Disco Elysium

Book cover of Disco Elysium.
by Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere, Argo Tuulik, Cash DeCuir, Olga Moskvina, and Siim Sinamäe
Book 2 of the Elysium series

Review

Disco Elysium, written by Robert Kurvitz et al., is a role-playing game produced by ZA/UM. It’s the story of Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, a man who wakes up with no memories and has to solve a murder while learning who he is.

I went into Disco Elysium knowing only that it was highly acclaimed and that you played a detective solving a murder. That didn’t begin to do it justice. Disco Elysium is one of the best video games ever made. The writing is incredible. The voice acting brings every character—and all 24 voices in Harry’s head—to life. The world is exciting, strange, and alive. It’s my favorite video game, and it’s a literary masterpiece.

There Is Nothing; Only Warm, Primordial Blackness

The player controls Harry Du Bois, a man who wakes up almost naked in a trashed hotel room with no memory and has to piece his life back together. Over time, he learns he’s a cop. A damn good one. He’s in Martinaise. He’s there to solve a murder. He was in love once. He blasted his mind into pieces with alcohol and drugs. Harry is the perfect window into Elysium because he knows nothing about himself or the world. This lets the player discover the setting alongside him.

The world of Disco Elysium is almost an alternate history. You can map Elysium to real-world inspirations: Martinaise and Revachol are France; Graad is Russia; Oranje is the Netherlands; Seol is Japan and Korea; Mesque is Spain and Mexico. Even the events and figures in the game have clear analogues: the Antecentennial Revolution and Kras Mazov are the October Revolution and Karl Marx; Samara is Southeast Asia, and the war-crime-ridden conflicts there recall the Korean and Vietnam wars; the EPIS is the European Union.

That familiarity gives you a false sense of security. It makes it easy to dismiss the game’s magical realism. Harry’s 24 talking skills seem like symptoms of psychosis. The cryptid hunters are just local eccentrics. The curse on the doomed commercial area is just bad luck.

Then Joyce Messier tells you about the Pale. That Elysium is a shattered world surrounded by a physics-defying, reality-dissolving mist. Suddenly, all your assumptions collapse. You feel the same confusion Harry must have felt waking from his self-destruction.

After the World, the Pale; After the Pale – The World Again

A major theme of Disco Elysium is how the past has an unshakable grip on the present. Harry is the clearest example: he had a good job, a partner, purpose, a child on the way. He destroyed it all with drugs and alcohol, shattering his mind into fragments. His entire existence is now spent trying to escape the fallout of a past he can’t—and doesn’t want to—remember.

Revachol is the same, haunted by its history. Its buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes from the failed communist revolution. The Coalition warships still float above the city, ready to level it—a reminder that Revachol’s autonomy is an illusion. This influence of the past is woven into reality itself. The Pale is the “rarefied past”: the weight of history, memory, and failure grown so dense that it erases the present.

Disco Elysium is a tragedy. Revachol doesn’t get its revolution. The Pale continues its advance. But the story of Harry doesn’t have to be. Maybe there is hope for him; something to get him back on his feet for good this time: his new partner, Kim Kitsuragi.

This Man Would Hurl Himself in Death’s Way to Save You

Kim Kitsuragi. I don’t know how to describe him in a way that fully captures who he is. He’s your partner, the anchor who lets you drift but never lets you get lost. You need that, because the game throws you straight into chaos—you don’t know who you are or where you are—but knowing you can trust Kim gives you something solid to hold onto.

Kim is kind, dependable, utterly loyal. Harry’s Esprit de Corps skill puts it best when they first meet: “If an assault were launched on this building right now – if the windows came crashing down and the whole world descended upon you – this man would hurl himself in death’s way to save you. You are sure of this – but why?” And he’s more than that. He isn’t a sycophant. He is one of the best-developed characters in any medium. He has his own history, his own goals. Uncovering them, and building your relationship with him, is what makes the game so powerful.

There’s one scene that stayed with me. Kim and I had just discovered a car sunken along the coast, hidden beneath the tide. Kim knew immediately that it was mine, wrecked during my earlier bender. But he said nothing. He just sat with me on a swing set for hours, talking, whistling, waiting, until I was ready to face what I’d done. That’s who Kim is.

Something Beautiful Is Going to Happen

The world is doomed. The Pale will destroy it. The beauty of Disco Elysium lies in the contradiction that there is no future, but there is hope. It’s bleak, but so full of humor and absurdity and friendship and sorrow. In a way, that’s the story of life. The ending is certain for all of us, but the journey there can be wonderful.

The writing is haunting, with wonderfully crafted prose that reminds me of masterpieces like William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!1 It finds beauty in the mundane and the decay that permeates Martinaise. This is never clearer than in the scene describing Harry watching his lost love as her streetcar recedes into the distance, which paints the picture perfectly in my mind:

Sparks fall like snow from the bow collector of streetcar no 42. Slowly down the slope from Voyager Road and then east on the B206, across the river, to where there are no closed factories or ruins. To study. At the academy. Electrical cables run overhead and the bow collector draws across them like a musical instrument. A flash. She’s standing at the rear window, holding onto the rail. In a spring coat, waving at you…

It’s early in the morning. The world is dark blue. The sparks light her face. A delicate composition of triangles. The street seems to grow longer, like in a dolly zoom. And there’s something in the air as you stand there and wave back at the shape growing smaller and smaller. Something that has always been there. A great see-through world. The tenderness you feel. The ghost of Revachol between you, carrying your signals. The holy messenger.

The prose is brought to life by the fantastic cast of voice actors. Lenval Brown anchors the performance as the narrator and the voice of Harry’s intellect, while the more primal parts of his brain are voiced by Mikee W. Goodman. The contrast between Brown’s deep, measured voice and Goodman’s more manic style perfectly illustrates the different states of mind Harry is in. Jullian Champenois makes Kim feel calm, collected, and so cool. You want to impress him, to show him that you’re not the failure the world thinks you are. Honestly, it’s the voices that pulled me in. As beautiful as the prose is, it’s the voices that give it weight.

The music by Sea Power matches the tone perfectly. The songs are ethereal and melancholic, but a bright punch of trumpet occasionally pulls you out of the gloom. My biggest regret is that I can never play Disco Elysium for the first time again, but listening to the soundtrack is the closest I can get. It instantly takes me back to the moment I first heard each track.

No; This Is Somewhere to Be; This Is All You Have, but It’s Still Something

Disco Elysium reminded me of a few other works:

Cold and Heavy – Like Truth

Disco Elysium is not just my favorite game; it is a testament to what the medium can produce. It answers the question of “Can a video game be art?” so emphatically that the question itself seems obsolete. It shows that a game can be a literary work that rivals the greatest novels, and can be surprisingly fun while doing it.

  1. William Faulkner’s work and Disco Elysium share more than fantastic prose. Both follow the Gothic tradition, focusing on decaying settings where the oppressive weight of a failed past suffocates the present. William Faulkner’s post-Civil War South and the post-revolutionary city of Martinaise are haunted by their histories and populated by characters psychologically scarred by that trauma. ↩