loosely related evidence. Brian Moriarty says he could never understand how people were able to look at alphanumeric codes, apply that onto celebrities names and assume they were satan-spawn because of the number their name equaled. But then he starts talking about that Shakespeare isn't real shit. He never says it's a load of bull but he brings out all the info that makes people believe Shakespeare in a very matter of fact way. You can see why, when presented with only this information, people would fall down a rabbit hole and end up believe something loosely held together by cherrypicked facts and ideas. Which is the game's roundabout way of saying that the deeper point is that there isn't a deeper point to this game. It's final message is a rabbit hole, showing how the player went to deep, focused on the possiblity of there being a people that lived in this fictional world before you. It gives all of these perspective puzzles and statues not because there is some deeper point to them, they are just about showing the importance of having the right perspective of things. It's meant to make you think, "neat." But they knew people would think something deeper was happening so they make the conclusion about how those things meant nothing and the player fell into a trap that many aspiring open-minded, freethinkers get stuck in. So like again, just to make this clear. The ending point of the whole game was about how a part of the game had no point, giving it the point of telling you it has no point.

When I played this game for the first time, I became obsessed with it. I always felt like I was on the brink of a breakthrough about the world. Only after completing the game and continuing to find more perspective puzzles (because I literally only had that left to do) did I finally realise that I was narrowing my view of the game's systems to just the game when it's really more about reality than it's own world. Really one of the most interesting games to exist. I really don't understand how a man with little red maga hats for blood cells ended up making this game. Even a broken clock is right twice a day I guess :/