A murder mystery set in a rich, fictional setting, Disco Elysium is told with sweeping profundity and hilarious absurdity. With no combat to impede story progression, this is a choice-driven role-playing adventure that deftly raises the bar of quality for the medium.

There’s depth, hundreds of hours of replayability and above all, an experience you won’t forget. With humour, panache, wit and genuinely touching moments, this is a hell of a story.

I loved it, though I barely understood much of it. It's a wild ride despite being mostly walls of text. It's the only game where I honestly couldn't say what I thought my character would do at any given turn because I felt I barely knew him, and that was, I feel, by design. You're getting to know him as you're making the choices that define him. Like you are, in a way, with yourself in real life.

Disco Elysium wants to get you in touch with the voices in your head. This detective RPG calls back to the old Infinity Engine games like Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate, but it put a unique spin on everything. With a beautiful oil painting aesthetic, it also features a system that treats your skill like additional party members, each with their own opinions on your actions. Ultimately, every lengthy run-though of Disco Elysium is about the consequences of your choices and actions, adding up to some fantastic stories. A great, surprising entry into RPG canon.

It’s not very often that a game of this calibre comes along. Disco Elysium is mad with psychedelic energy, unabashedly dramatic, and dangerously well-written. I wish, like the detective, I could forget all about Disco Elysium, if only to experience it again as if for the first time. It’s truly one of the greatest RPGs ever released.

With the quality of writing and the inventiveness of design, Disco Elysium brilliantly faces the traditions of role-playing. In doing so, it paradoxically succeeds in overcoming them where more "innovative" titles have failed, demonstrating that innovation is not enough as the sole aim and motivation to make a great game, but that a great game can be, by virtue of its qualities, innovative.

A fiercely original take on traditional computer role-playing games that often seems unrefined and self-indulgent but is still a welcome shake-up of genre norms.