PC Gamer has been seduced by an amnesiac detective with a penchant for asking weird questions that make everyone feel uncomfortable. Disco Elysium, our 2019 Game of the Year, subverts the RPG systems we've become so familiar with and swaps the challenge of combat—which is non-existent—for challenging themes and topics instead. It tosses out conventions and raises the bar for RPGs, leaving us wondering if it's also raised expectations for new games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Bloodlines 2. 

Fraser Brown: It's not just raised my expectations; it's made me worried I've turned into an RPG snob. I already roll my eyes whenever a developer announces that its RPG will have a crafting system, but now every RPG convention is making me sigh. I doubt I'm alone. After I admitted that Disco Elysium had ruined the Outer Worlds for me, I was surprised by how many people said they had the same experience, and it's not because The Outer Worlds is a crap RPG—it's a solid Obsidian adventure, but it's very familiar, and so are a lot of RPGs on the horizon that I was previously very excited about. 

Games like Bloodlines 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 are beholden to a different set of expectations. They're set in already established universes and based on earlier RPGs. Bloodlines in particular has a lot to contend with, given the near mythical status of its wonky but wonderful predecessor. With Disco Elysium, there was nothing like that holding it back. The Witcher 3 also had a legacy to deal with, however, and that didn’t stop it from being exceptional. I started playing again recently and continue to be enamoured with it. The RPG systems it depends on might be ones we've seen thousands of times before, but the quality of the writing and quest design makes it timeless. 

So maybe I can live with RPGs not relieving themselves of all their baggage, but I still hope Disco Elysium doesn't prove to be an evolutionary dead end, instead leading to more unconventional and adventurous games sprouting in its wake. I don't mean more Disco Elysiums, though; the genre is so broad that we should be overwhelmed with variety. That means I'm also open to being wowed by an RPG with loads of crafting and combat, as long as they're not just checking a box. There's loads of novel stuff that can be done to the more staid elements of modern RPGs.

Tom Senior: Disco Elysium feels more like interactive fiction than an RPG to me. Technically there are stats and you can level up aspects of your personality, but that's mostly in service of giving you dialogue choices. I love Disco Elysium, but it hasn't damaged my enthusiasm to explore beautiful new worlds in RPGs. It's going to be an exciting year, as the new console generation arrives and we see another audiovisual leap in standards, RPGs are well placed to give us the best journeys and stories of the new generation. 

Much as I love the game, and its sense of humour, Disco Elysium has a nihilistic streak that I can only put up with for so long. I still love a big spectacular fantasy story, ideally with some jokes. That made Outer Worlds fun last year. After the disappointment of last year's Fallout I'm keen to see Bethesda get back to what they're really good at—big singleplayer sandbox worlds. Disco Elysium uses RPG mechanics brilliantly to portray the internal struggles of a very broken detective, but there are more stories to be told with the medium, and I can't wait to enjoy those stories.

Chris Livingston: I was only maybe ten minutes into Disco Elysium when I had a very clear thought: "I don't think I've ever played a game quite like this." It's not like everything it does is revolutionary but it seemed obvious to me right away that it was just operating on a different level than other RPGs I've played. Every little interaction and discussion and observation and examination could be followed down a wormhole full of surprises and horror and humor. I guess I'm used to quickly examining a few things in a room and then moving on but here were these long, intricate interactions and discussions over minor objects like a mirror or necktie. It took what felt like ages just to make my way out of the hotel you begin the game in, and I was already overloaded with information and intriguing mysteries and choices I regretted making. I can't remember any RPG that so quickly had me off-guard.

It was rather exhausting, really, and definitely not something I want from every RPG going forward—I'm very happy with games like The Outer Worlds because they're fun and breezy and don't hammer your brain into mush every couple of minutes. I don't expect (or want) every new RPG to try to emulate DE, but it's great to see a game come along that moves the goalposts a bit, something for other RPG designers to at least have in the back of their minds when they're making their next game.

Tyler Wilde: To add to what Chris said about the little things, what sets Disco apart to me is that looking at something or speaking to someone characterizes the protagonist as much as the world or NPC in question. Audio logs are over, now give me introspection and dread because I clicked on an inanimate object. 

As an example series a lot of people have played: Much of Mass Effect's universe is explained to Shepard by NPCs or codex entries, and companions largely just tell her their backstories. I never worried about contradicting Shepard's internal logic or affecting her emotional state when making a decision, because she never fretted over things, or contemplated objects that made her sad, or did anything to indicate an internal life (it was my feelings that mattered, really). Done with a bit more Disco flavor, Shepard would've read those codex entries and interpreted her companion's stories along with us, reacting to them internally, processing them, characterizing her, her friends, and the galaxy at the same time.

I wouldn't object to more Disco-style games, though in parts I wished it'd just get to the point instead of tickling the edges of ideas and making me jog back and forth between informants and informees—there are moments in every story-driven game where I wish it would just be a damn novel so that I can get on with it. But even without replicating its particularities, I do hope Disco is taken as a cue to experiment more with dialogue and characterization. I don't think it instantly raised any expectations for me, but it provides an example of one way to push the genre away from flat protagonists who act primarily as player avatars, which I don't think is desirable despite all the games which treat it as the ideal norm.

