XXX NIGHTSHIFT has been retitled.
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ill play whichever one of these has the least union busting bones
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I’ll play whichever one looks the least like disco elysium
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good luck!!!
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I will buy all of them but not play them.
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I will probably play all of them but not buy them
Fully expect them all to be terrible
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I feel like I would have preferred “for dead spies” to have been a tagline rather than a subtitle, like “tactical espionage action”.
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Not sure that taking the DE format and changing the main character from “shambolic disaster of a person” to “super cool hot spy lady” is gonna work out so well
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I got this game not too long after release because people said it was like Planescape: Torment without the fighting, but I found that my computer at the time couldn’t run it.
This week I finally got around to playing it. Probably anything I’d say about it is already in this thread, but I like the writing and I’m curious to see how much the scope of the game expands by the end. I’m guessing not too much given the nature of the central story, the density of content, and the hours played by my Steam contacts.
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I would be shocked if this isn’t at least decent and interesting and also if it rapidly becomes impossible to talk about without half a dozen pointing out that it’s not really disco elysium
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not like current ZA/UM deserve a better fate than that
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i’m definitely never going to shut up about how it’s not the real za/um, it’s going to get annoying
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i will be very surprised if this isn’t politically braindead
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While I didn’t watch the video @Dracko linked above, I did spend some time this morning watching somebody else try a little bit of it. I was initially skeptical, but the little bit I saw made me decide to try playing the demo myself.
Let’s get the good first impressions out of the way: the interface is slick, and all their little aesthetic flourishes fit in well with the milieu they’re trying to evoke. Three health bars risks coming across as too cute, but the ticking-up anxiety in the opening scene makes me want to give it a pass. Similarly, picking one skill to emphasize from each stat category feels like a good improvement over the original game’s approach—
—but at the 15-minute mark, it’s trying way, way too hard to get you to notice that this is the “REAL” successor to DE. Overwrought inner voice narration with heavy accents; skill check characters symbolized by abstract illustrations; overhead view of an apartment that manages to perfectly evoke the trashed hostel room of the Whirling-in-Rags despite being a completely different place. Replace the trappings of disco psychedelics with institutional antiseptics and police proceduralism with ideological spycraft, but the guts are all the same. Callbacks and parallels are inescapable. I wanted to draw comparisons to EarthBound fan-games that copy the formula, but which don’t understand how or why to deviate from that blueprint… I don’t know that such games actually exist. I’m making up a guy to get mad at.
I kept playing.
Having finished the demo, I will not disavow my initial negativity, but I like what I played quite a bit more than I expected to. FATIGUE/ANXIETY/DELIRIUM work so much better here because you don’t just get healing items—if you want to fix an overabundance of one of these on-the-spot, you either do a drug (losing a bunch of one problem to get a little bit of another) or you live with the overabundance. The map screen is functional and effective. Active skill checks offer an “exert” option now—take on some immediate health damage of the appropriate type, and you roll three dice instead of two, improving your odds of success, particularly for challenges of roughly even odds, but if your health damage is too high, you lose the option to exert. Max out one type of damage, and you have to lose a point in a relevant skill to wipe it all out, effectively leveling down.
Will the writing ever impress me as much as DE’s did? Hard to say; Herschel’s skills don’t feel as intuitive or as immediately compelling as HDB’s did. She is not lovable for being a loser the way he is. She does not have a counterpoint partner to play the longsuffering straight man to her absurdist flights of fancy the way HDB has (because somebody turned her guy into a vegetable before she arrived on the scene). In the hours that I played, I had maybe five conversations I really liked (and would like to hear more from the characters I’d had them with). I had intimations of at least three mysterious happenings that I’d like to investigate further. I had a kind of subterfuge set-piece event that didn’t much resemble anything from Disco Elysium, and I would love to see if there are more of these in the full game. I had exactly one skill check that I think the game fudges your roll to force you to fail, but I didn’t mind too much. I had fun, and at least the demo doesn’t involve giving them any money.
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i think harry is a moé protag. the proof is how every single fuck up just makes him more endearing. like, i want to protect him but i also want to embarass him. pretty sure that’s moé
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