Marc Aboim
“The mask of humanity falls from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone – everything you love, all the love and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.”
Disco Elysium is a choice-based, point-and-click, role-playing game based on the fictional city of Revachol. You wake up as an amnesiac detective after going on a drinking bender the night before, with no recollection of even the most basic concepts of this world or even yourself.
One of the first things you realize is that you are indeed a detective, there’s a dead man hanging outside the hotel where you woke up, and you’re supposed to solve this murder. But this is only a facade – Disco Elysium is much more than just a game about solving a murder, it’s about finding who you are and how you fit into this world.
As the plot unfolds, we get more insight into who this detective is and what actions of his past brought us here, while also getting an understanding of what is here, what this town that we’re in is like, what the people are like and why, and what social conditions led them to be here. This world is heavily thought through and offers an astonishing critique of our political system while also delving into our individual construct and making the player take a stance on several social dilemmas.
The Psychology of Disco Elysium
“There is nothing. Only warm primordial blackness. Your conscience ferments in it – no larger than a single grain of malt. You don’t have to do anything any more. Ever. Never ever.”
This quote is the first piece of text you’re presented with in the game; it’s also part of your first choice: to accept your non-existence, or to question it and be confronted with glimpses of what it was like to be alive, all the pain and unacceptance. It’s this or the silence.
A big focus of this game is how you develop your character’s psyche and intellect, how you rediscover who your character is, and that is pretty much dependent on the psychological choices you make. The game’s diverse dialogue options give you multiple constructs of who your character can be, which strongly influences your path, but you’re not at the helm; there’s a constant back and forth with the amnesiac side of your character and the memories trying to get back and show you who you really were. The strong point of the game is the rejection of the old self. Not knowing exactly who you were, the thought of it scares you, and that is exactly the pain of being alive that the game presents to us right away. So with all the choices you have, there’s always this haunting in the back of your mind, something that’s creeping up, but you don’t know what.
This spiral of thoughts, this almost journey through the circles of hell, does not only apply to your character. You can see in your encounters how many lives have passed through this place, how many turns these people have been through. This carousel is deeply involved in the murder you’re investigating, and it actually surpasses it. More than a detective solving a murder, you’re a fragile breeze strolling through a volatile field of cemented memories, and it is up to you to save them.
The Politics of Disco Elysium
“Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change — not even incremental change. It is control”
Revachol was once the capital of a powerful empire known as the Suzerainty of Revachol, but 50 years prior to when the game is set, the last suzerain was overthrown by communist revolutionaries. The Commune of Revachol came to be through a civil war between the Communists and the Royalists, which ended when the then king was killed in a conflict, formalising the end of the monarchy.
But the Commune didn’t last forever. The Coalition of Nations that was created through the alliance of the nations surrounding Revachol (who were anti-revolutionary) managed to gain the upper hand after one of the anti-aircraft guns situated in a sea fortress seized by the communists failed to work during an invasion. With that, they managed to capture Martinaise and other areas of Revachol. There was never an official surrender from the Communist Party, but Revachol was signed over to the Coalition, ending the eight years of the Commune, and the communists and anarchists were massacred and buried in mass graves.
This brings us to the present. Revachol is still in the hands of the Coalition and is now a neoliberal’s wet dream. After a decade of economic success, however, Revachol has fallen into recession and is now a vital hub for cheap labour. Martinaise is the small district that serves as the backdrop to this game; the Coalition is not as present anymore, giving the Dockworkers’ Union legitimacy over this district. But their ideology does seem to be far from the socialist one we’d expect from a union.
What about our character, though? The game allows you to choose who you want to be; you can side with the racist truck driver if you want, you can be a centrist (or “moralist” as it’s called in Elysium), you can be a full-blown fascist, but where the writing really shines through is when you follow the communist path. The coalition and its Moralist ideology is no longer sustainable but there are no revolutionaries left, besides some small groups of students with which the ideology is somewhat popular, something that does reflect on the character when you pursue the communist alignment, because you end up as caricature of an ultra-leftist, a husk whose biggest revolutionary act is spewing shallow statements like “hang the bourgeoisie” because all that’s left in this world is just that, loose sentences that can be traced to the revolution but no one to tell the tales of it.
This nihilistic view of what is left of our political field does get you thinking about how we got here, and I think this reflection is even more needed now than when the game was released six years ago. You’re left with a mixed bag of emotions, but this pessimistic approach reflects only the past; the future depends on you, make of it what you hope for.
“’A grey rain falls on Martinaise. The city soaks in it, cold and dripping. Waves hit the concrete breakers. The homeless huddle by the fires behind the fences. There, among the shacks, is your home. Stay. Have a drink. Forever.’’
Now on a personal note, while I strongly recommend that people play this game, I can’t recommend buying it. An investor bought out a major share of the game’s studio through some dodgy means, and when the game director and art director questioned this change and asked for documents and financial data, their contracts were immediately terminated. Soon after that, they released the final cut version, which skyrocketed the sales of the game. Meanwhile, most of the original directors, writers and developers have not benefited from this since they were fired.