James Davenport: I don't think Disco Elysium has raised my expectations for the genre as a whole. I'm playing through The Witcher 3 again, and I like the conventional combat and level-up system. I wouldn't change a thing about the even more conventional Divinity Original Sin 2 post-Disco. I'm all for parties with casters and rangers and knights fighting the same old fantasy bastards. Just tell me a good story and build systems around it that best serve the fiction.

But Disco Elysium did remind me that RPG storytelling and systems don't have to fit the same mold that D&D created back when. I want my dungeons and my dragons, but I also want postmodern adventures through an alcoholic's tortured mind. RPGs should be more genre agnostic in terms of the stories they tell. Give me an RPG library as diverse as deep as the library down the street from me. We've seen plenty of sci-fi and fantasy, and Disco is basically a stab at a China Mieville RPG. Let's seem more realist historical fiction, absurdist comedies, cosmic horror, Downton Abbey: The RPG—you get the idea. Good writing and bespoke RPG systems make for fascinating stories, and Disco Elysium is just the beginning of a new wave.

Andy Kelly: The most interesting thing about Disco for me is how it features as much conflict as the RPGs that inspired it, but they all take place in text form: in conversations, or inside the protagonist's fractured mind. It’s a game filled with battles—but mental ones—whether it's a tense stand-off with a suspect, or trying to get information out of a tight-lipped witness. That's something I'd like to see more of in RPGs.

Like James, I still want to play RPGs with fantasy settings, parties of heroes, magic, and all of that. But Disco is proof that you can create a compelling RPG with a contemporary setting, that isn't about destiny and prophecies and ancient evil orders. You can make an RPG about a murder in a grimy city, and it's every bit as compelling as one about a windswept hero carving their way through a magical realm.

Disco is a great game—one of the best on PC—but I would love to see that style of writing, dialogue, and quest design in a more dynamic, reactive, perhaps three-dimensional world. I love the idea of a game with this much depth of role-playing, but in a world that feels less static. I really hope the sheer volume of GOTY awards Disco won will encourage developers to think about RPGs in a more open-minded, experimental way, because it's clear there's an audience for it.

Robin Valentine: I’m not sure a game has ever shown up its contemporaries in quite the same way as Disco Elysium does. It’s not really about the specific ideas that it has – it’s not like I now want the next Dragon Age to have talking skills and radical centrism. What’s important is that the ideas it has are genuinely new. The game takes all these established RPG tropes, that are so deeply ingrained, and totally reimagines them to fit what it’s trying to do. In the process, it exposes just how stagnant and backward-facing the genre’s become. Even truly great RPGs of the last decade have mostly focused their efforts on scale and writing—they’ve taken fundamental things like skills, character-building, and dialogue trees completely for granted, more often than not.

I think a lot of that comes down to gaming’s relationship with the tabletop RPGs that birthed the genre. The pen-and-paper scene is more popular, vibrant, experimental, varied, and exciting than ever in 2020. Those are the games that inspired the developers of Disco Elysium—its hugely reflective of the current scene. Meanwhile, the biggest upcoming videogame RPGs are based on… tabletop games from the 90s. I’ve been saying for a long time that there’s something deeply wrong with that state of affairs, promising as the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Bloodlines 2 may look.

As someone who loves RPGs, I really want Disco Elysium to be a shot in the arm for the genre. Major developers need to be looking at it and thinking "how did a handful of blokes from Estonia do this with their first game, and we’re still just making skill trees?" It should be an invitation for studios to think differently, be bolder. 

And if they do, I think it’ll benefit games as a whole. There’s an argument that the RPG genre is the most influential around—these days a game’s barely considered complete if it doesn’t have level ups and loot in it somewhere. If RPGs can take a new leap, then maybe everyone else will once again follow. 

Fraser Brown: Now that you’ve said it, Robin, I kinda do want to see the next Dragon Age do talking skills and radical centrism.

In hindsight, I understand why soothsayers were declaring PC gaming dead at the end of 2009. To the outsider, we were an insular group of World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike fans who still clung to genres carved out in the '80s and '90s—but didn't we know that Sierra Online was defunct, Cliff Bleszinski was making Xbox 360 games now, and id Software was an iOS developer? PC gaming didn't seem as cutting edge in the age of Xbox Live, the ubiquitous Wii, and blockbuster console series like Gears, Forza, Halo, Killzone, and Metal Gear.

Of course, the soothsayers were wrong. Over the past decade, Steam's concurrent user count shot up from a little over 2 million to over 14 million at its peaks. And even as Valve's service expanded—transforming from a hand-picked boutique into a labyrinthine marketplace—it couldn't contain PC gaming alone. On and off Steam, a new free-to-play ecosystem grew around MOBAs, MMOs, and shooters, and a flood of roguelikes, visual novels, Kickstarted RPGs, grand strategy games, sex games, VR games, and more spilled out of modders and do-it-yourself PC developers who didn't need anyone's permission to make games—no console dev kits, no licensing agreements.

