Disco Elysium has a few flaws but I still think it’s a good game overall and hopefully if people know about the flaws and how to work around them then that will help people enjoy the game more. I’ve read a lot of the negative reviews and have some comments about the reoccurring themes.

Many negative reviews talk about dying unexpectedly and losing game progress as the reason for disliking the game.

The way you can lose the game is if you hit zero hitpoints (HP) or zero morale points (MP). When you lose you are reset to the last time that you saved (and if you have never saved then you have to create a new game). It is not a fun game mechanic because it can lead to players suddenly losing hours of progress through no fault of their own and having to either replay through parts of the story or quit.

You can see how much HP and MP you have remaining in the lower-left of the screen.


The bars below the numbers represent the amount of HP (orange) and MP (blue) you have remaining. The screenshot shows two HP and four MP remaining (edit: A Steam bug has deleted the screenshot https://sp.zhabite.com/discussions/forum/7/4120176169346566739/).

The numbers above the bars represent the number of times you can "heal" these values. If you are about to lose the game but you have a heal available then the game will let you use the heal instead of losing. You heal by clicking the "plus" sign where the relevant number's bars have depleted and where the final bar is shrinking. If you have no available heals (the number in the "plus" sign is zero) then you simply lose and have to load a save.

Values are lost when the writers wanted to represent your character being injured or demoralised. This can happen arbitrarily and unexpectedly, and you should not assume that you will be able to predict when it will happen.

Your HP and MP reset to their maximums at the start of each day, so increasing the maximums will help you to avoid reaching zero. Here are ways to do this:
In character creation, you can put points into four categories of skills. Two of these categories are Physique and Psyche. An increase in Physique will correspond with an increase in your maximum HP, and an increase in Psyche will correspond with an increase in your maximum MP. These increases happen indirectly as a result of something which will be explained in the next paragraph.
As part of the Physique category, there is the skill Endurance. As part of the Psyche category, there is the skill Volition. These skills directly correspond with the maximum numbers of HP and MP bars you get. One thing that increases them is starting with higher levels of Physique and Psyche which is why adding to those will indirectly increase the number of bars (e.g., more Physique -> more Endurance -> more maximum HP).

As you play the game you will gain skill points. If you open the skills menu then you can click Endurance or Volition to put points into them then select "save and close" and you'll see that your maximum (and current) HP/MP have increased.

If your starting Physique or Psyche were very low, then unfortunately your skill cap for the corresponding skills will also be very low, meaning you can potentially only allocate one skill point into the skill before you cannot put any more points into it. This means your character might be stuck with a maximum of only two HP or MP (if you started with minimal Physique or Psyche). You will have to live with these low maximums or restart the game and put more points into Physique or Psyche.

Heals will let you offset low maximums in HP and MP because as you near zero you will be able to go back up away from zero.
Alcohol in your inventory will let you heal HP. Cigarettes in your inventory will let you heal MP. These items can be found as you explore the world (rightclick -> containers become highlighted -> doubleclick container -> take items). They can also be bought if you go to the shop "Frittte" which is next to the hotel you're staying in. To reiterate something from before, the number of drugs that you have available is equal to the number of heals that you have available, which you can see by checking the numbers inside the orange and blue "plus" symbols in the bottom-left of the screen.
As mentioned above, levelling Endurance or Volition will not only increase your maximum HP/MP but it will also add to your current HP/MP.

To decrease the impact of losing you need to save more because then a loss will only take you back to that point. Unfortunately the autosaves are uncommon so you need to remember to save a lot. There are two types of saves: quicksaves and normal saves. There is one quicksave slot which is overwritten each time it is used. There are many save slots and you can return to those at any point. If you press ESC then you can select "quicksave" or "save".

Some negative reviews show people saying that they felt like there was too much information shown to them and presumably they felt like they would either have to absorb it all which would feel like a chore or let it go over their heads. Here are some things which I think people have felt overwhelmed by:

In character creation all of the skills have lengthy descriptions, e.g., "Logic urges you to... At high levels [something positive] but [something negative] ... With low levels [something negative]." The long descriptions will make some players feel like they need to allocate their skills points and choose their signature skill carefully. However the descriptions don't correlate much with the gameplay (there aren't actually negative things gained from having a high skill), and the skills themselves don't have that much bearing on the game (what they do will be summarised below). I like the descriptions for their poetry/language, I found them interesting to read, but beyond that you don't need to be concerned with them.

As you play the game, your inner-monologue will talk to you with various character voices which represent different urges and observations. You can think of each skill as a character within your inner-monologue. The suggestions made by each "character" do not need to be followed, they are more for the sake of giving the game a certain feel rather than hinting at what you need to do to progress with the story.

Examples:

• Empathy will make observations about how people feel
  
• Logic will piece facts together
  
• Half-Light tends to suggest that you act violently
  
• Electrochemistry will try to convince you to take drugs

At first you might think that you really need Empathy or Logic because they seem useful for a detective and that you should avoid points in things which don't seem very useful, but really the commentary provided by all of the skills is more to give the player a sense of your character's thought patterns as part of the player experience. My favourite skill is Shivers because I like the artistic descriptions that it provides about the world. You can choose to put points into whatever you think sounds cool without being concerned that it will ruin your experience.

More points in a skill will make it more likely that you hear thoughts from that skill.

Beyond just talking to you, skills also let you have higher chances of passing corresponding skill-checks, but in my opinion you should not be concerned with trying to optimise this aspect of the game.

