Disco Elysium

The words 'great writing' are writ large right across the discourse surrounding Disco Elysium, but it's worth taking time to examine exactly what we mean when we say that, because 'great writing' could mean a multitude of things in any given context or medium, and I think it's important that we be specific about it when it comes to this game.

Part of that is because, quite simply, Disco Elysium is a game, and when the words 'great writing' appear in a game review, they don't tend to mean the same thing as they do when they appear in a review of anything else. In this realm, 'great writing' has historically tended to refer to dialogue alone, as a natural and obvious consequence of dialogue being the only literal writing that exists in many games. This has changed to some extent recently, but when I see a player talk about a game's writing, I still tend to assume this is what they mean - essentially, that the words the characters speak don't make them cringe. (I'm old enough to remember a time when the bar was very, very low.) But while Disco Elysium has some extremely fine dialog, that is absolutely not what people are talking about when they say it has great writing.

That's no doubt why so many people were so excited by this game - it's very rare that we're able to talk about the strength of a game's writing in the way that a literary critic would talk about the strength of a book's writing. Even when games do try to reach beyond gaming and compete with the best works in other mediums, it's TV and cinema they go for almost by default, but there is no doubt that Disco Elysium's ambitions are specifically literary. 'Great writing' here primarily means rich, detailed worldbuilding, creating a space that the reader/player can feel like they're truly inhabiting and deeply understanding. Plenty of games have done that through visuals, but to do so almost entirely through a character's internal monologue and his conversations with those around him is a very different skill and a very different experience; I do not walk around Revachol thinking 'I want to go to that mountain' or 'I wonder what's inside that forest', I walk around it wanting to know more about its history, religion, economics, culture, and politics. I mean, Hyrule's great, but I've never found myself wanting to know more about the writings of a historical materialist who lived there fifty years earlier and how they inspired a popular revolutionary uprising that was crushed by a coalition of foreign governments, nor wondering how the modern citizens of those foreign governments feel about a political and religious figurehead from three hundreds year prior who may have been the actual messiah or may have been a power-mad war criminal depending on which parts of her mythology you choose to take as real events. They're not comparable.

So it is absolutely correct to talk about the quality of Disco Elysium's writing here; this town feels diseased, dirty, broken, abandoned, but it also feels absolutely alive, truly three-dimensional. Characters get into lengthy arguments about politics and I wish they'd go on longer. Seedy underworlds and shadowy undercurrents of power are exposed and you're given a complete picture not just of how they operate, but of how they came into existence and why they've been allowed to fester and thrive, 'bad guys are bad' replaced with 'the systems that should prevent this are fundamentally broken'. That's thrilling, as any experience is when it feels this good and this truly new. All of which makes Disco Elysium sound like a nailed on five-star masterpiece - and yes, there are absolutely times when it feels like it is.

However.

'Great writing', truly great writing, should also be courageous. It should stand for something, mean something, tell us something, hold the power to change our minds and lives, and it feels like there's a void at the core of this game because it so studiously avoids ever doing any of that. Disco Elysium is a game that will gleefully and mercilessly mock you for believing in anything no matter what it is (and credit where it's due, it's often quite funny with it), but it is also a game that is too cowardly to believe in anything itself, lest it invite any mockery in return. We've all known people like that - most of us have been probably been people like that in our teenage years - and we all know they're absolute chuds, and I can't deny that I find it a little disappointing that Disco Elysium, otherwise so very deeply and carefully constructed, falls into this trap. For something that largely feels so brave in stepping outside the accepted boundaries of games, it's a shame that it doesn't confront and challenge the medium's most crippling boundary of all, and ultimately does politics in a way that won't upset people who think politics is somehow beneath them and that caring about anything at all is a sign of weakness. (We all know the wider world of gaming is positively littered with those people, so the temptation is to consider this as a commercial decision - but how likely was it that any of those people would want to play this anyway?) It jars that the game plays it so safe on this point, having been so adventurous with almost everything else. There are other flaws (the pacing is....not great in the first couple of days, and without a walkthrough you're liable to spend large stretches of time ambling around wondering what you're supposed to be doing, speaking to the same people repeatedly just in the hope it advances the story somehow), but only this one feels critical. It's not fatal, not even a particularly massive deal, but it is enough to put a small asterisk next to its name, to make it feel more like one of the 100 best games ever than one of the top 10.