Minecraft and DayZ alone spawned dozens of offshoots that mix survival and building and social dynamics in ways that had never been done before, and along with new esports contributed heavily to the rise of livestreaming. Competitive and co-op games flourished—with some help from Discord, which made voice chat gatherings more accessible—and at the same time, the death of the singleplayer game was exaggerated again and again. 

While some big publishers did chase always-online worlds, our 2019 Game of the Year was Disco Elysium, an oddball, visual novel-esque singleplayer RPG. Our 2018 Game of the Year was tactical roguelike Into the Breach. Our 2017 Game of the Year was crowdfunded, turn-based RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2—and now Larian is making Baldur's Gate 3.

Old PC genres were renewed, and new genres spawned from the creative interplay between big and small developers, modders, crowdfunders, and players. The past we appeared stuck in led us into the future, whereas the Hollywood movie wannabes that gaming celebrated 10 years ago—the Uncharted series comes to mind—are what feel old today. The decade was all about turn-based tactics games, after all.

Putting aside some of last year's squabbles—Epic Games Store exclusives being the most prominent—PC gaming feels delightfully positive right now. Here in 2020, more games release every week than anyone can keep up with, and the PC is not an afterthought like it was for a part of the new millennium. Good PC versions of Japanese console games are becoming the norm, indie games generally target the PC first, and Microsoft has committed itself to treating Windows 10 as an extension of its Xbox business. Games for Windows Live is becoming a distant, dark memory. 

And so much of what's available is cheap, free, or free-to-play. While microtransaction-funded games got a bad rap initially, Warframe, Path of Exile (soon to be Path of Exile 2), and Apex Legends are just a few examples of zero-cost excellence on PC today. On top of that, Steam sales, free weekends, Humble and GOG giveaways, and other promotions frequently bolster the value of our hardware investments. You can spend $100 annually on games and be incredibly happy.

Most recently, Epic's retail ambitions have meant a steady stream of brilliant freebies, including favorites such as our 2018 GOTY Into the Breach, Subnautica, and Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, as well as financial cushions for new and upcoming PC releases such as Control, Outer Wilds, Ooblets, and Griftlands, to name just a few. Epic's aggressive strategy has returned plenty of resentment, but the benefits of competition have outweighed the headache of platform fragmentation, which was already happening by way of Battle.net, Origin, uPlay, and the Microsoft Store.

There's no reason to predict a lull in 2020. We don't know if Cyberpunk 2077 will be everything it's touted to be, but the scope of CD Projekt's ambition is exciting. Valve is going all-in on VR with Half-Life: Alyx, the first Half-Life game since 2007, which at worst will be a fascinating test of the platform's capabilities. Mount & Blade 2's open-ended medieval roleplaying is finally on the way. And there are hundreds of other big studio and independent games in the works. I'm particularly excited for The Eternal Cylinder, the next game from the always-peculiar Chilean studio ACE Team.

In the processing world, expect 2020 to match the pace of the past 10 years: We'll see new CPUs and GPUs, but older models will continue to suffice so long as you aren't chasing ray tracing or 4K. The new consoles releasing at the end of the year may eventually result in a mild bump to minimum requirements, but with so many PCs (and consoles) that don't support ray tracing, we expect existing hardware to remain viable for several years at least. You won't get maximum performance, and you won't be able to turn on all the fancy effects, but you won't be locked out of any games.

Virtual reality may see more rapid development. The all-in-one Oculus Quest has broadened VR's reach, and Valve has gone all in with its own headset, the Index. VR got off to a modest start, but that framing ignores that it also went from sci-fi speculation to reality in under a decade. The young technology is still in a period of rapid iteration and advancement, and as the '20s progress, expect VR games to become much more prominent—along with the accessibility issues they present. Boneworks selling 100,000 copies in its first week is a good start.

I don't expect cloud gaming services like Stadia to have a substantial effect in 2020—if they can at all, it'll take at least a few more years to change the strong relationships we've formed with boxes. However, the growth of subscription services such as Xbox Game Pass is already making a difference. Game Pass remains dirt cheap during its introductory period, and offers subscribers over 150 games with the promise of more throughout the year, including the Yakuza series, a bunch of Final Fantasy games, and new releases such as Wasteland 3 and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. 

Game Pass is a fantastic deal right now, but if the switch from physical discs to digital licenses was a partial loss of ownership, subscriptions are its total obliteration. EA has Origin Access Premier, Ubisoft recently introduced Uplay+, and others may follow course. There's been no hint of it, but it's not entirely absurd to imagine Steam one day introducing a Kindle Unlimited-style program that offers access to a portion of its library for a monthly fee.

As new models and technologies bring new opportunities and new problems, the old ones stick around, and we'll continue to grapple with the issues that characterized the 2010s. The gaming scene has hardly been a bastion from hatred and prejudice over the past decade, nor has it shown exemplary respect and fairness to its workers, many of whom still deal with discrimination, crunch, mass layoffs, and sudden studio closures. Loot boxes may be going out of fashion, but that doesn't mean the end of manipulative and aggressive monetization. And the increasingly close relationships between developers and players—who might today be streamers, YouTubers, crowdfunders, esports pros, modders, hat designers, or subreddit admins—increases the probability of both collaboration and conflict, symbiosis and abuse.

