Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer's regular RPG column, where Online Editor Fraser Brown delves into PC gaming's most beloved and enduring genre. Grab a seat in our badly-lit tavern and please ignore the goblin puke.
We love a big RPG dilemma, don't we? Right up until the point where we actually have to make the choice and we stare at our screens for an uncomfortably long time, hoping we'll figure out a way to make a call and not feel absolutely terrible about it later.
For my money, the best—agonising, guilt-inducing—choices are the really personal ones. I love that Mass Effect lets me determine the fate of the galaxy in all these different ways, but it never gives me a reason to care about the rachni, for instance, or the council, so when I have to decide to save them or let them die, it becomes more of an abstract moral choice.
Disco Elysium, then, left me in tatters. It's more personal and intimate than a productive therapy session. There's a card you can read pretty early on, stuck inside a ledger, that opens the wound that Harry worked very hard—by abusing alcohol and drugs—to forget. If you toss it, you never get it back. That was a hard one. Is ignoring it a kind of liberation? Or are you just helping Harry hide from his trauma?
It's effective because it's powerfully relatable. You don't even need to have experienced a cataclysmic breakup to understand Harry in that moment.
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