Story/Writing: Disco Elysium crossover! (I know nothing about Disco Elysium - running theme in this comp LOL.) So far, the case is only about two investigation scenes in, with a lot of dialogue being incomplete. As a result, I didn't get a great feel for the worldbuilding so far.
What I did understand about the worldbuilding from playing the case is something along the lines of this: The Moralintern is the government. Harry works for it as a cop, and so does his co-worker (a Satellite-Officer). There are a couple of Moralintern organizations called the ICP and RCM, and the RCM is the one the @#%$ing cat case comes from. (I don't know what either of those stand for.) When looking at some missing posters outside, Harry couldn't get his eyes to focus in on their faces no matter what he tried, which could be because of his own brain or because of a supernatural outside force (I don't know). But overall, I didn't get the vibe that anything was all that different from the real world, other than the name of the government and its organizations, and some stylized/time-period types of changes. pink and parcark did clarify for me upon request that Disco Elysium's world does work quite differently from the real world, but the case hasn't gotten there yet - so as of now, I only have a few confirmed differences in governmental structure to go off of, and not a lot of detail on those.
The narration style was cool. Everyone's non-verbal actions are narrated by a separate voice with typewriter blips, and this makes the case read a little bit like a novel. I liked this, and it allowed for more descriptive actions than the visual aspects of a game would allow for.
Oh, and now that I've established things, I should explain the premise in a bit more detail: A cat was reported missing to the RCM a couple of days ago - but the person who filed the report left no information other than their address, the word "cat", and "last seen outside my apartment". When visiting them, it looks like their apartment has never housed a cat (not a litter box in sight), and they barely recall having visited the RCM. Very strange... I definitely like this premise, it's quite unique for an AAO case and I'm very intrigued by it so far.
Characters: There are four characters established so far - Harry, his co-worker, and two witnesses.
Okay, well. Technically there's 28 characters, if not a couple more? As part of the gameplay mechanics of Disco Elysium, there are 24 distinct character traits divided among Harry's four core "stats" (will elaborate later) - and they act like Harry's alters, kind of? They talk to each other in his brain like alters would - it resembled my conversations with my alters pretty well. They each seem to have different verbiage. I like them. Harry & co are cool.
Harry's co-worker also has a solid, consistent voice in his dialogue. The guy's a d*ck but he's a cool character (though he didn't appear for long, so I don't have much to say on him so far). The two witnesses are probably the least interesting so far in comparison, though that's not to say they weren't distinctive - they each have a cool appearance and manner of speech.
Not a lot to say about the characters, but not bad either.
Presentation: HUGE WINS. parcark and pink put an immense amount of work into the art assets for this case, borrowing a lot of canon Disco Elysium assets and reformatting them for AAO, and making a ton of their own, too. Every bit of art looked wonderful; shoutout to the title screen, which was JAW-DROPPING. During the intro of the case where you set your core stats (again, will elaborate later), the custom UI for setting your stats is beautiful, and there's an interactive help menu where you can learn about each stat and each of the abilities associated with it - each with their own backgrounds. Wonderful. Fantastic.
A lot of the assets used in this case come from Disco Elysium or other games, but pink and parcark both made a number of small edits to those. Looking at the credits list, it looks like the character sprites and custom evidence/equipment were all made by pink, while parcark made the custom UI for the character build menu. Really amazing stuff, I loved it all.
The issue with this case's presentation is that it's not complete. A lot of frames of dialogue are unfinished (essentially, temporary placeholders) - so at a certain point in the case, there was a big spike in frames that had different voice blips than usual, or text wasn't colored when it would usually be, or the text wouldn't have punctuation or everything would be in lowercase. This isn't really a huge issue, but the sudden transition threw me off so I got confused during that transitional period and I felt a little bit dizzy trying to wrap my head around what just happened. At one point, an evidence icon stayed on screen after finishing a Talk conversation for some reason - no idea how that happened - and at another point, a character whose home Harry was visiting appeared on screen before opening the door. Small things all around, but they added up - though that said, I can't understate that regardless of the technical side of things, this case was beautiful.
Gameplay/Mystery: The gist of the gameplay is that you have four stats: INTELLECT, PSYCHE, PHYSIQUE, and MOTORICS. Each of those four stats has six abilities associated with it, with names ranging from the self-explanatory "LOGIC" or "PERCEPTION" to the much more fancy-sounding "ESPRIT DE CORPS" and "INLAND EMPIRE". Each stat ranges from 1 to 6 points, and you get a set number of points to customize your stats with at the beginning of the game. (Think point buy for D&D character building; I gave Harry the stats I thought Athena Cykes would have for the fun of it. 2 INTELLECT, 5 PSYCHE, 2 PHYSIQUE, 3 MOTORICS. She's not a marathon runner, but she did judo-throw a cop, right?)
Your stats affect your ability to succeed at certain tasks you'll have to take on during the course of the game. This is how I understand it: when faced with a challenge, the game makes a passive dice roll for you based on your stats (if the passive roll succeeds, you get a hint or an extra line of dialogue), the game tells you what your odds are of succeeding at the challenge if you make an active dice roll, and you then decide if you want to do it. Some challenges can be retried, some can't. There was one challenge where the passive roll caused the game to break, but parcark fixed this promptly and I got a piece of evidence from it. I REALLY loved the D&D-esque gameplay, and all of the poking around with numbers made my day as an autistic math geek.
Furthermore, in the Evidence tab you can find the evidence Harry gathers during his investigation - but there's a UI object in there, and if you Present it, your evidence tab changes to your "clothes" tab, where you can customize your clothes to change your stats. Same thing with the Profiles tab - you can switch between displaying the profiles of characters you've met and the skills associated with your stats, should you need a reminder. This is wonderfully done. My only complaint on this front is that for some reason, when I would present the UI object to switch between evidence/clothes or profiles/skills, I would usually have to click manually to advance after the switch happened - meaning the frames weren't timered properly (or they were, but glitched for some reason - there are a LOT of behind-the-scenes processes happening any time you make a decision in this case).
I couldn't find any Present dialogue that was finished other than one piece of evidence - something I really hope will be implemented soon, because if the dialogue continues to be as good as the rest of this case (seriously, the narration style and the alters' dialogue and color-coding were so awesome), then this will be a phenomenal case.
Oh - and this case came with an optional script (similar to one of TimeAxis's) that changed the background behind the "continue" button, altered the display of multiple-choice prompts to allow for more text on the bottom screen at once (and make the font the same as the one used in textboxes), and added a custom backlog. This script was very cool and convenient, and I liked the changes it made a lot - it definitely would not have been so fun to have to scroll through a bunch of big Arial text to read four lengthy multiple-choice prompts.
Theme Relevance: Three quarters of a thumbs up so far. I'm excited to see what's so cool about Disco Elysium's world...
