i've seen the term "disco-like" used a lot lately. what features from disco elysium differentiate it so much from other CRPGs?
Twenty years ago we called them Planescape: Torment clones, and they're essentially the product of trying to implement investigative procedural VNs inside game engines designed for Dungeons & Dragons clones. Navigating that mismatch between the affordances of the game engine and the intended mode of play is what produces nearly all of the genre's distinctive features, including:
the sprawling recursive dialogue trees (i.e., because that's the only way the game engine allows you to interact with NPCs apart from fighting them);
the hilariously overengineered inventory system where your pants have separate stats from your shirt (i.e., because it was adapted from an inventory system designed for managing magic item slots);
the fact that most "cutscenes" consist of a narrator simply describing what you see in spite of the game being fully graphical (i.e., because the game engine just doesn't have the assets or the scripting capabilities to do non-combat cutscenes);
and, of course, the most obvious fact that your principal interface with the world is running about on an isometric grid with characters that look like animated minifigs opening and looting various containers (i.e., because that's the game engine's sole affordance for nonviolent environmental interaction)
Disco Elysium's innovation was simply subtracting a lot of the superfluous game-mechanical cruft carried over from trying to build an investigative procedural VN inside the Baldur's Gate engine, while carefully keeping the shape of the resulting gameplay more or less intact.
So if you're looking at your average Disco-like and thinking hey, this isn't all that different from what you might imagine some sort of fucked up fantasy Phoenix Wright mod for Baldur's Gate 3 would look like, this is because that's actually, literally the genesis of the genre.
"fucked up fantasy Phoenix Wright mod for Baldur's Gate 3"
EVERYONE MOVE
THAT'S MY KINDA GAME
