Disco Elysium - Review @ IGN

I feel strange having to point this out, but point and click adventure games don't have skill checks. Or skills, for that matter. They don't have character progression of any kind. That's a characteristic of RPGs, in their many forms. The sooner everyone comes to grips with the fact that RPGs take many different forms in 2019, the better.

You don't need to point out anything. It's already been mentioned that it has some RPG elements. ;)
 
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I feel strange having to point this out, but point and click adventure games don't have skill checks. Or skills, for that matter. They don't have character progression of any kind. That's a characteristic of RPGs, in their many forms. The sooner everyone comes to grips with the fact that RPGs take many different forms in 2019, the better.

The general rule of thumb for describing games via their most relevant genre title is to take whichever element stands out the most and use that as the primary descriptor.

A sense of the hybrid has been around for a very long time and people still debate even to this day the RPG merits of games like Deus Ex and System Shock for example. Going back even further and Bard's Tale can have people arguing in the same way.

And there's nothing wrong at all with hybrids. A good hybrid is usually better than a half-arsed full RPG. My favourite hybrid is King's Bounty: The Legend for example, a game which IMO perfectly blends the RPG with the more strategy games of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Heroes of Might and Magic itself is also another example of a really well made hybrid series that some people like to claim for the RPG camp as well, but King's Bounty is certainly more RPG than HoMM, but both are still clearly hybrid. So you also get scales of hybrid.

Disco Elysium is clearly a well made hybrid. It blends RPG with Choose Your Own Adventure and regular Point and Click Adventure Game. Of those three, which is most prominent, which aspect does the player feel most accurately conveys to a potential new player what type of gameplay to expect? At the moment I'm most commonly hearing people say it feels most like a p&c Adventure Game. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that. It can still be a good game that appeals to RPG players with that descriptor, that descriptor isn't an insult unless the buyer went in under a different impression.

It's all very well banging the drum for its RPG credentials just because you feel it's a slight on the game to not mention its RPG elements, because you feel invested to defend it every time you feel someone is being negative about it, particularly if you read a negative post that describes it as what it is, but you have to remember, the whole reason we have genre descriptors is as a buyer's short-hand guide to whether they'll want to buy it in the first place. It's all very well getting the sales, but if you do so by over-hoodwinking people then you're going to be inviting more negative feedback than the game deserves as more people come to the game with the wrong expectations.
 
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To add my two cents, I think I would probably call it an interactive choose your own adventure with rpg elements.

Why interactive?
Because to me, a standard cyoa is a book, whilst this is a game with movement, visuals, sounds etc.

Why cyoa ? , because it is almost entirely text based. There are no other in game mechanisms such as combat. It does have some exploration elements...

Why rpg elements?
To me, things like character development, levelling, stats and being able to play a specific chosen character are rpg elements.

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