At some points in the game you will be presented with huge amounts of information about what seems like a very deep world. This will be presented by your Encyclopedia skill and also by certain characters. It is often way too much to absorb completely (unless you really want to pay attention to it). My hint is that the information about the history and broad setting of the world is not really necessary to progress though the story. You don't need to absorb it. I basically just played the game reading the names of all other countries as "a place which isn't this one" and probably missed a lot of details about the history of the place that the story takes place in. Whatever you understand from the exposition passively will be enough to enjoy the game (in my experience).

Some reviews talk about how you can feel like there is nothing for you to do to progress the story and you feel like the story is locked behind a dice roll for which you are only waiting for the opportunity to reroll. However, I think that there are only two rolls which can prevent you from making progress even though certain other tasks may seem important:

• First roll (day 2+) Prove your authority to Titus Hardie (Authority check)
  
• Second roll (day 3+) Listen to the wind (Shivers check outside of FELD building)

For the first roll, if you fail it two times then on the next try you will automatically succeed. For the second roll I'm not sure whether you can fail it beyond three tries but I know that by completing side-quests you can continually unlock it and retry it with higher chances of success to the point where you'll have a 97% chance of succeeding on it each time. I don't know whether you could fail the 97% chance check and have no way to retry it and be softlocked but hopefully the game developers added something to prevent that possibility.

Levelling-up the skill which is relevant will allow you to immediately reroll any check, including the checks above, so if you have skill points available and have not reached the cap then you can level the skill and retry the check. Certain tasks being completed will also allow you to retry the check. To know which tasks will let you retry the checks the game will tell you what to do but you can search for ways to retry on the internet. You can also consider saving the game before the check and reloading it if you fail if you want to move things along without doing side-quests.

Neither check is on day one, so if you're on day one then you don't have to worry that there is a check which is locking you out from making progress. If you feel aimless on day one then you should just run around talking to people and trying to complete tasks as best you can until 21:00, at which point you can go to the next day. Other ways to pass in-game time quickly are to read the ledger case notes about old cases once you have found your ledger and to read books bought from the bookstore. However, you don't need to do those things to reach 21:00, you can reach 21:00 just by exploring and talking to NPCs.

In general if you're stuck on something and really can't see a way forward then you might as well use the internet to make progress because that's better than quitting or feeling annoyed.

As you explore the world, you will find items of clothing. Each item of clothing will change your stats, for instance you might find a hat which increases your Perception skill by 1 but decreases your Authority skill by 1 while you wear it. On my first playthough when I'd find a skill check I'd often exit the dialog and do the chore of looking through all the clothing to maximise whatever skill check I wanted to pass so I might look through twenty items looking for things which would increase whatever skill I needed. This was not fun and on my second playthrough I just rolled skill checks without checking my clothing. My advice is to not be concerned with failing skill checks and to decide that it's better to fail a few checks that you would have otherwise succeeded but to not have to bother searching through your clothing.

Some people in the reviews seem to have encountered bugs which ruined their games and forced them to restart. I only encountered very minor bugs but to avoid bugs the best thing to do is to make regular saves. If you think that you are "softlocked", i.e., a bug or flaw in game design is preventing you from making progress then you should use the internet to check whether you actually cannot make progress and may need to go back to an older save to continue.

A final issue that people have with the game is that the game just isn't to their taste. Everyone has different tastes and some people will feel like Disco Elysium is not the sort of thing they like.

If you have played the game for a few hours and aren't enjoying the writing, the voice acting, the visuals, the music, and so on then maybe the game just isn't for you because I think that's what many people have been drawn to. I see the plot (solving the case) as an excuse to experience the world and to interact with the characters rather than as the main point of the game. If that doesn't interest you then maybe the game just isn't the type of thing that you enjoy.

Here are some specific things that people have an issue with:

The game uses a lot of words to describe things. Some people like to read descriptions and other people will feel like long descriptions just make things tedious.

I personally like descriptions and I think that the dialog/descriptions were written so that the key information is given quickly which means that if you want to play faster you can just skim-read the first part of the line to get an idea for what is being said.

Even if you make all of the honourable decisions, never take drugs, and try to play as a good and normal person then you'll still encounter NPCs (including your inner-monologue) saying that you're an alcoholic and criticising you and eventually you'll fail a dice roll and be forced to choose from a set of bad or embarrassing dialog choices. So there is not really a way to play where you will be able to fully choose your way out of being a loser. If you can't enjoy that then you just have to accept it as part of the story.

RNG should not softlock you from completing the game but it will mean that you might end up locked out of side-quests and lines of dialog and will miss them during your playthrough. That might annoy some people but it's just part of the game.

The game is slow-paced. It took me about thirty hours to complete on my first playthrough.

Politics are a major theme in the game. Many of the dialog options presented to your character will essentially be asking you to make your character choose between a belief in capitalism, communism, fascism, and neutrality. The game also presents many (perhaps even the majority) of the characters as representing or believing in one of these belief systems.

Some people interpret Disco Elysium as having a particular political message. I myself think that if it has a message then the message is at least nuanced: perhaps that no ideology, organisation, or person is completely good or bad. I don't think that the game proselytises even though many people claim otherwise and even though the writers are public about their own political beliefs. I think that the game presents every ideology in extreme, exaggerated, negative forms (for tragic-comic effect) but also in ways where you might find them reasonable.

I think that even if you dislike the political themes in fiction then you can still look past them and enjoy the game for its other virtues.

Many people really like Disco Elysium but it definitely has some flaws. Hopefully this guide can help people circumvent the flaws and allow them to enjoy the game or to quickly decide that the game isn't for them.