Your character sheet is made up of four distinct pillars: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. If that isn’t varied enough for you, you can build your own detective from the ground up instead. The beauty of Disco Elysium's skill system is that there's always a reward for the choices you have made. The beauty of Disco Elysium’s skill system is that there’s always a reward for the choices you have made – a Sensitive might not know where he is, but he can start interrogating his necktie for clues.

Begin with the Sensitive option, however, and you’ll have no idea where you are and will have to piece together that same information. For example, opening with the Intelligent build allows you to instantly decipher that you have woken in the city of Revachol as your high Encyclopedia skill level feeds you that knowledge. Each determines the base stats for your nameless gumshoe and influences the decisions offered to you from the get-go, but they all offer an interesting way to play. The first decision you have to make when booting up Disco Elysium is what kind of detective you wish to be: Intelligent (think Sherlock Holmes), Sensitive (think Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks), or Bruiser (think Marv from Sin City). It’s a gorgeously designed isometric RPG that makes you think at every turn of its painterly streets. As you stumble around your wrecked bedroom searching for remnants of your former self, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t simply a whodunnit, but a journey that will challenge you to solve crises on both profoundly personal and societal levels. A part of your consciousness described as your ancient reptilian brain – which you literally engage in conversation with – attempts to persuade you to give up your quest even as your snivelling limbic system battles against it. You can’t even remember your name, let alone that you are a cop on a murder case. Everything that surrounds this core mystery is far from simple, however, not least being that you kick things off with an almighty dose of hangover-induced amnesia.

The premise of Disco Elysium is straightforward: A body has been discovered, hanged from a looming tree in the backyard of a hostel, and it’s up to you to work out how it got there over the course of the 30-hour story. And, somehow, it manages to make all of this fun and, surprisingly often, funny. Through sharply written dialogue and an expertly crafted world, it uses some unique game mechanics - such as debating against 24 different sections of your own brain - to create an experience that will stay with me for a long time. It takes the age-old mechanics of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and twists them in strange ways around a macabre tale of violence, poverty, and a society on the brink of collapse. Like all good detective stories, what appears simple at first becomes so much more than that in Disco Elysium – and here it gets so, so much weirder, too.

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