There are three things you need to know about skills in Disco Elysium. The first is that each skill has its own personality - they speak to you, and squabble with each other. The second is that each skill has has an upper limit where it becomes stifling or overbearing. The third is that (certain) skill checks can be repeated, by putting more points into the the relevant skill. Have I said the word "skill" enough? Let's carry on.

As the sensitive yet disturbed detective, I found myself engaging with an insensitive yet disturbed child throwing rocks at the corpse whose death I was meant to be investigating. Naturally, I ask myself: what is this kid's whole deal? Can I gain a better understanding of this aggressive, posturing tiny ginger?

I fail the appropriate empathy check. I ding another point of empathy into my build, only to fail it again. When I try and fail a third time, the voice of self pity suddenly appears for the first time and chastises me. I have inadvertently reached the ceiling of empathy as a useful tool, and it is crushing me.

For the rest of the game, I'm going to travel through Revachol pouring my heart out to its citizens, whether I want to or not. I tried so hard to understand one random child - who was only really invested in shouting slurs at me - and it has left a psychic wound. In a way, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: the natural outcome of trying to use empathy as a tool to batter down someone's firmly held defenses, in the form of rolling and re-rolling a check.

It's the kind of narrative vignette that shapes the personality of a playthrough, and it wouldn't exist if Disco Elysium's skills didn't work in precisely they way they do.

Oh, Also

I have been playing an uncharacteristic amount of Spellbreak lately, after watching this trailer and being intrigued by the whole fantasy vibe. I have never really got into battle royale games before but this aesthetic was a great entry point.

https://twitter.com/PlaySpellbreak/status/1375085328550203400

Ruth Cassidy is a writer and self-described velcro cyborg who, when not writing about video games, is probably being emotional about musicals, mountains, or cats. Has had some bylines, in some places.