But with the threat of stagnation thoroughly dismissed, PC gaming is full of exciting and positive unknowns. The staples from 2010 still exist—a new Call of Duty still marks the late summer harvest every year—but 10 years later, we're practically in a new dimension. At least one exciting new genre springs to life every year now, and there are no more shoo-ins. Perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 will be the most important game of 2020, but it feels just as likely that something unexpected out of Estonia will steal the spotlight before the year ends.

Disco Elysium is PC Gamer's Game of the Year for 2019! To see all of the winners, head to our GOTY 2019 hub.

Jody: The drama skill would like to explain that what makes Disco Elysium great is how it coherently draws together influences from outside of videogames, that it combines 1970s cop dramas with David Fincher deconstructions of detective stories and China Mieville city-building. The encyclopedia skill feels obliged to mention that it's also synthesizing the politics of post-Soviet Estonia and, in its glib moments, the hellsite called Twitter. Conceptualization would like to add the importance of its impressionist art style and equally impressionist music, both moody and yet not without color or incident. My electrochemistry skill really needs a drink if I'm going to carry on with this.

Disco Elysium's skill system, which transforms each of your character's abilities into NPC companions who pipe up with their own opinions and commentary more often as you put more points into them, is a revolutionary addition to roleplaying games. It forces you to see even trivial choices as coming to define who you are, and because of that it gets away with only occasionally throwing in a Big Moral Choice while still ensuring you finish it with a strong conception of who you've become.

Just as significant is what it leaves out. I took part in one fight and skipped an optional one and that's all the combat I saw in 30 hours. RPGs use combat as a pacing mechanism (and often as a padding one), so for Disco Elysium to throw that away and not be any lesser for it is huge. It's like someone kicking away a crutch and then running a marathon.

Wes: I was so excited when I started doing some real detective work, finding the notebook I'd lost during one hell of a drunken bender. Within it were clues to my forgotten identity, the backstory I needed to understand who I was. Like any other game, Disco Elysium prodded me to open it and investigate, to solve the riddle. And then, unlike any other game, it made me question whether I really wanted to know my past. Was that really who I was? Or could I be someone new? What a thrill, to deliberately throw away a plotline. What catharsis! And I know my particular makeup of skills changed which inner voices chimed in at that moment, yanking my mind in different directions, making me really choose what I thought. So many RPGs are defined by what you do, but Disco Elysium is truly defined by what you think. I've never played anything like it.

Fraser: Disco Elysium is challenging. Not in the way Dark Souls is challenging, but in its presentation of ideologies, addiction, racism, morality. It's a lot to digest. Your amnesiac detective is built out of personality traits, obsessions and beliefs, so you’re always encouraged to explore who you are and what you make of the society you’re stuck in. I became a communist for the funny dialogue options, but by the end I’d had serious discussions about its merits and flaws and found it informing loads of other choices I made. I’ve never played another RPG that gives so many opportunities to define my character beyond stat bumps, aside from maybe Planescape: Torment.

Andy K: I spend most of my time in Infinity Engine-style RPGs trying to avoid combat and find a smarter way to deal with any given situation, which makes Disco Elysium particularly enjoyable. The sheer number of ways to charm, smarm, or bullshit your way out of trouble makes for an incredibly satisfying RPG, and is proof that you don’t need traditional combat to make a game like this compelling over tens of hours. Disco’s protagonist is one of the most joyously malleable characters in RPG history, from the clothes he wears to the intricacies of his personality. You can truly make your mark on this world through the things you say and do, even if those things are terrible and offensive. It’s your choice.

The Game Awards, the annual flurry of new game announcements interspersed here and there with bits of chit-chat and trophies, has come to an end for 2019. This year's event didn't really feel like it had any mega-blockbuster game reveals—no new Elder Scrolls game, or Mass Effect revivals—but there were certainly some big moments: Microsoft revealed a new Xbox, the Series X, and a new flagship game, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, and a new MMO set in the Magic: The Gathering universe is on the way, which could be fun.

And yes, there were award winners, too: Quite a few of them, in fact, and some honest surprises, foremost among them that Death Stranding didn't run away with the whole thing. It did well, winning three awards including Best Game Direction, but the big dog this year was actually the outstanding detective RPG Disco Elysium, which claimed four trophies. Yet neither was selected as Game of the Year.

Which game earned top prize this year? Read on to find out. And don't miss our rundown of all the new trailers that appeared at The Game Awards right here.

