I’ll just quote the write-up I made for my old forums earlier today:
Disco Elysium is a funnier Planescape: Torment in a near-Earth setting with all the busywork combat removed.
Character creation uses a four stat system that governs success in 24 skills, and how you build your version of your forgetful detective determines precisely which combination of tropes on the noir cop/gonzo gop spectrum you’re going to inhabit for this playthrough. Sure, there are plenty of working-man stats like Endurance for health, Volition for morale, Perception to notice things, but then there’s stuff like Visual Calculus to make sense of crime scenes, Authority to detect and project power, Inland Empire for creativity and the sort of self-constructed intuitive leaps that Dale Cooper relied so heavily upon, Esprit de Corps for extranarrative interjections in which you learn what’s going on with your partner and precinct, Electrochemistry to know about (and be compelled to use) drugs–and for how esoteric these skills get, they become relevant with surprising frequency. Even the more physical stats play a huge role in dialogue and non-combat encounters: the devs pointed out that Conan the Barbarian has no interesting interiority, and so they spent a lot of effort to ensure that even the most meatheaded, socially stunted characters have surprising options and choices during your interpersonal interactions.
More importantly, every skill is a voice in your head, suggesting or demanding you indulge relevant desires. Failing skill checks can sometimes be more beneficial than succeeding. Having a good score can help you solve problems, but having a great score will introduce new ones. Too much Logic makes you arrogant; too much Rhetoric makes you an insufferable ideologue.
Ideology brings us to the game’s most obvious design flaw, which is that we’re very much in “every system will fail, punch in every direction” territory. Some of the ideologies at work in Revachol are necessarily worse than others, but the game is willing to let you try to adopt any of them, right up to and including being a flag-waving fascist or a eugenics-supporting racial supremacist. I think they intended this to be a joke, since your protagonist’s past already necessitates that he’s something of an awful loser and so any undertaking he embarks on should also be colored by that context. It’s hard to take these options lightly, considering how often media intended to satirize or criticize an idea is subsequently lauded as a celebration of that idea. There’s just a little too much for racists, sexists, homophobes, and fascists to get excited about here.