chapotraphouse

Can't remember who said it but the last time this was posted someone came up with "Harriet Potter and the Live Laugh Lost Kitty" and that's just perfect.

Disco Elysium's writing is so good because of it's grimy setting, and how grounded the characters are in it. I mean there are other reasons. But Martinaise is a massive part of it.

That concept lives rent free in my head, not least of which because I see how it could actually be made to work: by layering the game space over three parallel settings--an idealized vision of a cozy small town, a dying rustbelt small town, and a neighborhood in a cyberpunk city--that the game just sort of flows between day-to-day without skipping a beat, with a protagonist that's just "what if Akko from LWA was a burnt out grad student with a substance abuse problem and a god complex," and also the cat smokes cigarettes and becomes your sidekick after the first act because it's the only other character that can see how completely fucked everything is. Just really lay on the tonal dissonance without acknowledging it while playing with themes of how the idealized past was also fucked, the hopelessness of decay, and the seeming absence of a future that's anything but an intensification of that hopelessness and decay.

So basically the exact opposite of what the pitch is intending.