Disco Elysium is a point-and-click RPG which is at once easy to fall into and unlike anything I’ve played before. I heard about it on Chapo Trap House a few years back and saw it in a sale, so I bought it and now I’m 8 hours into it, according to Steam.

The game starts with the player character in a booze coma, in a dialogue with his Limbic System and his Ancient Reptile Brain – ie with aspects of himself. The player’s first task is to summon up the will to awaken.

You wake up in a hotel room you don’t remember trashing last night. The world is strange. It’s modern times, but where are we? Haiti? Finland? It emerges that the game is set not only in a fictional country but in a fictional world, brilliantly realised and compelling.

The player character is a bumbling fuck-up with something desperate and sad under the surface, and possibly a ‘vast soul’ under that again. Characters give you pretty normal RPG quests: Solve the murder; convince X person to let you into Y location; etc. But your own internal voices give you strange quests which emanate from inscrutable inner drives: ‘Find some alcohol and drink it,’ or ‘Sing karaoke.’ You spend as much time in dialogue with your gut feelings and intellect as you do with the characters. These internal dialogues have real consequences for your character’s skills, politics, etc. With names like Empathy, Volition, Inland Empire, Shivers and Half-Light, the internal voices interject, inform and misinform, help and sabotage. They provide dialogue options such as bumming a cigarette, asking for money or blurting out something ridiculous.

At times, they describe a breath of wind, a bleak vista or a distant sound. In these moments, you feel what the character feels. I know nothing about the development team but I can tell it includes poets and novelists.

So far the game has been completely non-violent for me, though I’m aware there are combat dynamics. I did punch a door one time. For some reason I am surprised that a game can be non-violent but still so compelling. I found a ghostly voice trapped on an apartment building intercom and the experience was haunting. It made me entertain the theory that my character was in purgatory, or some such thing, a theory I later rejected.

The game is very funny. More often than not, you are the butt of the joke. It’s a bleak world, lived-in and tired. Every other RPG I’ve ever played has a world from which the class struggle has been mysteriously exorcised. But in Disco Elysium, the politics are right there in front of you, and you can delve deep if you wish.

The graphics are beautiful, but not technically advanced by today’s standards. I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while, that more games need to make this trade-off: invest in good writing and clever mechanics, not in making a game so graphically and technically advanced that it will force me to buy a new machine. If we’re going to talk about graphics, let’s talk about more about art and style, less about a mad quest for photorealism and textures and lighting and crashing my laptop. Disco Elysium is a positive example of what I’m talking about.

So eight hours in, I’m still in a starting area called Martinaise and have not found my missing gun, much less solved the murder. It’s not an easy game, but I feel it half-expects me to be as incompetent as I am, and forgives me with a shrug of the shoulders. And I have a lot of time for a game that rewards me for investing skill points in Empathy.