Disco Elysium is a game where the main battle isn't with a boss, but with your own thoughts.

I entered like I was in a detective story about a corpse in the backyard of a hotel, and I found myself stuck in a city that talks better than most characters in games. Revachol is dirty, funny, angry, and very much alive. Skills clash with each other right in your head, politics aren't just a backdrop, but a character, and the investigation constantly deviates into drunkenness, guilt, and a strange tenderness for a world that has almost written you off.

It's almost entirely text, and that's not a flaw, but a form. The jokes hit home, the dialogue branches so that you want to replay not "as a different class," but as a different mindset. There's almost no combat—and it doesn't need to be. The tension is maintained by the phrase, the skill check, and the feeling that you've just said too much.

It won't be for everyone: anyone expecting action or a fast-paced story will be turned off within the first few hours. It only took me a couple of evenings to realize that this is one of the best RPGs I've ever played. After the ending, you'll spend a long time thinking not about the solved case, but about the kind of person this cop was—and could have become.