Disco Elysium - The Final Cut Review

Rating: ★★★★½ (PS4 & PS5), ★★★★★ (PC)

How do you perfect perfection?

This was the insurmountable question I was faced with when I loaded up Disco Elysium - The Final Cut for the first time.

I found myself nervous at what I might experience, as my original aching stumble through the vanilla experience in 2019 had provided something I would easily rank as one of my best gaming experiences to date, and while The Final Cut promised even more immersive content, such as full voice acting and a slew of vision-quest style missions, I was anxious that I would experience a Mr. Croisseux scenario, where the glut of satisfaction may indeed be ruined by just one more “wafer thin” slice of greatness.

Thankfully after once again losing myself to a rabbit hole that would make even Alice think twice, I can confirm that The Final Cut succeeds in almost every area, delivering a madcap descent into the world of shoddy police work and a murder that seems to unfold the more you try to solve it.

To start, let’s help those who didn’t play the original catch up. Disco Elysium is an immersive isometric RPG title in which you find yourself trying to solve a murder in a rather unfriendly town. However, while that description might paint Disco Elysium as a rather standard affair, it’s anything but, as complicated matters are….well...you.

You see to call this game a granular experience is to call Everest a “bit of a hill” and at every step of the way, you’ll be fed a myriad of choices, each of which seem at first to be inconsequential, but can have a dramatic impact on how the townsfolk treat you and also how you progress as a person. You can play the game as a hard line cop with little regard for how people see you, beat the answers out of suspects, or try to outwit them with a deluge of words that even you aren’t too sure of their true meaning.

As Disco Elysium is a non combat experience, a huge amount of importance is placed on your dialogue choices, and so it’s outstanding to see how much love and care has been put into this aspect of the title.

The amount of introspection on offer here is incredible as you might even begin to question your own actions as a player as much as you do a character, and thanks to the obscene amount of choices on offer, you’ll walk all shades of moralistic grey within the 30 plus hour runtime. As you argue with different aspects of your mind while fighting off a hangover of the ages, you realise that this is a rather special game, and The Final Cut pulls you even further into its grimy embrace.

The fact that the title is now fully voice acted it rather mind blowing, as the sheer amount of verbage being thrown around is enough to make your head spin, in fact over a million different lines of dialogue were recorded or re-recorded for The Final Cut, and while on paper this might seem like a herculean task with little actual impact for a game that was so wildly successful without it, I honestly think that this inclusion might well be the product's best feature.

The level of immersion it adds is enough to drown in, as raspy voices now ooze out of your speakers, pulling you in with each and every word, and thanks to original lines also being re-recorded you get a mix that’s consistent and sounds as good as the rest of the game plays.

There’s a few tweaks here and there which see familiar lines hit with a different tone, but it’s nothing that impacts the experience negatively. In fact, huge credit should go to Lenval Brown, who voices all the different aspects of your brain, and who gives each a different tone and delivery. This type of commitment and craft needs to be commended and it puts most other VO work to shame.

This audio dreamscape acts as an injection into the title that many never knew it needed, as now we coast along to the honey like tones that are punctuated by harsh aggressive rasps and scratchy beats. It’s like a soundtrack that you’re live mixing with your choices, and it makes for delicious listening.

ZA/UM had a vision with this game and it’s clear that their efforts have paid off.

Speaking of visions, the vision quest style extra content that Final Cut adds into the mix allows players to experience new self reflective side quests that further your connection with your character, allowing them to truly lean into becoming a facist !*$%, or stepping back and watching the world burn around them as an anarchist.

What makes this feel truly impressive is that the content doesn’t introduce itself as many DLC packs do, pausing the game and saying YOU ARE ENTERING THIS NEW AREA as is their want to do. Here it’s seamlessly interwoven into the main narrative such that a new player may not even realise what has been inserted, and arguably this is what all expansion packs should strive to do, be so well connected to its source.

However this does lead me to my one critique of this otherwise flawless gem, and that’s the controls for console gamers don’t quite connect with the game world.

Being able to move around the world using the analogue stick is a given, but this does come into conflict with the game's point and click nature, where the greater control of movement actually ends up as nudging your character ever so slightly again and again into position to interact with objects. It’s a little frustrating at times, and a shame that console players (who didn’t get a look in on initial release) are now experiencing something less immersive as a result.

You can draw people in with fantastic graphics, incredibly written narratives and brilliant sound design, but if I’m stuck trying to pick an object off the floor, that frustration does destroy the scene somewhat.

Therefore I’m left in a rather odd position, as Disco Elysium The Final Cut IS a better game overall, what with it’s feverous devotion to audio mastery and the brilliant new content which furthers player choice, but the controls for the console version hamper this ever so slightly, thus making it an example of pretty much THE perfect game for PC players, and just slightly less so for console gamers.

As a result I CAN’T give this a perfect 5/5 score, as it is by definition a lesser experience for some newcomers despite the glut of content on offer.

I’m genuinely torn on this, therefore it only makes sense to separate the review into two components, a 5/5 for PC players and a 4.5/5 for console players which I think is fair.

Rating: ★★★★½ (PS4 & PS5), ★★★★★ (PC)