The Last of Us is, at heart, a well-executed linear game that is wearing the grown-up clothes of a science-fiction thriller film. Like, a pretty good science-fiction thriller film that has some emotional heft to it. Not, like, Children of Men good, but if you squint you can look past the reductive gaminess and murder mechanics and draw some comparisons. It moved me. It has a thoughtful, moving end.
Disco Elysium is new. It's far more than the sum of its 980,000 words and its painterly art. Its stuff is freeform, interior, optional, contingent, subjective, hidden, oblique, abstruse, expressive, loving. It's this big-hearted journey of discovery that grabs big-box political and emotional themes that games hardly even touch and wields them pretty damn effectively. It understands and inhabits discrete literary and cultural traditions and plays with them, finds new life in them. It has a historical sensibility and a political sensibility, and it both commits to these and drenches them in irony. It steals genre tropes and breaks them over its knee, laughing. It reflects, regurgitates, reminiscences upon and strongly repudiates the parochialism of our real world. It's funny and it's sad and it's angry and it's kind. And it uses the distinct, inimitable tools of videogames—agency, choice, consequence—rather than grafting the flesh of cinema onto a third-person shooter. As a bonus, it does all this while executing sentence-to-sentence writing that is consistently at or beyond the limits of what other games attempt, let alone manage.
