I still think there’s room to riff on the idea in a meaningful way, it just has to combine burnt out disillusionment, the failure of a past lost idyll to actually exist, and some superpositioning stuff where the game world gets swapped out for a dead-but-still-moving-a-little rustbelt town and then a cyberpunk slum without skipping a beat as reality falls apart.
Also finding the cat is the end of act 1, the cat talks, the cat smokes and then eats the cigarettes, and the cat is the Kim figure for the rest of the game. No one else seems to notice that the cat isn’t a person, or is otherwise oblivious to its supernatural nature.
Cottagecore cozy games are fine but there’s also like 1000 indie games to fit that bill, so yeah it was really tone deaf to say “man wouldn’t Disco Elysium be better if it was this thing we already have a ton of!”
It’s like watching The Lighthouse and going “I think this movie would be better if it was in color, had witty dialog, and starred some Marvel superheros.”
it’s also the cottagecore-adjacent anti-art sentiment of taking a game with deep, complex themes and making a facsimile about nothing
I still think there’s room to riff on the idea in a meaningful way, it just has to combine burnt out disillusionment, the failure of a past lost idyll to actually exist, and some superpositioning stuff where the game world gets swapped out for a dead-but-still-moving-a-little rustbelt town and then a cyberpunk slum without skipping a beat as reality falls apart.
Also finding the cat is the end of act 1, the cat talks, the cat smokes and then eats the cigarettes, and the cat is the Kim figure for the rest of the game. No one else seems to notice that the cat isn’t a person, or is otherwise oblivious to its supernatural nature.
Cottagecore cozy games are fine but there’s also like 1000 indie games to fit that bill, so yeah it was really tone deaf to say “man wouldn’t Disco Elysium be better if it was this thing we already have a ton of!”
It’s like watching The Lighthouse and going “I think this movie would be better if it was in color, had witty dialog, and starred some Marvel superheros.”