Yet isn't that just an amazing thing to be able to criticise a game for? It is an unrecognisable line of thought for video game criticism; the framework that supports this kind of conversation simply does not exist in 99% of the things you'll ever play. Disco Elysium feels like a significant breakthrough, one that opens up all manner of doors and possibilities and leaves enough room for improvement to make contemplating those possibilities an exhilarating thought - and if history does not regard it this way, if it is rendered either as a total one-off or as merely the starting point for one single developer to spend their career kicking against the wider industry, then gaming as a medium will be significantly poorer for it.

i couldn't do this justice with just words. i'd probably have to wave my arms around and shout and do a little dance maybe. shake my ass that kinda thing

Recommended for: people who don't realise they live in Eastern Europe yet.

Whether implicit or explicit, the "point" (or whatever could best live up to it) is blunt. Ideology failed, the symbolic/ social order collapsed. As the amnesiac, middle-aged child of the world that has been called post-modern, your task in the "game" (or something that might live up to it) is to find out what exactly went wrong.

You play someone who doesn't remember their name. You are a detective, apparently, and possibly not a very good one either, investigating the brutal murder of a man in The Zone. This mostly involves approaching various movers and shakers of Revachol with the question "what went wrong?" All under the surprisingly patient gaze of a new partner, Kim, who grounds the game in detective-noir, smokes a single cigarette a day, and looks devastatingly cool while he does it.

The first thing you need to know about Disco Elysium is that it is both really good and probably more interesting to people who don't call themselves gamers than to those who do. Talk to your girlfriend about it. Bring it up at breakfast. Don't be ashamed anymore.

Pontificate all you want. Finally we got a game that wasn't written by surburban nerds who create their reality by blurring together the last few years of American TV. A 10000 word essay or 1 hour video on the philosophy of Disco Elysium is completely unnecessary: pontification only happens when income draws from Youtube watch hours. Disco Elysium "works" (for all the sickening adoration), because it's meaningful, applicable, "relevent," not-entirely-escapist and, despite its reputation as a European art-piece, easily understood.

I laboured through Twin Peaks part 3 to the eighth episode and finally started to get it a little bit. Fuck. This is weird. Imagine if TV had grown up like this and I could be flicking on to channel 5 as a kid for a live synthesized Decasia mini-series or to watch atoms jerk out in a nuclear blast for 10 minutes. Beats The Office.

Disco Elysium casts the history of video games in the same light. Planescape: Torment happened, then "gamers" got 1000 versions of "good enough" narrative pulling from half a century of "good enough" cinema.

It gives you the words to say "is that it? Did all of that "limitless potential" of 64-bit games in the early 90s have to culminate in 100 pastiches of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings?"

Often overlooked: the game overcomes savescumming - of rebooting a save until an unwanted randomised event does not occur. It avoids the ancient frustration of failing a dice-rolled skill check with good writing, an intuitive system that allows the player to retake checks if they later level up the associated skill, and by investing the player in commiting to their choices, whatever the consequence.

To this day, high-profile CRPGs fail to acheive this. For all its epic scale, Pathfinder WotR never comes close. Baldurs Gate 3, for all its budget, can't do it either. This is the overdue knife cutting through decades of horrible videogame writing and uninspired design.

Also overlooked: Disco Elysium is easy to read. It's a text-based game designed to mirror Twitter with vertically-oriented text. Easier to read than the horizontal norm, mirroring the way we (on average) read 1000s of words a day without a thought. Shadowrun did it. Did anyone else? "Oh but we've always done it horizontal like this..."

Criminal to overlook: the watercolour am-I-drunk-or-just-an-impressionist art style and (Britist) Sea Power's score. Phenominal.

Disco Elysium will not be remembered for its impact on the video game industry. Its innovations have not been adopted by its genre, even if they are as simple as vertically organised text or a way to redo skill checks. Its writing, too, has not been matched, though perhaps we can point to "Gamedec" as a game that at least tried. There is resistance in the medium: nostalgic conservativism meets market pressure meets lack of ambition and talent and suddenly another Disco Elysium can't happen. Instead we get to look forward to Fallout rip-off number 112, or is that already out?

A certain amount of stars align, a game like Disco Elysium happens. Some miserable Estonian alcoholics say fuck it, give it one last go, and knock it out the park. Unlikely to happen again, but sure to be relevent conversation at your next dinner party, so get on it.

