The Australian Classification Board has garnered a reputation for being pretty tight about the games it approves: its refusal to give DayZ the green light over weed resulted in the game being changed worldwide, and Disco Elysium similarly found itself in the firing line earlier this year. Back in March, the board announced that Disco Elysium: The Final Cut was too offensive to go on sale, citing its depiction of drug use, crime and violence as just some of the reasons for the ban.

Well, the board has now reversed its position on Disco Elysium, and the game can finally be released on consoles in Australia. With an 18+ rating slapped on, at least.

Disco Elysium was originally refused classification for a whole host of reasons, including depicting "sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety," but it seems the Classification Board took particular issue with drug use in the game. The Review Board's new report decided that while Disco Elysium does depict drug use, there are "sufficient disincentives to drug use to enable it to be accommodated within the R 18+ classification.

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The delightfully unusual detective role-playing game Disco Elysium is finally on console. The Final Cut version of the game arrived yesterday on PlayStation machines (4 and 5), the App Store, Stadia and PC (a free update if you already own the base game), and there's an Xbox version due to follow this summer.

I've been playing it on PlayStation 5, and generally it works well. I haven't noticed the frame-rate issues I've seen reported elsewhere, so presumably they really have been fixed. But I have come across the object interaction bug, which sometimes doesn't register your interactions, or doesn't quite trigger them. Pressing the button again usually rectifies the issue, so it's sometimes annoying but rarely more. Loading times seem fine on PS5, though I wonder what they're like on PS4, and I haven't seen any other bugs, though I'm only early in the game (code arrived late).

But the most notable new addition is full voice acting. Disco Elysium is a wordy game and only patches of it were voiced originally, meaning most of the time you were reading a text box on the right-hand side of the screen. And though the words were (and are) delightful - Disco Elysium has an outrageous sense of humour, and a lovely way of voicing thoughts that really ought to stay in your head - the sheer amount of them could be wearying. This also made the game somewhat quiet and still, as it waited for you to read and catch up. But the addition of audible voices has a powerful effect on this.

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Disco Elysium - The Final Cut launches on 30th March, developer ZA/UM has announced.

That's for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC via Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, the App Store and Google Stadia priced £34.99.

The Final Cut will be available at no extra cost to all current owners of Disco Elysium. An Xbox version is planned for the summer.

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ZA/UM just announced Disco Elysium: The Final Cut at The Game Awards.

It's a free upgrade for all existing players as well as a standalone release. It hits PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, and PC via Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, and the App Store and Google Stadia from March 2021, and Xbox Series X and S, and Nintendo Switch from summer 2021.

The headline addition is full voice acting (Disco Elysium has a lot of text to read!), but there are also new quests and unseen areas to explore.

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The wonderful Disco Elysium is one year old (that went quick!), and while we wait for the console versions to come out, we have a rather unexpected port to play.

Disco Elysium for the Nintendo Game Boy is a lovely and well-thought out demake by user interface and graphic designer Colin Brannan in collaboration with GB Studio that can be played in a browser or on mobile, and even downloaded as a ROM to be played on an actual Game Boy.

I've had a mess about with it and it's a really great effort, a kind of fusion of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and the original Disco Elysium. Anyone who's played Studio ZA/UM adventure will get a kick out of seeing the original's world and characters reimagined on Nintendo's famous handheld, I'm sure.

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Early on in the zombie film 28 Days Later, Cillian Murphy wanders out of hospital after waking from a month-long coma and crosses a deserted Westminster Bridge. The roads and pavements are empty and strewn with litter, all the while the gothic Palace of Westminster looms over the bewildered Murphy, now a sightseeing tourist in post-apocalyptic London. Understandably, there has always been a lot of interest in how this iconic scene was filmed. How was such a busy landmark in the capital entirely emptied of people? The answer was fairly simple: they filmed it at 5am on a Sunday in the middle of summer.

Today, there would be no need for such ingenuity. In the heat of a global pandemic, central areas of London are almost entirely abandoned (except on Thursdays when crowds congregate, zombie-like, to clap for carers on the very same bridge). Photographers from around the world have already been documenting cities under lockdown - a deserted Times Square, a lonely Eiffel Tower, a vacant Piccadilly Circus, its Coca-Cola billboard eerily replaced with the deadpan face of a monarch. It could be an image captured from the upcoming Watchdogs: Legion, or the location of a horrifying shoot-out in the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

How quickly reality can be made to look like fiction. We're used to seeing images of ruination and abandonment. There's a long artistic tradition fascinated with crumbling visions. From European obsessions with classical antiquity to Romanticism's love for gothic castles and abbeys. In games this enthusiasm plays out within the realms of the medieval fantasy epic - The Elder Scrolls, Dark Souls or The Witcher series' many deteriorating structures often echo the work of 18th and 19th century painters like JMW Turner, Caspar David Friedrich or John Constable.

