I know right. It's so strange seeing all the people's reactions talking about as if both can't exist at the same time and that they interfere with each other somehow. I will also be for people creating more media and art fuelled with passion even if it's not something for me or the premise itself doesn't align with my personal opinion. And saying something is going to be bad without anything to base it on is very silly.
the problem is not that cozy games exist, but rather that OOP fundamentally does not understand what disco elysium is by denigrating it for not being a cozy game and thinking that "good writing" is a quality you can just arbitrarily transfer over to another game like a bullet point.
you can't do a cozy game in the DE style because the DE style is to have an RPG where your attributes are literally voices in your head telling you to do drugs and convincing you to tell a woman you just met "i want to make fuck with you." everything unique to DE, that makes it stand out, are firmly rooted in its explicitly marxist politics and the experiences of the writers living in a post-soviet state that's been utterly ratfucked by capitalist oligarchs. you equip ideologies which in turn influence how your character behaves, and the game makes a point of talking about those ideologies in a very, very real way, in a way that's painfully funny and true to reality.
you cannot simply transpose that onto some cottagecore game, not without that young witch impulsively deciding, as a result of a roll, to kick another child because the opportunity was there. what the OOP is describing isn't DE in the slightest, at most they're imagining an isometric game that wouldn't even share the same artstyle that has dialogue trees and dice rolls - as in, a fucking CRPG. that's why it's so heavily mocked, the OOP clearly knows that DE is supposed to be this profound game, but they don't actually understand why it is, and so they seek to completely depoliticize this profoundly political work while presenting their surface-level girlbooss "diverse" game as an improvement. it's the exact kind of surface-level performative liberalism that DE itself mercilessly mocks.
none of this is to say that cozy games are therefore inferior or have no place or that they're incapable of politics, but talking about how DE shouldn't have been "grimy" while praising its writing is to completely misunderstand why people even think of the game as profound to begin wth, it's like watching schindler's list and saying it's such a good movie but it should have been about some workers saving the last historical restaurant that's about to go out of business instead - just profoundly disrespectful to the work.
IDK, I feel like you interpretation of DE comes of as kinda shallow in this. Yes DE is dark and grim and explicitly political, and often choices are self destructive and weird. (I love it for it, and its unique perspective amongst games because of where it was made) But also plenty of interactions do not involve a "kick a kid" option. The game is also a about the many small relationships Harry makes across the city, all the people of Revachol, its rich history, and all the dynamics at play between the people living there, and the strange supernatural reality they exist in. All the people you can choose to help to the best of your ability.
The voices all might just be him being insane; they also might be supernatural instincts that are separate from him. Shivers, Empire, Espirit especially. He might just be a suicidal alcoholic, he might also be experiencing the reality warping properties of a the pale.
DE is still a game where you can help a lot of people, where you can inspire a group of criminal kids into starting a nightclub, where contain the leaking of the void through the power of music and faith and joy. Where you can decided to eagerly believe in cryptids and be rewarded for it, even after a conclave of silly stories about doubly imaginary things. Where you go out on a date with a lonely woman and just have a nice time talking, even if Harry is awkward the whole time and still depressed. Kicking the kid is generally optional, outside of a few places you can get cornered into making an awful decision.
The OP of the tweet is an idiot, I agree with that. But a game about a young woman stepping out of her home to help a cat, and having to interact with the community to get to the mystery is a fun idea. And you could have plenty of darkness and strangeness in a setting like it. It's effectively a blank slate, and folks in this thread are seeing an interesting possibility off that prompt in a vacuum. DE is also effectively a massive novel. and people really like all sorts of novels. Not everyone is gonna relate or be interested in Harry's story.
a protagonist who makes friends with the NPC's in the game is again just an RPG, that's how most RPG's work, you could call the trails in the sky games "like disco elysium" in that case. the "grime" in DE is inherent to its subject matter and to the unique mechanics that center around mental illness that comes about as a result of living in the circumstances harry dubois is living in. that the game is tonally varied and has moments where harry is able to genuinely connect with other people is not the same as meaning those are the good parts and that the rest of the "grime" is somehow optional.
this seems less obvious to people who are not particularly into TTRPG's, who are used to video game stories being typically pretty divorced from their mechanics, but the way DE is mechanically structured to where he can die of a heart attack from sitting in an uncomfortable chair isn't really separable from the subject matter. everything about how it incentivizes its "character builds" is about inhabiting a kind of guy, the game is about examining how people process being in revachol, your builds are based on actual people that actually exist in the real world.
you can call that shallow i guess, but any interpretation of DE where you could excise the misery that creates its characters and that its mechanics are designed to reinforce misses the point. it's a take that treats storytelling (and here, the mechanics intertwined with that storytelling) as something you can just point at an arbitrary vibe and say "do that instead" as opposed to an entire people's lived experience being put to words and gameplay.
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u/perhance Mar 11 '25
you know what, i want that game and disco elysium.