I’d built this experience up in my head, and here Harry was on-stage, and I realized that I had a single check in front of me. I had to talk to people and track it down and really think about where the hell I might find a music album in the half-ruined, post-war situation that is the city of Revachol.Īnd when I found it, I performed it, and there in the middle of Disco Elysium I knew that something special was going on. Performing karaoke was a quest in my log, and it took me a while to find the appropriate musical track for perfect accompaniment of Harry’s half-remembered anthem to sadness. As the song says, “I have been so glad here / looking forward to the past here.” It’s a melancholy track, “ The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns,” that tells a short and oblique story about what once existed and has been lost. Outside, he’s alienated by the society and systems that he can’t remember but which are nevertheless still in conversation with those internal aliens.Īt the beginning of the game, before he can remember his own name, Harry decides that he wants to perform karaoke of a song he’d been jamming to during the bender that led up his complete loss of memory. Inside of him, his skills are alien advisors. Harry converses with them all as if they’re equivalent entities in the world who can help him out. A conversation might take you through dialogue with a gardener, Harry’s conceptualization of abstract ideas in the world (the skill Conceptualization), and his partner Kim Kitsuragi. Can you solve the case of who killed the hanging man and why? Can you recover your missing badge and gun? Can you return to your status as a cop, or do you even want to? These questions sit on the surface of the game, but they also plumb into the depths of DuBois’s mind. The work of it is organizing all of these in time and space. The game justifies itself with mystery and recovery: Recovering Harry’s memory, recovering the case, and just generally getting his shit together. For reasons unknown, he drank and drugged himself into a stupor so deep and annihilative that he wiped his entire memory. Except he failed, or decided not to, or couldn’t get a handle on it.
The player character, Harry DuBois, showed up to take care of it. There’s a man hanging by the neck in a courtyard around the back of a hostel, and someone called it in a week ago. As the cop show once said, all the pieces matter.Īnd Disco Elysium is a cop game. The city block shifts and moves beneath your eyes and your feet and your fingertips. There is nothing so small that it does not matter. All of those things compound on each other and worm their way, intricately, into conversations and small moments and the big plot points of the game. What you said in a conversation at the very beginning of the game, the skill points you put in during character creation, and your choice of bedtime. What item you picked up 15 hours ago matters. What you’re holding in your hand during a conversation matters. It takes this space and its fundamental connections and takes them to the most extreme place that it can: One where everything matters. The circle of political life goes around and around.Ĭrucially, Disco Elysium doesn’t just posit cause and effect and go from there.
People have bosses, bosses have ideologies, ideologies have material expressions in the world, and people live in those expressions. Substituting a depth of conversation and interaction with the world for Spector’s focus on simulation, Disco Elysium is based around the fundamental linkages between things in the world.
Seven years later we have Disco Elysium, a top-down roleplaying game that takes place entirely in an area slightly larger than a city block.
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