Disco Elysium is a work of existential nihilism told through a million words of tedious dialogue, a narrative that goes nowhere, and political jokes that only a child should find clever. It looks nice and sounds nice, but the real substance of a game like this is its writing and gameplay and that's where it all goes wrong. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Disco Elysium has a million words of tedious dialogue.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the writing is the heavy-handed characterization of the protagonist. Harry Du Bois is a burned out detective with a drinking problem, amnesia and the personality of a bipolar college kid with a twitter account. You lead him from social encounter to social encounter selecting from a set of dialogue options that range from stupid to stupider in his quest to remember his name, address, place of employment, and what money is. These conversations are frequently punctuated by the voices in Harry's head. This internal monologue is of even worse quality than the dialogue. I often wished I could turn it off since it contributed nothing to my understanding of the story, characters or setting.

Occasionally, while you meander about town you will be required to pass a skill check which determines the success of mundane actions such as reaching for a piece of clothing, jumping on a short wall, prying open a trash can, and sitting in a chair. The odds of success depend on the stats you choose at the point of character creation, those you choose while leveling up, and the clothes Harry is wearing. These skill checks control the course of the game's narrative and are the most excitement you will have. As you can see, it's impossible to separate the poor writing from the shallow role-playing mechanics. Did I mention that the plot of the story revolves around a murder case? It really doesn't matter and despite being tasked with solving the case, Harry isn't too interested in solving it either, preferring instead to whine about how hard his job is. So what's the game really about? Some will say it's the deep political or philosophical content.

Unfortunately, Disco Elysium has nothing original or insightful to say on any subject. I hope you enjoy platitudes and painfully unfunny jokes because there's not much else. The success of the game can be explained not by its substance, but its subject matter. The writers were not afraid to touch on controversial political topics. Some players might even feel a tinge of excitement when these topics are mentioned. Answering what amounts to a survey about one's political leanings and having the results repeated back at you is the lowest form of pandering. From the quirky navel-gazing to the asinine political commentary, this is, without a doubt, one of the worst games I've ever played.

By the time I finished Disco Elysium for the first time, on Frebruary 14th 2022 at 4:20AM, my steam account clocked 172 hours of playtime, putting it second to Team Fortress 2 in sheer hours running the program. Mind you, most of those hours were just loading screens. This fucking game with its fucking disastrous architecture demanded me a kind of undivided attention I don't think I will ever give any other piece of media. It was demanded, because the material conditions upon I could go through this aesthetic experience was through the excruciating, lenghty, sometimes unbareable and outright infuriating 5 to 15 minutes of loadtimes for every mistake I made: for every door I opened that I didn't have to but I did because I wanted to be thorough, for every time I closed my pc by mistake and had to load everything up and make up for the lost progress; -sometimes I had horrible throws that I was not willing to accept as my canon first run, which might as well be the only time I play the damn game in years, considering I will not submit myself again to almost half of my playtime dedicated to loadtimes (and the prospects of me getting a console or a better PC to run it are absolutely out of the question for the time being). For 10 days straight, from February 4th to February 14th, 2022, the only thing inhabiting my thought cabinet was Disco Elysium. I woke up to pick up the game from the day before, sometimes just leaving the game running over the night so I didn't have to load it once morning came. Then, I would spend most of the day diving into the game and every single corner and dialogue I could find. I would try every white check throw, I would do every sidequest available. In spite of all the suffering and bouts of anger this game gave me, I was unable to stop. I was mesmerized the same way you would under the spell of someone you are in love with. I was in love with this game. I am, I still am. I love Disco Elysium more than almost any other game or piece of media. Few things I would hold even closer to my heart than this game.

Disco Elysium is much, much more than just a game, or just an RPG. Sure, I could say something like "Disco Elysium is a WRPG that feels like a Dostoyevski novel directed by David Lynch and the protagonist is Bojack Horseman" and sure it would be the best way to resume it in a sentence, but this game is also the forever in green song of hope, it's the dwellings and ponderings of a bard, wondering about out deep, deep sadness that lies in the almost imposible to describe feeling of loneliness, and how it ties up past with future, from what's gone to what's to come. A study about human will and how free our will truly is. It's a neverending question about what's right and what's meaningful. It's in the process of you unraveling the mysteries of this here past (be it a murder, be it an ex-something, be it your own identity) that you start to map the meaning of things, the hows and the whys, paving the way for our minds to do what they are made to do: judge the state of affairs. Are things good? Is this person to trust? Did I do right? How should things be? None of this questions is easy to answer, and this game knows it and it wants you to aknowledge the fact. It takes time to think about things, to know them, to understand them. You have to sit with your thoughts and puzzle it out. That's out blessing and our curse as human beings: to inhabit the realm of the metaphysical: of that which is not the hic et nunc. It's a blessing because it's the foundation of all of those all so human things that make life worth living, like love and hope, but also it can be an anchor tied to your neck. It's indescribable pain and it's sublime joy. No way to have one without the other as long as we live in the material realm of things.