• Esports Team: G2 Esports (League of Legends)
• Esports Players: Kyle "Bugha" Giersdorf (Sentinels, Fortnite)
• Esports Host: Eefje "Sjokz" Depoortere
• Esports Game of the Year: League of Legends (Riot Games)
• Esports Event: League of Legends World Championship 2019
• Esports Coach: Danny "Zonic" Sorensen
• Content Creator of the Year: Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek
• Fresh Indie Game: Disco Elysium (Za/um)
• Multiplayer Game: Apex Legends (Respawn/Electronic Arts)
• Sports/Racing Game: Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled (Beenox/Activision)
• Strategy Game: Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Intelligent Systems/Koei Tecmo/Nintendo)
• Family Game: Luigi's Mansion 3 (Next Level Games/Nintendo)
• Fighting Game: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Sora/Bandai Namco/Nintendo)
• RPG: Disco Elysium (Za/um)
• Action-Adventure Game: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (From Software/Activision)
• Action Game: Devil May Cry 5 (Capcom)
• VR/AR Game: Beat Saber (Beat Games)
• Community Support: Destiny 2 (Bungie)
• Mobile Game: Call of Duty Mobile (Timi Studios/Activision)
• Independent Game: Disco Elysium (Za/um)
• Ongoing Game: Fortnite (Epic Games)
• Games for Impact: Gris (Nomada Studio/Devolver Digital)
• Performance: Mads Mikkelsen as Cliff (Death Stranding – Kojima Productions/SIE)
• Audio Design: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward/Activision)
• Score and Music: Death Stranding (Kojima Productions/SIE)
• Art Direction: Control (Remedy/505 Games)
• Narrative: Disco Elysium (Za/um)
• Game Direction: Death Stranding (Kojima Productions/SIE)
• Game of the Year: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (From Software/Activision)

It's been mentioned in some of the glowing reviews for RPG Disco Elysium (our reviewer gave it 92%) that its unique setting was created for a tabletop RPG Estonian designers, ZA/UM, have been playing together for 10 years. According to an interview lead designer and writer Robert Kurvitz had with Escapist Magazine, he's also written a novel in the same setting. It's called Sacred and Terrible Air, and it's going to be translated into English next year.

Kurvitz has other plans for Disco Elysium in the future, and is apparently planning both an expansion of some kind as well as a sequel. "We have an insanely ambitious list of projects we want to make in the Elysium setting," Kurvitz said. "The last one I want to make, when I'm 50 or 60, that I want to absolutely go crazy on and throw out all commercial considerations and get this as conceptual as possible, is the tabletop setting. The working title for the tabletop setting is You Are Vapor. It will be a really, really, crazy pen-and-paper game."

ZA/UM also plan to release a manifesto next year. I can't think of many studios who could get away with a manifesto, but ZA/UM are definitely one.

Thanks, Escapist.

Drugs are an important part of Disco Elysium, even if you choose not to take them. As the latest devblog from Robert Kurvitz over at Estonian indie studio ZA/UM points out, the full-sobriety challenge run is "favoured by our writers" and, "After all, there is no temptation without abstinence." Kurvitz then goes on to point out the many ways Disco Elysium has of tempting you.

Here's one: drugs make you better at things. Each of the four stats is connected to a drug, with amphetamines temporarily improving your motorics, for instance. That means it also improves every motorics skill and the maximum cap that skill can be raised to. An hour later the effect wears off, but if you took the opportunity to spend a point to boost a skill to the temporary maximum that point isn't lost. As Kurvitz says, "this started out as a bug, but we kept it because testers liked it."

Something I hadn't realized while playing is that though legal substances like booze and cigarettes are always visible in the world to tempt you, illegal substances are hidden until after you try some acquired another way (through dialogue, for instance). Stashes of speed and pyrholidon, Disco Elysium's made-up anti-radiation drug which improves your psyche stat, only become visible once you know what to look for.

If you're playing Disco Elysium already and aren't worried about some minor mechanical spoilers, like the effect of certain thoughts you can equip in your Thought Cabinet, this deep dive into drugs is worth a read. Kurvitz also notes that the brand names on substances have no effect because, "Just like in real life, brands do nothing."

Since drugs give mechanical bonuses (and also have substantial negative effects, to be fair) it's a wonder Disco Elysium made it past the Classifications Board here in Australia. A quick search of the Classification Database doesn't show it, perhaps because it hasn't been submitted for rating. Several members of the Board have been vocal about believing the rules they're obliged to follow are overdue for change, but without the cooperation of our lazy and conservative state governments it won't happen. In the meantime, I guess everybody is looking the other way—easy to do when a game is PC-exclusive and only available online.

Disco Elysium is an RPG where you're never alone. Not because your buddy cop Lt. Kitsuragi won't leave your side until 9pm each night—at which point you can pretend to go to bed, then sneak away to take drugs and steal the boots right off a corpse—but because from the first scene you've got a chorus of voices in your head.

Some of them are parts of your brain: The Ancient Reptilian Brain and the Limbic System are in constant conversation when you try to rest. But most of them are just whichever skills you've put the most points into. I had a decent score in Drama, which meant that I could sometimes tell when people were lying or telling the truth, but it manifested as the voice of a wanky Shakespearean actor. "Prithee, sire! I do believe he dares to speak mistruth!" That sort of thing. It also tried to convince me to lie about the serial number I'd found on a piece of evidence, because that would be more fun.

Meanwhile, the Authority skill barks with the voice of a military sergeant, saying I should interrogate everyone with force, while Physical Instrument is an inner football coach telling me to get into shape and Electrochemistry is a louche debauchee who thinks I should drink more and smoke cigarettes for "massive bonuses".

It's like carrying around a full party of BioWare companions. "You should drink that wine you found in the street," is definitely something Varric would say. I'm the player who chooses companions based more on their personalities than their stats, so Disco Elysium is perfect for me. It's never going to limit me to a party of three or six or whatever. There's always room for more voices in my head.

