Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is an RPG that takes place in a fantastic realist world, the titular Elysium. The game is based on a tabletop role-playing game setting that lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz had created before forming ZA/UM, and the setting was previously featured in Kurvitz's 2013 novel, Sacred and Terrible Air (Estonian: Püha ja õudne lõhn).

The player is placed in the shoes of an amnesiac police detective from the Revachol Citizens Militia (RCM), who awakens one cold winter morning in a trashed hostel room with a massive hangover. As he talks to people in the hostel, he finds out that he is in the hostel-cafeteria Whirling-in-Rags in the impoverished district of Martinaise within the city of Revachol on the isola of Insulinde, in the year '51 of the current century. He was sent here three days ago by his superiors in Precinct 41 to investigate the murder of a private security contractor, who was discovered hanging by a cargo strap from a tree in the yard behind the hostel. The case was considered especially sensitive, since the murder seems connected to an ongoing strike by the Martinaise dockworkers' union against the Wild Pines Group, a major logistics corporation.

The main character, however, apparently suffered a mental breakdown shortly after his arrival in Martinaise, and instead of investigating the case, he went on a three day long bender of alcohol and drugs around the district, which seems to be the cause of his total memory loss. The main character teams up with Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, his temporarily assigned partner from the rival Precinct 57, and together they must try not just getting to the bottom of the case of the hanged man, but also carefully navigate the conflict between the union and Wild Pines, as well as the mystery of the main character's past.

The game features no kinds of traditional RPG combat; instead all situations, including violent confrontations, are handled through skill checks and dialogue trees. There are four primary attributes in the game: separated into Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Each attribute has six distinct secondary skills for a total of 24, which the player can improve through skill points earned from levelling up. As the game is played, the skills are being constantly tested both passively and through two kinds of active checks in dialogue scenes, namely white checks (which can be retired should they fail) and red checks (which can only be tried once). In addition, as the player put more points into the various the skills, they increasingly begin manifesting as voices in the main character's internal monologue, giving him and the player advice on how to solve the various challenges they encounter throughout the story. Skills with many points put into them, however, run the risk of becoming compulsions or being overbearingly loud compared to other skills, insisting on giving their "advice" even in situations where it is less than helpful, encouraging the player to try for a balanced approach to levelling up and discouraging minmaxing.

The progression of time within the game world are tied to the dialogue scenes, and does not move forward outside them. Speaking to the various NPCs also occasionally unlocks Thoughts, which are placed in the main character's Thought Cabinet, where the player can choose to have the main character internalize them, which happens passively in the background over a period of in-world time. Thoughts that are in the process of being internalized or are completed usually come with different boosts or penalties to various skills, but can also come with more unique features, such as giving the main character new dialogue options and/or extra money or experience from certain kinds of actions. As the player chooses different dialogue options, the game will keep track of their choices, and eventually assign them different "Copotypes" and political ideologies based on their general conduct, which come with their own Thoughts, which the player are free to have the main character internalize or object against.