Cosmo D generally made their name with broadly music-themed, surrealist walking sims, always strong on environmental- and sound design, but burdened with weak writing and a let's say "unique" approach to character design, so I don't think anyone expected their next venture to take them into the burgeoning genre of Disco Elysium-clones, nor that they'd do such a good job at it. But while DE offered up a seemingly endless torrent of dialogue to the point of occasionally feeling more like an interactive novel than just a very wordy videogame, BoCL is much more tight-lipped and just kind of small in general. A single playthrough is unlikely to take more than 2 hours and a lot of that will consist of running through the same few areas anyway. Said playthroughs can be quite varied and there's a quite a few different endings, but even so, it's difficult not to feel a bit disappointed once you've fully explored the handful of available locations and realize that that's yer lot. And speaking of the locations, environment design on the whole has definitely taken a few steps back compared to the dev's previous endeavours, generally being a lot more realistic and grounded, which, along with the lack of content easily serves as the game's achilles heel. Sound design is expectedly top-notch however, from the ominous droning in the main menu to the energetic rhythms bouncing around the club's interior to little things like the clattering of dice during the skill checks or the choppy string sequences that serve as impromptu voice acting, it's all good, full marks on that front.
The writing is surprisingly solid, which runs in tandem with the skill-check based gameplay. Unlike in other heavily text-based RPGs, dialogues tend to be extremely short, frequently involving singular sentences, interspersed with ubiquitous dice-based skill checks. It lends the writing a sharp, concise quality which was sorely missing in some of the devs earlier games, and works wonderfully with the humor, which manages to be silly and quirky without feeling forced or becoming too random. The difficulty is higher than one might think, since unsuccessfull dice rolls often cause negative status effects that can negatively affect successive rolls. As a result, reckless play can easily lead you into a seemingly inescapable doomspiral, repeatedly falling over your words until you faint from sheer embarrassment and have to start over. Success ultimately comes down to careful risk- and resource-management, plus a little bit of luck, or failing that, considered use of the quickload function. It's an occasionally frustrating, but very absorbing system and satisfying like you wouldn't believe when you've been playing your cards (or dice rather) right and the positive status effects start stacking as your character develops into a towering monument to the art of charisma, opening hearts and minds left and right with their bottomless knowledge of house music and flamingo thigh stew. Fun stuff.
Final rating: 8.0/10
originally written on 07/05/2024
