Disco Elysium

I found the reveal of the true killer kind of annoying. It's a completely random person we've not seen throughout the game yet, so there was no way of us putting pieces of information together to form a theory - it's a completely unrelated person. In addition, I didn't like the motivation he had for killing the mercenary. Sure, he's a veteran of the former revolution, he despises everything that's not communist and took a problem with a mercenary having a sexual relation with a woman he spied on for months. But that whole parasocial sexual relation, the peeping, the ultimate motivation for the killing... I don't know, kinda yucks me out and didn't feel compelling at all.

I think it's pretty damn perfect. The seeds of there being a sniper were seeded from minute one. The hanged man was shot, but no one heard a shot. Who left the footprints in the pinball area? Who knew about that area when even Garte doesn't? If you thought Klassje did it...why would she stay for a week after that and then call the cops herself? She is some sort of spy, why would she do that? If Kassje had done it, she would not be present in the game at all, or would be in hiding somewhere since 'someone' stole her fake pass, but I digress.

While yes the deserter is someone we have not met before, he's not a random person. We just let ourselves get swept up in the politics of the harbor, which the deserter is embroiled in through Evrart.

Imagine if, after the tribunal, Klaasje's disappearance was related to her actually being the killer. That would have made sense. But she was likely just afraid of how he leads would make her look like the prime suspect, so she fled. Still, I probably would have preferred her to be the killer somehow. Some kind of spy/agent working for some corrupt people who want smash the union or something.

Like I said: how would it make sense if she killed him in her own room, only to then involve 7 other people in the cover up and then stay in the Whirling for a week and then call the cops herself? If you want a story where she is the killer, it is a completely different story that likely doesn't get into the same themes, because Klassje has money enough to skip town and time to do it. Even assuming her passport is already stolen when she murders Leli, she has the means to go into hiding properly and the skills to vanish without a trace into the larger Revachol area.

Then the whole thing with Ruby. It was an intense encounter finding her under that ruined factory and the confrontation was quite dangerous - we almost died there. But her ultimately not being related to the killing at all apart from staging the lynching was also just kinda annoying. I get that we didn't have any other leads that made sense at the time so Ruby was the only logical suspect. But her just completely vanishing after our realising that she's not the killer felt anticlimactic.

Like I already pointed out, you had other leads, but the story made you follow the most obvious one. You are acting like a cop would. There is a reason smart crimes don't get solved and innocent people get railroaded into being guilty. That is what that scene was. Ruby was at the wrong place at the wrong time and now the law is out to get her. If Harry and Kim were normal pigs, they would pin the crime on her and leave. Or just kill her because they are corrupt and working for La Puta Madre. If Ruby lived in your game, it's because you went the extra mile to not be a normal cop.

I think so far, your issues with the game is exactly this. Ambrosius and Kim act like cops. They follow the most likely lead they can see, because they have many cases to solve and hope that the obvious perp is indeed the perp. So when the union says they did it, they of course go after that lead, getting pulled into the wider politics as pawns by both sides of that struggle in the process and wasting time. And when they find an actual witness, of course they hone in on her. It's only when all of these things turn out as dead ends that they even seriously look for Ruby, which is ALSO a dead end and then everything goes wrong and only after that are they, as a last ditch attempt, following the clues they always had that pointed at the real murderer but ignored because other things seemed more important.

And the game railroads you through all that, which is I think what your core issue is. You are not free to just decide the right clues to pursue and solve the murder like a superstar cop. But if you did, you'd lose out on 90% of the game, so the game doesn't allow you and makes you experience all of it. The games could allow you this but then impede your progress (no access to that side of the river, no boat to use etc.) and does do so, but really the impediment is that the game wants to tell it's story in a particular order and takes you along for the ride, which is very normal for such games.

As for the Phasmid: you can take a photo of it, it's not a hallucination. You could believe that if it were Ambrosius and Cuno on that island, but if Kim's there, the photo is proof. And anyway: the Phasmid is the games message in a bottle: amazing things still exist and you should try and keep your mind open for the possibility of them existing. Did it have anything to do with the murder? From what I remember it made the Deserter more crazy and secretive over time with it's peromones, but that is conjecture by your cops and not proven. But the point of the Phasmid is that, in spite of the world being swallowed by the pale and under the thumb of capital, even in a bombed out husk of a city, wonders are around you, you only have to look and keep looking. I find it very hopeful.