Some of the skills go beyond this role as individual NPCs and become entire populations. Putting points into Empathy means there's another layer in every conversation with actual people, letting me know what they're thinking and what their body language suggests. Encyclopedia on the other hand is a skill that recites trivia—massive deluges of it. If you are into "lore" this is the skill for you, but if worldbuilding bores you, it'll drive you nuts.

While Empathy lets me know what other people might be thinking, the Inland Empire skill gives interiority to objects. If you play Bloodlines as a Malkavian there's a great bit where you argue with a stop sign. In Disco Elysium, with enough points in Inland Empire you can talk to everything from a mailbox to your own necktie.

Esprit de Corps adds another chorus. This skill, which suggests what a proper cop would do in any given situation, gives insights into what other police are doing right now. These blue visions might be real or they might be imaginary. After radioing my precinct to explain how disastrously my investigation was going, Esprit de Corps chimed in to recite the conversation among my coworkers about what a fuck-up I was, a flash of cop fiction what was funny and bleak and one of the most impressive bits of writing in a game where every five minutes there's another contender for 'most impressive bit of writing'.

One more I can't skip is Shivers, a seemingly useless skill that represents your sense of the city of Revachol in which you live. Every now and then it narrates a vignette at you, colorful moments in the lives of people nearby. But then, after taking speed to increase my stats so I'd be better at dancing, I fell into a lucid dream in which I had a conversation with both my own spinal cord and the city itself. This is just the kind of thing that happens in Disco Elysium.

Giving skills and other aspects of who you are their own voices makes it a weird and wonderful Inner Monologue Simulator, in which the path toward truth is slicing yourself into aspects—entire hosts of devils and angels—and letting them interrogate you and each other. At one point I made my Rhetoric skill apologize for trying to get me to ask a question whose answer would be too painful to deal with.

The actual NPCs are great too, and I should give a shout-out to Kim Kitsuragi, the long-suffering cop who gets partnered with you and has to put up with your shit. He's one of those classic characters who reveals more facets as you get to know him. But where another RPG might give you a party of characters with dark secrets to uncover, in Disco Elysium you're the one with secrets and an army of mind people alternately trying to hide or reveal them. 

It's exaggerated to suit your situation as one troubled individual, but there's truth to it. Maybe "everyone contains multitudes" seems like an obvious point to make, yet living for hours deep inside someone else's crowded head has made it concrete for me in a way I won't soon forget.

You are not well. You've woken up on the floor of a grimy hotel room with a hangover so devastating you might as well be dead. You don't remember who you are, which city you're in, or what happened the night before. Apparently you're a detective, in town to solve a murder, but you don't feel like a cop. You feel like shit.

Disco Elysium is a detective RPG of improbable depth. It's part Planescape: Torment, part police procedural, part psychodrama. Your fatally hungover detective peels himself off the carpet, naked except for a pair of soiled underpants, and begins the laborious process of piecing his broken mind back together, while simultaneously attempting to solve a gruesome murder on the wrong side of the tracks.

The game has stats, skill checks, companions, quests, and an interface inspired by classic Infinity Engine CRPGs and tabletop roleplaying games. But it also has a lot in common with visual novels and point-and-click adventures, with dense, branching dialogue and the ability to intimidate, charm, or bullshit your way out of tricky situations via several novels' worth of brilliantly strange, vibrant dialogue. There's no clicky Baldur's Gate-style combat here: everything happens via skill checks, dialogue, and text, including when things turn violent.

A man has been found hanging from a tree in an empty lot and it's your job to find out who killed him—if you can get near the corpse without puking. Disco Elysium's sallow, flare-wearing protagonist is a total disaster. The taste you get in your mouth the morning after a heavy night of drinking made flesh. The sticky floor of a discotheque given life. But the beauty of the game is how you can remould this grotesque lump of sin into something else entirely.

Thanks to that skull-shattering hangover, and the amnesia conveniently brought on by it, your detective is truly a blank slate. You can reveal things about yourself by talking to the poor souls caught in the wake of your apocalyptic bender. But you're also given the opportunity to suppress these discoveries, even down to denying your own name and choosing a new one. The degree of freedom you have to shape your character's psyche is really quite astonishing.

Through conversations you control every facet of your personality. You're given a variety of ways to respond to people, and this dictates your personality, how the population reacts to you, and the outcomes of quests. The things you say and decisions you make in Disco Elysium really, actually matter, affecting your role in the world and the inner workings of your mind in a meaningful way.

You also have to watch what you say, because doing the usual RPG thing of exhausting every conversation option regularly leads to you putting your foot in your mouth and getting someone (or yourself) in trouble. Characters will remember things, so it pays to think carefully before making any rash decisions or betraying someone. Then again, a cavalier attitude can lead to interesting, unexpected things: an example of how well Disco Elysium caters to different play styles.

Skills are important too. There are 24 in total, ranging from logic, perception, and reaction speed to endurance, conceptualisation, and authority. A character with high authority might find it easier to pressure a timid witness into spilling their guts. A high logic character can divine truth from a clear-headed analysis of a crime scene. There are some more esoteric skills too such as inland empire, which lets you pluck inspiration from dreams and talk to inanimate objects.

