Disco Elysium continues to be the best RPG I've played. It feels more like a spiritual successor to Planescape Torment than the actual successor to Planescape Torment.
I think I've recapped the game before, but I'm too lazy to scroll up so Imma recap it again.
You play as a detective in a once glorious now run down city, sent to help solve a situation with a hanged body in a tree. Some time before the start of the game, you showed up in town, kicked around for awhile, went on an apocalyptic drinking binge and spent three days drinking so much that you nearly died and gave yourself permanent brain damage. You awaken in your hostel room with the hangover to end all hangovers and absolutely no recollection of who you are, why you're there, or anything else at all. You don't even know your name.
The game is set in a slightly steampunk setting with technology roughly equivalent to the early 90's. The city you're in was, in a previous life, the capital of the world during a fascist monarchy. A failed communist uprising momentarily freed the city only to collapse and be destroyed in another violent rise of yet another regime. The city of Revachol is just as important a character as you are, and it's riddled with just as many scars.
The game is about trying to solve a murder. But it's also about trying to discover who you are and what lead you to what you are now. It's about trying to move on after hitting rock bottom, trying to put the pieces back together, and maybe even accepting that maybe they'll be forever broken.
The most unique aspect of this rpg is the skill system, here's the skill tree:
View attachment 37636
There's no combat in this game, rather dialogue with various skill checks. Some dialogue options will passively open up if you have a high enough skill (the game rolls a secret check in the background) while others are active checks that are either white checks, meaning you can retry them later after you've put more points into that skill, or red checks, which can only ever be tried once. Role playing really is the name of the game here, however, as rarely will a failed check lead to a gameover (except, well, sometimes they will) but instead will simply lead to a different outcome. What your character is good at is important, but equally important is what your character is bad at, and sometimes a failed check can open up options that weren't available to you before.
Each of these skills also act as a voice inside your fractured mind. They act as your inner thoughts, with voices like Encyclopedia piping up to tell you trivia about the world, authority trying to convince you to assert your dominance, or electro-chemistry reminding you of how awesome drugs are and how you should probably get some. The higher your skill, the more often these voices come into play, but also if you put too many points into a skill, that voice may begin to dominate. Electro-Chemistry as mentioned before is your knowledge of, and ability to use, drugs. And putting points into that allows you to use illegal substances for some pretty wild stat boosts for hard to pass checks. In my game it's also turned my detective into an absolute addict, who is sniffing speed on the side to help solve every mystery.
If you like deep, story driven rpgs, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try.