God, I love Disco Elysium so much. For me it’s the best game of all time. It’s funny you single out what you call DM railroading, because it was one thing that was talked about a lot around the release, but they called it a “fail-forward” design philosophy. And it’s so important to the game because failure is such a major theme of the game, and trying and failing checks is a big part of that. That’s why there are several red checks right at the start of the game that actually have advantageous outcomes on failure - to teach you that trying and failing is okay. A lot of my favourite moments in the game comes from failed checks.

And the same goes for all those “wacky” dialogue options. A lot of people miss out on so much because they are afraid to “sound crazy”, because we have been conditioned by every other RPG that picking stupid options leads to being punished. Buy Disco doesn’t really work like that, it’s one of the least punishing games ever in that sense. You’re more often than not rewarded for picking those dialogues. There is even a loading screen tooltip encouraging them.

Anyway sorry my latent hyperfixation got awakened and I’m ranting…