Conversely, a character with low perception can miss case-breaking clues floating right in front of their face, while a low endurance cop will struggle in even the most trivial physical trials. All the defining traits of the best fictional cops are in there, but importantly, the worst are too. So if you want to have the superhuman insight of Sherlock, but also be a self-destructive mess like The Wire's Jimmy McNulty, Disco Elysium lets you.

When you create a character, your starting skills are determined by the stats you roll. Your base stats are intellect, psyche, physique, and motorics, which make you better or worse at certain things. But as you play you earn experience points that let you upgrade any skills you like, allowing you to sculpt your character further. You might start out physically weak, but stick enough points into the appropriate skills and you can become a force of nature.

And I haven't even mentioned thoughts yet. As you speak to people you'll reveal thoughts that can then be slotted into your brain and developed over time, unlocking stat buffs and fascinating, insightful nuggets of story. Some of these have a major effect on your character's mental state, while others are more frivolous and largely played for laughs. You're limited to three thoughts to begin with, but skill points can also be used to unlock more. And the more thoughts you develop, the more complex your character becomes.

The result of all this is one of the most preposterously malleable characters in RPG history. You can create a highly empathetic communist disco music enthusiast, a self-deprecating artist who punches first and asks questions later, a deluded rock-and-roll cop with a passion for democracy, or a drug-addicted feminist psychic. Every person who plays Disco Elysium will have a different experience as a result of the frankly audacious depth of its role playing.

The game is set in the fictional city of Revachol; specifically a dreary, forgotten district called Martinaise. Plagued by poverty, crime, corrupt unions, and scarred by a violent revolution, it's exactly the kind of place you'd expect to wake up after a three-day drug binge. It's gorgeous, with a stylish, painterly aesthetic, expressive characters, and detailed backgrounds. But it's filthy too, which is relayed mainly by that gloriously rich, evocative writing. A vividly described autopsy made me feel genuinely queasy.

Many of the people you meet say disgusting, offensive things, which is entirely justified by the grotty bleakness of the setting. Martinaise is a horrible place filled with horrible bastards. But there are flickers of warmth and humanity, too. People making the most of a bad hand, struggling against an uncaring world. It's a lavishly realised setting with acres of history and culture to discover, although occasionally, in some optional conversations, I felt like a mountain of rather dull, long-winded lore had been suddenly dumped on my head.

Typically the writing is funny, subversive, and, admittedly, a little self-indulgent at times. But it's also incredibly good, with an anarchic literary flair that makes even the most matter-of-fact conversation hugely entertaining. There's partial voice acting too, although it varies wildly in quality. The sleazy, rasping delivery of your ancient reptilian brain, which regularly emerges to taunt you, sounds wonderfully evil. And I love the soft, calming voice of Lt. Kitsuragi, your partner, who is a kind of moral centre for the wild and unpredictable protagonist.

Freedom in Disco Elysium isn't just limited to shaping your character. The structure is also extremely open-ended, letting you pursue the murder as doggedly, or not, as you like. A list of tasks is constantly building up in your notebook, and you can perform them in any order you like: including those linked to the main case. And they're all interconnected, meaning doing one task before another can open up completely new avenues of investigation.

Martinaise is a large, open space made up of several distinct areas and the sheer volume of stuff to interact with, people to talk to, and quests to pick up is quite overwhelming. You'll investigate a dilapidated apartment block, a frozen coastline, a crumbling boardwalk, a dockyard, and other suitably grim locations, all of which are brought to life by that beautiful art—not to mention atmospheric music, lighting, and ambient sound design. It's a place you can really get lost in.

How you complete tasks and solve crimes is dependent on your character. If you're the physical, all-action type, you'll deal with situations in a more direct, aggressive way. But if your character is psychological or empathetic, you might find a more subtle solution. Crucially, every kind of player is catered for. In my experience you'll never hit a brick wall because of the way you've built your character. This makes Disco Elysium a supremely satisfying RPG, because if you want to play a certain way, it's primed to accommodate it.

The thing about Disco Elysium is that my experience of it is completely unique to me, such is the dizzying variety of skills, stats, thoughts, and conversation options on offer. You could play through it five times and still not see everything, so there's no one experience to assess. But I can say with certainty that it's one of the finest RPGs on PC if you value depth, freedom, customisation, and storytelling.

Disco Elysium is an incredibly deep RPG and there's no right way to play. But there are a few things that might be useful to know when you first hit the mean streets of Martinaise, whether it's making some extra cash, figuring out how the in-game clock works, or escaping your partner's prying eyes.

Collect bottles

Look out for a yellow plastic bag. With this equipped you can pick up bottles, either from the ground or by rooting around in garbage cans. You can then exchange these in the Frittte convenience store for money. You won't make a fortune this way, but it might help you afford a bed for the night.

Always be tabbing

Similar to games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, holding the tab key highlights objects in the world that can be interacted with, containers, and NPCs. This is especially useful for finding hard-to-spot bottles. If it feels cheaty, just imagine it's your detective's finely honed senses.

