Disclaimer: This article will not serve as a game critique or an introduction. I’m assuming that the reader has already played the game. Instead, this piece will contain a collection of random thoughts and moments of Aristocratic catharsis.
I began playing Disco Elysium on the console after it became available on the PlayStation. In retrospect, it wasn’t the wisest decision. The graphics optimization on the PlayStation version underperformed, resulting in numerous annoying bugs. The game’s centerpiece is its self-indulgent, 1000k-word writing, and while the large TV screen did enhance the graphics, it didn’t particularly aid in digesting this extensive text. Despite having adapted to paperless media in this tech era, I’m more accustomed to reading on a screen no larger than 15 inches. Regardless, I managed to read the equivalent of two volumes of War and Peace twice on my television. What’s worse, I am planning to do this for a third time.
Disco Elysium is not a groundbreaking open-world game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s a digitized version of a tabletop RPG, where you initialize your character’s stats, roll the dice, and select actions from a list of choices in the rule book. However, in this digitized version, more sophisticated rules can be handled than a human Game Master can manage. Your stats directly influence your interaction with the plot and the environment. In other words, changing your character’s initial stats yields a different version of the story.
During my third playthrough, I ventured into the “hardcore mode”— a more difficult mode unlocked after the game’s first completion. I chose to create a character with an extremely sensitive personality attributing 1 point to intellect, 5 to psyche, 5 to physique, and 1 to motorics. This meant that my character would be an overly sentimental and muscular person with a slow reflex and low intelligence. This may not sound as terrible as one might think as a game character. After all, the game’s design allows for completion regardless of play style. However, adopting statistical rigor into our gameplay would reveal that skills based on motorics and intellect are often more useful for progressing the plot. Being a strategic game player myself, I deliberately chose the least beneficial build for my character.
As expected, the low perception level of my character incapacitated him to even inspect a broken window after he woke up completely blank from a destructive hangover. I also failed the encyclopedia check in my attempt to identify the source of the disco-star grin on my face. However, after playing with this unique build for a couple of hours, I found that my character did bring some unexpected minor benefits.
One advantage of the base stats I chose was that I didn’t have to worry about my character dying from an impromptu heart attack or a wave of despair. In a previous playthrough with lower physique stats, my character died because he sat on an NPC’s uncomfortable chair, kicked a mailbox, or punched a payphone. Any minor inclination toward vandalism would potentially punish me my character’s life. This time, the long health and morale bars at the screen’s lower left look reassuring. So I rushed out of the hostel and kicked the mailbox without suffering repercussions.
After deciding to resist Klaasje’s beauty, a choice I decided against in my first two playthroughs—being manipulated by attractive women is, problematic origins aside, almost a trope in the noir genre—I encountered the first instance where my build benefited me. Having a low perception and weak suggestion skills would make it harder to accumulate money through plogging and panhandling, but even my hotel manager could be intimidated by the authority that high psyche stats can lend. I found that I could pay him only 30 reals for the drinks I owed. Unimaginable!
A lingering concern was whether my character could manage to decipher the world’s ultimate truth with his limited thinking capacity. In prior playthroughs, leveling up your character’s intellect led to them asking the right questions when talking to the right people: what’s wrong with this failing city? This question would in turn lead you to the game’s ultimate truth. First, the world is inevitably doomed because our continent is surrounded by “the pale,” a form of mist that embodies the concept of death. Secondly, within the city lies a “baby pale,” akin to a growing black hole that eats up all the good things that could happen to the city’s residents.
To me, this is the most enticing part of the game. The externalizing of misfortune is usually more subtle. The game basically says that everything in this universe is SUPPOSED to be dreadful and miserable because there is a literal and effective bane to shoulder the blame.
When I reached the part of the game where my character was supposed to ask THE insightful question and failed, I thought, maybe I would finish the game as an oblivious idiot. But then, a new bubble popped up in the game: listen to the wind.
That moment, I understood what the pale was.
When a friend introduced this game to me, she said it was a rip-off of Soviet Union history, which meant it couldn’t be bad. This argument completely convinced me, and I quickly developed specific expectations for the game’s tone—it needed to be melancholic and carry a post-apocalyptic aura, flavored with a distinct leftist cynicism and nostalgia. My expectation was met the moment I heard Instrument of Surrender, a melody that played every time the player exits the Whirling-In-Rags, delivered by the French horn with ambient noise accompaniment. It reminded me of Dvorak’s New World Symphony for a fleeting moment, before I sensed a nostalgic hue of past glory followed by a great defeat—”That’s right,” I thought to myself, “that captures the essence.”
I am strangely comforted by my character’s constant failures and every single bit of the plot’s absurdities in this game. When prompted to listen to the wind, I was reminded of the game creator’s background. It made me realize that “the pale” was just the ultimate form of wishful thinking. It was a feeble hope that THE ideology would provide us with more than a framework to view the world and feel a never-ending sadness. THE revolution fails not because of its intrinsic weaknesses but because of some inherent failing in the world. There is a reason, then, for all the misfortunes that befall people, a cause for all the emptiness we feel in our hearts.