Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is an isometric RPG that almost entirely drops combat and instead builds the whole game around conversation, investigation, and the inner life of its main character. The player wakes up as a detective with total amnesia in a wrecked hotel room in the city of Revachol, a place that has never recovered from a lost revolution and occupation. There's a hanged man in the courtyard, and somebody has to solve the case. Over the course of a few days, the game follows not just the investigation but also how the detective pieces together his own identity and worldview.

Instead of classic skills, the game has twenty-four inner voices that act as independent characters in the dialogue. Logic offers conclusions, Empathy reads other people's feelings, Electrochemistry pushes for one more drink, Inland Empire makes things up, and Authority urges the player to slam a fist on the table. Dice are rolled, and both success and failure move the story forward — failure often opens a more interesting path than winning would. On top of that sits the Thought Cabinet system, where the player lets opinions and beliefs mature in the detective's head, permanently changing his stats. Health and Morale function as life bars, so the detective can die even from a memory he can't bear to face.

Visually, the game uses painted locations that resemble oil paintings, with characters stylized into blurred, almost sketch-like shapes. It runs smoothly practically everywhere, and text is its main content, which makes computers its natural home. The music is subdued, atmospheric, and sometimes melancholic, with a strong presence of guitars and horns. Reception was extraordinarily strong, the game won a string of awards, and it was praised above all for writing that is unusually literary and funny at the same time. An expanded version with full voice acting followed later. Today it stands as proof that an RPG doesn't need combat to have momentum and tension, and it remains one of the strongest pieces of writing the medium has produced.