Time passes as you talk

Time in Disco Elysium is not real-time. Rather, it's advanced primarily by talking to people. So whenever you're in a conversation, the clock will be ticking, moving the day forward. You can also make time pass by sitting on benches or reading, which is handy for objectives that are limited to a certain time.

Watch your tongue

It's tempting to exhaust every conversation option when talking to people in Disco Elysium, but this can sometimes be a bad idea. Think carefully before you press a tricky topic, because in this game it's possible to let something slip that can bite you in the ass later, or get someone else in hot water.

Run, stop, run

If you double click somewhere in the world your character will sprint there instead of his usual stroll. Well, it's more of a wheezy jog than a sprint, but it's reasonably fast. And if you want to stop moving suddenly, perhaps to click on point of interest that has just been revealed, slam the spacebar.

Breaking locks

Occasionally you'll encounter a container, or something in the environment like a sewer grate, with a grey outline. This usually means it can't be accessed with your bare hands, which is where the tools found in Lt. Kitsuragi's car come in handy. Equip the correct tool, try again, and the loot is yours.

Play dress up

Disco Elysium has an incredible selection of clothing to deck your detective out with, but they're more than just for making you look cool. Every piece of clothing comes with positive and negative stat modifiers, so if you're having trouble with a skill check, throwing on a hat might give you the edge.

Go with the flow

A game this heavy with skill checks means you'll be tempted to save scum. And while this is a perfectly valid way to play the game, because it's your life and you can do what you want, it's worth noting that failing a skill check in Disco Elysium can often lead to something interesting or unexpected.

Ditch your partner

I love Lt. Kitsuragi, but sometimes you need to be alone to complete certain tasks. To lose him, wait till nightfall then head towards whichever bed you happen to be crashing on that night. He'll wish you goodnight and turn in himself, leaving you free to wander back back into town solo.

Stay healthy

Occasionally an interaction will seriously damage your health or morale. You'll know this is happening by the health critical or morale critical message that flashes on the screen. In these situations a meter will start to drain and unless you quickly use a restorative item (pray you have one) it's game over.

Learn more about the world

If you love lore and world-building, stick some points into the Encyclopedia skill. This will give you little nuggets of information about pretty much everything that crops up in a conversation, from the complex history and politics of Disco Elysium's world to the nerdy specifics of weapons and vehicles.

Listen to your brain

Your broken brain is one of the chattiest characters in Disco Elysium, frequently piping up to remark on things, sabotage your thoughts, or otherwise mess with you. But sometimes these lines of dialogue give you subtle hints about the right thing to say in a conversation to get what you want.

I've only just managed to get this dead man down from the tree. First I had to get past the stench, no easy feat since the body's been there a week, and then sever the industrial rope he was hanging from. My partner suggested getting help. Pfff.

I waved him away and shot through the rope in a rare display of competence. On my other save, where I created a character with less impressive physical stats, I can't even get close to the body without vomiting and instead have to psych myself up by going away to think about it for half an hour.

Disco Elysium will let you play the kind of detective you want. Its selection of stats and skills can mimic a variety of "copotypes" like the master of deduction, or the Columbo who always has just one more question, or the one who "just get these flashes", or who talks to dead people, and so on. Replaying its opening days I've been a tough guy who takes no nonsense and an unhinged sensitive who at one point began taking off his clothes to get a better sense of the air. "It's a technique of mine," I tried to explain to horrified onlookers as I unzipped my fly.

No matter what flavor of gumshoe you create though, your character is always a boozehound with amnesia, the one genre staple that remains true in every playthrough. You're always a loser who woke up on the floor missing a shoe. 

Disco Elysium encourages you to play to your skillset by giving each skill a voice. In the classic text box where NPCs answer questions a skill like Authority will pop up to suggest that somebody needs to be manhandled, while Inland Empire—which takes subconscious insights and transforms them into dialogues with objects—has given my necktie the ability to suggest inappropriate things. Electro-Chemistry wants me to smoke a discarded cigarette butt while Visual Calculus is telling me the shoe size of footprints in the mud. 

It's a glorious overflow of information. I have to block out irrelevant stuff like I'm telling Watson to shush because I'm on the edge of a breakthrough, for god's sake man just shut up, I'm trying to think here and I can't listen to you and my necktie at once.

To get prosaic for a second, all this is folded into a classic top-down RPG. I walk from location to location clicking on objects, picking up clues or just coins, then interrogating every character who will let me climb their dialogue tree. It's Planescape: Torment if instead of being based on Dungeons & Dragons it was more like Life on Mars or China Mieville's novel The City and The City.

The thing about mysteries is that everything hinges on the solution, and if it falls apart at the finish that makes the time spent getting there feel wasted. The opening hours of Disco Elysium give me confidence, though. The writing's perfect for the genre, poetic in a "Raymond Chandler sneaking something profound past his editor" way, and there's a lot of detail to uncover. A side task to explore abandoned shops that might be cursed blew out into something far bigger than I expected.

What's more, playing through the opening a second time with a different loadout was just as interesting, changing the tone like I was watching a reboot with a different director. Now I want to go back a third time as a supergenius who can analyze tire tracks and tell you what car they came from while snapping at my long-suffering sidekick. The game's afoot, even if I've only got one shoe.

Disco Elysium will be out on October 15.