Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

The pitch

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut is ZA/UM's detective RPG: you play an amnesiac police officer investigating a murder in the decaying city of Revachol, with every interaction resolved through dialogue and skill checks rather than combat. The Final Cut adds full voice acting and additional content to the acclaimed original 2019 release.

The writing is not up for debate

Reading across this game's review corpus, the quality of the writing is close to uncontested. "95% of the game is dialogue with other npcs and yourself... The RPG aspect is that you can level up different aspects of yourself like logic, [and] reaction," reads a 1,142-vote review, describing a system built entirely around a "Thought Cabinet" of internalised ideas the player character can adopt and develop. Positive reviews describe it in unusually personal terms: "This is probably the game that touched me the most in my entire life," reads a 1,003-vote review. This regard extends even into technically negative reviews — reviewers routinely call it a 10/10 masterpiece in the same breath as recommending against buying it, for reasons that have nothing to do with the game's quality.

The dispute that dominates this game's negative reviews

What actually drives most of this game's negative-review corpus is a documented ownership dispute rather than any complaint about the game. In 2021, ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus acquired the studio through his holding company; original creators Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, Helen Hindpere and Martin Luiga say they were forced out shortly after, disputing the transaction's structure — including a set of game sketches Kompus reportedly bought for £1 and resold to the studio for €4.8 million. Producer Kaur Kender sued over separate compensation and dropped the case in December 2022 after Kompus repaid that €4.8 million to ZA/UM; a separate employment-related suit from Kurvitz and Rostov was dismissed in March 2023, though both maintained the studio's account of events was wrong. That history is public record, not review speculation, and this game's audience treats it as directly relevant: "Great game, Horrible new publishers who stole the IP from the original creators," reads an 855-vote review. "As many have said before. DO NOT BUY this game even if they sell it for a dime. A group of investors[…] screwed the minds behind this game," reads another, with over 1,300 votes. Across the 100 most-helpful negative reviews, 44 mention the original creators directly and 30 name ZA/UM specifically — this is by a wide margin the dominant theme, ahead of any complaint about the game's writing, systems or performance.

A story that crosses into positive reviews too

Unusually for this library's coverage, the dispute isn't confined to negative reviews. Several of the most-upvoted positive reviews raise the same concern while still recommending the game: "The corpos running ZA/UM, the studio that made this game, have basically gotten rid of half the driving creative forces behind this game and [are] now just holding the rights hostage," reads a 419-vote positive review. Another, with nearly 1,500 votes: "The greatest RPG of all time stolen by con artists releasing a meme update so that when you Google the game you don't see the headlines." Whatever a reader ultimately decides about the underlying dispute, its visibility across both sides of this game's review corpus is itself a distinctive, documented feature of how this game is being received in 2026 — five years after the events in question.

Where sentiment sits now

Recent English review sentiment — the 100 most recent reviews, spanning August 5–10, 2026 — runs 80% positive, well below the 92.1% lifetime score. That's a meaningful, sustained gap rather than noise, and it lines up with a dispute that review text shows is still actively cited by players half a decade after the events themselves. Achievement data reflects a game built for one long, considered playthrough rather than repeat completion: the median across 45 achievements is 2.4%, with even the most common character-archetype achievements capping around 20–32% because several are mutually exclusive within a single playthrough.

Value

At its current 75%-off price of NZ$14.99, this is an easy value proposition for one of this library's most acclaimed RPGs by pure content and writing quality — the open question this corpus raises isn't whether the game is worth the money, but where that money actually goes. Reviewers researching the topic report the original creators no longer receive royalties from sales under the current ownership.

Verdict

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut earns its reputation as one of the best-written role-playing games available, built around a genuinely original dialogue-and-skill-check system that even its most committed critics don't dispute. What makes this review unusual is how inseparable that reputation has become from a well-documented, still-unresolved ownership dispute — one that a large share of this game's own audience, on both sides of the recommend/don't-recommend line, considers as important as the writing itself. The game is a genuine landmark. How you choose to engage with its current ownership is a separate decision worth making deliberately.