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Developer ZA/UM's acclaimed open-world detective RPG, Disco Elysium, struck a chord with many last year - and those players looking for an excuse to do it all over again can now take advantage of its newly launched Hardcore Mode.

As its name suggests, Hardcode Mode isn't for the faint of heart, introducing a range of changes designed to make your life in the dilapidated city district of Martinaise even more miserable.

For starters, the difficulty of every Check goes up, meaning your chances of failure are much higher, and money is considerably harder to come by too (expect to value your few possessions more than ever). Making matters worse, pharmaceutical costs are increased and their effectiveness is reduced - so you'll likely feel the pull of booze and cigarettes more often in order to keep your head clear and your courage high.

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

A hard-boiled, wild-eyed cousin of Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium is a game about defeat. Specifically it's about the defeat of the political Left, set on the run-down waterfront of a quasi-European metropolis that once played host to a communist revolution. Revachol was a city built "to resolve History", you're told early on, where "the terrible questions of our time will be answered". Five decades down the line, those answers are writ large in the bullet holes from mass executions, the bigoted orphans roaming the mouldy tenements and the craters left by the neoliberal governments that brought Revachol's revolution to heel.

It's certainly a painful game to contemplate if, say, you recently voted Labour, but Disco Elysium's atmosphere of despair should cling to anybody who has ever sought a better life for themselves, regardless of their politics. Early in the story, you dream of your own corpse dangling from a tree in the scattered light of a disco ball. Through blackened, bubbling lips, the body proceeds to damn you for this world's dreadful plight. "You failed," it croaks, against the melancholy lilt of a distant guitar. "You failed me. You failed Elysium. Four point six billion people - and you failed every single one of them." Coughed up by the past your character is desperately trying to forget, the accusation is ludicrous but horribly convincing: it reflects the demented self-aggrandisements of both severe depression and video games. You aren't just an amnesiac has-been detective, after all, drinking and drugging himself into a not-so-early grave. You're the Player. If any single individual bears responsibility for the state of this universe, it's surely you.

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Developer ZA/UM is currently in the throes of porting its acclaimed detective RPG, Disco Elysium, to Xbox One and PS4, and says that it's due to launch on consoles next year.

Disco Elysium, which released on PC earlier this month, casts players as a less-than-upstanding detective, who begins the game in a dishevelled heap on hotel room floor with what rapidly turns out to be alcohol-induced amnesia - conveniently allowing for plenty of scene-setting exposition, and the opportunity for players to shape their anti-hero as they see fit.

What follows starts as a murder mystery - set in the dilapidated city district of Martinaise - and then rapidly explodes out into a sprawling open-world RPG that shapes and shifts depending on players' abilities and the choices they make throughout the extremely conversation-heavy, and impressively expansive adventure.

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When looking for an anecdote to illustrate both the fascination and frustration inherent in Disco Elysium, you need to go no further than its opening minutes. Your character wakes up with a killer headache, no memory of his past life and no clothes on. If you're feeling adventurous, you can make a grab for your tie, swinging away on the fan in your room. Failing the first of many many checks results in you dying of a heart attack and makes it clear that this game means business. Because while at that point it may all be fun and games to start over with a character slightly less inclined to instantly croak, it's actually one of many instances in which your body, brain or the outside world are out to get you.

Disco Elysium is built on a rather simple core idea, a noir detective mystery using the conventions of a CRPG. Instead of slaying monsters in fantasy combat, you spend your time sleuthing through the ruined streets of Revachol. The chief attraction then, is how downright obsessed developer ZA/UM is with the roleplaying mechanics of pen and paper games. Here you can invest in a myriad of skills that represent your body, mental state, knowledge and social graces. To keep things interesting you can't simply max all of them out, so while there are ways to find help, it's likely you're always going to struggle in situations your character isn't cut out for.

It's a bold way to make sure players never feel like they're fully in control, and for a while it's fun to watch your character fumble through an otherwise serious murder investigation. However, the inherent possibility of failure makes it possible to lock yourself out of the experience entirely. I played for seven hours when I had my own version of the heart attack anecdote: through a combination of refusing tasks, failing checks that would lead to alternative avenues and having no further skill points to spend to reattempt said checks, I had nowhere to go. All that mystery, normally so welcome, led me to a crossroads I wasn't even aware I was on. Afterwards I became an obsessive saver and skill point hoarder. Disco Elysium had shown me the mechanical heart within, and I felt like I could no longer rely on having the dice fall where they may.

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