You take control of him the morning after a particularly serious bender. The detective has spent the past few days drinking himself into a stupor he must have some scary personal demons or at the very least some heavy emotional baggage.

The overused amnesiac trope works extremely well here, giving the game an excuse to explain everything to you in conversation form – you don’t remember anything so you ask lots of questions and most people are willing to answer. You play as an amnesiac detective who was sent to Martinaise, a small district of the city of Revachol, to investigate a murder. I know you didn’t come here to hear about some silly (but fun) kids game, you came to hear about the disco, drugs, and degeneracy of developer/publisher ZA/UM’s cult hit. So playing something a little more fast-paced like Rainbow Billy with a nice amount of variety was the perfect way to satisfy my easily distracted brain. What it does well, it does extremely well – the writing, the characters, the art are all amazing, and the dialogue system combined with the role-playing customization elements take the game to the next level, but outside of all that the gameplay is somewhat hollow. Alternatively, Disco Elysium, despite its critical acclaim can feel like a one-trick pony at times. The problem I had with the game was the dialogue which sounded like it was straight out of a show your younger sibling might have watched when you were kids (in my case, that show was Barney – I’ve always hated Barney) so the crazed, imaginative depravity of Disco Elysium was the perfect antidote for my brain.

I know some of you might be scoffing, how could I compare the critically acclaimed Disco Elysium to some game that looks like it’s based on a kid’s cartoon show? I’m not comparing them, but the gameplay in Rainbow Billy was surprisingly good, it never got dull because it had a nice amount of variety. As strange as it sounds I think playing both of these games concurrently made me appreciate each one more, almost as if they were balancing each other out. Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan is a 3D monster befriending (taming) adventure that is disgustingly wholesome, whereas the other game, Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (the focus of this review), is a detective themed, narrative-driven role-playing game packed with dark humor and adult themes. The two most recent games I’ve played for review could both fall into that category, and they happen to be polar opposites. In my time at the Tavern, I’ve tried to broaden my gaming horizons and review games I wouldn’t normally play.

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