Like all good poetry that deals with the sadness, it starts with the smalltalk, the mundane, the everyday stuff, breaking the ice on the surface, letting a space for you to dig deeper. Disco Elysium follows the tragic life of Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Harrier Du Bois of the 41st Precinct of the Revachol Citizen Militia, an alcoholic cop drowning in the sadness, driving him to self inflicted brain damage via alcohol abuse. That's how you wake up. In a room in a hotel in the middle of the discrict of Martinaise, a special economic zone where the jurisidction of the RCM barely touches, where you were sent to solve the mistery of a murdered hired mercenary found hanging in a tree behind the hotel. In absolute amnesia, not really knowing who you are, after several days of heavy drinking and unsavoury behaviour in, abandoning his resposibilities and engaging in, plain and simple, selfdestruction. A very convenient plot device to have you and our protagonist have the same basic knowledge of the world around you. Stepping out of the blue, each new step, each new door lets you absorbe the reality and truth of it all: the places, the people, the living, breathing world around us. You are told of the havoc you wreaked, of which you have to take responsibility as the adult human being you are; luckily for you, confused player, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi from the 57th Precinct of the RCM came from the other side of the jurisdicition to investigate why your job hasn't been done and do it with you. With his matter of factly, no-bullshit, straight man attitude, Harrier finds the best possible companion to his persona, no matter what you do... except if you are a fascist and a racist, then you will find no love nor sympathy for you; an inexorable, tortuous ordeal that you are obliged to make along an asshole that hates you just for existing. But that's just a choice. You can choose to be a bigoted asshole, but you can also be a kind man; you can be a drunken disaster or strive to have a better life. From the moment you wake up, but specially after you step outside the Whirling-in-Rags for the first time, it's your perrogative to do whatever you want within the very limited scope of things a human being can do. You can be a neoliberal hussler, you can be a milquetoast social democrat (a.k.a. centrist), you can be a fascist or you can be a communist. You can be a superstar cop or an artistic cop or a sorry cop or a hobo cop. You can solve the case in a number of ways; thoroughly and slowly or fast and superficially. You can make Harrier do a lot of things, and be in different ways, but no matter what you do, there's always something deep in the soul of this very human character that remains the same. You can see it through all the game, through all his interactions: call it his aura, his vibration, call it whatever you want: the truth is Harrier Du Bois has a vast, vast blue soul. One of a deep sadness, a deep longing. The soul of a very flawed and scared human being that has something to say, a song to sing to the world. I think that's probably the greatest literary archievement of this game. All these characters are very three dimensional, fleshed out, and atop the list is, of course, him who we are to guide in order to make something out of the hours that won't come back. To resume, three are the main mysteries in this game: (1) What's going on in this world? (2) Who is our protagonist? (3) Who killed the victim?

