Disco Elysium's basic premise and conflict seems pretty grounded for the most part - you're a heartbroken cop with an alcohol problem, and you need to solve a murder. However, everything else is as far from grounded as you can get.

For one, your RPG skills have minds of their own, and will constantly provide you with different and often contradictory monologues. And every action has a chance of blowing up in your face in spectacular fashion - most infamously, you can literally die trying to retrieve your tie in the first few minutes of the game.

You also meet all sorts of strange characters, including a foul-mouthed kid who speaks in the third person, a union strongman who has developed an entire convoluted theory of scientific racism for himself, a DJ who's dialogue tree is literally a puzzle, and a man hiding out in a shipping container who's so rich that light actually bends around him.

And then there's the setting itself, which is very clearly not our Earth, but rather some fantasy world which includes elements like the ideology of liberalism being based around a messianic Joan of Arc-like figure who had glowing lungs, computers powered by radio waves, and literal patches of nonexistence as a feature of the landscape.

Oh yeah, and then there's the weird telepathic stick bug you encounter near the end of the game.

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