Plunged into this world, with the task of answering the big questions, Disco Elysium slowly unravels like a flower on spring comes, unfurling each detail with utmost care, like a braid, intertwining each part at your own pace, on your own terms. Given enough time, given the correct (or maybe wrong) choices, you are to become aware of the horrible ghost that haunts Harrier. You realise Harry has been binge drinking in an attempt to forget this past, this ghost that won't let him live in peace. In a sense, this game has something akin to Undertale, insofar you are punished for trying to push every boundry you are given. The consequences of digging through Harrier's past is to make him aware once again of that which he does not want to face. In a sense, the most ethical thing to do would be to let the poor, aching man oblivious to his past. It's one of the many things Disco Elysium is trying to say: That there's things we cling, and we cling so hard, unwilling to let go because of our ego, because of who we are -or who we think we are- and as ling as we hold onto that, we are unable to move on. We live in the past, longing for a lost future that never will be. Often times I feel like this. My best friend commited suicide five years ago. He was the man I loved the most, in a way I will never love no other man: As a partner, as a best friend. He was the Lennon to my McCartney, the Wilson to my House, the Sasuke of my Naruto, the Claus of my Lucas. It's been five years, and I still cry for him. I still miss him. I miss his voice and I miss his hair and I miss us cooking wonderful weird stuff and I miss us playing music, watching "Workaholics" stoned as fuck. I miss the concerts, I miss the moments we shared the most intimate things, the sunsets listening to Loveless waking down the center of Santiago. It's really hard for me to keep on living knowing there will never be someone like him for me, not the way he did. The private jokes, the years and years knowing each other (11 years we were friends, that's more than anyone else sans my mother). Sometimes I feel this feeling that I should not be happy because it's unfair to be happy in a world where Victor is no longer there by my side. Some days I wake up and I feel it. I feel the sadness, dripping slowly, seeping into my vital horizon, eating any energy I would have for living my life. I know how it feels to live with a ghost around you. You alone, and your ghost. I feel for Harrier's pain because it is my pain too. It's all to familiar. That's why I broke down in tears playing this game. In the karaoke scene. I couldn't take it without feeling it to the deepest of its extent. Never had a videogame torn my heart to pieces in this way since Chapter 6 of Mother 3. Staring in awe, I cried hard for Harry, and I cried hard for myself. I felt so sad he had to know the sadness. I felt so sad I had to know the sadness. But there I was, tears pouring as I stared into the vast, blue soul of a videogame character called Harrier Du Bois, he who came to know love and loss. Longing is something human, we all do, but that much longing only will turn itself backwards into a death wish. Harrier, thank God, despite all his suffering, is someone that still clings to life, to hope. He wants to be alive still -otherwise there'd be no game, wouldn't it? It's his will to live (also known as "Volition") that keeps him on this side of the line that divides the living and the dead. It's because and through this willpower that Harrier will engage with the questions set by the game; it is through this life impuse that we get to know Martinaise and it's people, their hopes and dreams, their expectations and wishes. Through this poverty-ridden wilderness we find reasons and will to do what we must, reflecting upon our own. Would you help kids mount a disco inside a church? Run from one side of town to the other to help some old lady that lost his husband? What are you willing to give up for others? What are you willing to give up for yourself (even if you don't want to give it up)? Disco Elysium is as much a political statement as it is a love letter, and I firmly believe this is a Soviet work of art, much like a Tarkovski film; that is: A work of art that cuts straight into the bone about the mystery of human existence in the midst of our mundane and everyday life of our common lives –within the limits of the world in that work– tying up the different perspectives, from the personal to the universal, from Harry to Iosif to the Phasmid. A Soviet videogame in a post-soviet world. Who would have imagined that? It's like the game in itself were that bullet that kicks in the events of this game: A scream from a reality long gone by, refusing to stop resounding without at least making a last change in the the world. To remind us that longing for a lost future only leads to death, in hope for the best, so that we may work for the real future. For ourselves, for our loved ones, for all of mandkind.

Disco Elysium, like few other games, gives a human face to the struggles of others, letting you wield the power of your will to make this world better for everyone, which, again ties up to the layer of political comentary within the game. Everyone is unhappy in Martinaise, no one feels "complete" nor "satisifed" with the way things are. Some would only fight for themselves, some would like to keep things as they are, some would like to fight for their friends, family and community, and it's up to you how much you do to make things better for this world. You can be someone that just speaks about communism but never helps their community, you can be a fascist that does charity to make themself sleep at night. It's clear you are no God and won't bring the dictatorship of the proletariat on your own, but there's so much you can do as a human being. Theory and practice either go hand in hand or they become a contradiction inside yourself. Such emapthy will eventually lead to extend that same respect to other living beings. Animals, plants, geists, even God themself. But to come to these grand realisations, one ought to sit down with their thoughts and ponder a long time. To be honest about my life experience, it takes years, and I don't think it could be any other way. And to write them down, –to make them into an interactive experience like Disco Elysium– takes a Bard that has sat and pondered all these thoughts for all of us, someone that has experienced the sadness one way or another, someone that knows how all these threads are tied together: the question of who we are, of where we are, and what we ought to do. It takes a philosopher to make a meaning of all of this. This game is an invitation to be that philosopher for your life, to be the captain of your ship, to be the bard that sings the unsung. Disco Elysium is the forever in green song of hope; the song that demands you to stand up and sing with all your heart. The song that through wonder and woe rings through your soul, piercing like an bullet.

The name of that bullet is Love.

Most of the big RPGs of the past few years are like watching a movie, but this one is like reading a book.