Disco Elysium and The Things Life Do To Us

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” — Eugene O’Neill, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

Amnesia as a starting point for a role-playing game character is often a device employed to give the player freedom, a blank-slating of a character and a justification for needing explanations of facets of an alternative reality which, to its inhabitants, should be obvious. However, when you ask “What is money?” in Disco Elysium you are met with The Waste Land Of Reality: money is something you currently owe a lot of. You’ve been here for three days and done a lot of damage. You have already pawned most of your possessions for alcohol. Your mind is blank but your body remembers: it’s intoxicated, addicted, old and stiff. Your face frozen into performance, your room trashed. You, the player, have arrived too late. Amnesia is not a starting point, it’s already a consequence.

At first, I played Disco Elysium as if I was myself possessing this body: I would give it dignity, I would respect the people of Martinnaise and my competent partner Kim Kitsuragi, I would solve the case and give this body reprieve for the time I inhabited it. Not a wrong way to play, but the Comedy of Disco Elysium quickly sways you not to preserve this man’s dignity, he does not deserve it; the people of Martinnaise have already made up their mind about you; Kim Kitsuragi -will- have to put up with your bullshit because you have already fucked up majorly and his grace is unmatched by saints; this body has already been pushed beyond its limit, handle it carefully or it does not survive this story. It is the comedy that teaches you to trust the absurdity and concede to collapse while negotiating the ruins of reality with it.

That movement from control into surrender is central to the game’s theme about determinism. The genealogy of freedom. Harry Du Bois, your Main Character, can choose, but he chooses from inside a life already shaped by forces he is not the master of: history, class, heartbreak, alcohol, ideology, neurochemistry, policing, masculinity, the city itself.

This game’s writing has been praised extensively, but I want to talk about a specific device employed masterfully by it: interjection. The game’s Skill System is integrated into its storytelling beautifully. It’s this game’s crown jewel. Skills in this game do not merely improve your odds, they determine what reality becomes available to you, they gain power in the inner committee of your mind. A high skill becomes louder, interjecting more and more often, generating thoughts independently of your willing them. It determines what you can pay attention to, which little bubbles you can click in the world to interpret it, to produce it accordingly. The phenomenology is tactile: High Perception adds density to the world, you notice texture, smells, traces, stains, hidden gestures, hidden secrets peeking out; Conceptualization creates aesthetic connections; Inland Empire creates symbolic connections; Encyclopedia offers facts with the anxious conviction that knowledge can stabilize a collapsing person; Shivers makes your skin more porous for Revachol to enter; Volition keeps trying to hold the Self together. In this way character building becomes, inevitably, psychological bias.

Up to a certain point, you trust this inner committee. They are your chosen way into the world, but this falls apart ingeniously. During a certain conversation with the character Klaasje, who has all the reason to be taken as a suspect in the case you are investigating, Volition suddenly warns you everything the other skills have been telling you is untrustworthy, they have been compromised. Desire, beliefs, beauty, compassion are all being played by the interlocutor, not you. Klaasje is manipulating you and you want to believe her. The point here is not, even, to trust what Volition is saying (the mind tries to rescue itself using another voice generated by the same damaged system), but that now you know there is no director in this committee, there is no correspondence between the truth of what you are and what thoughts come to you, no 1:1 correspondence between your perception and the world, which is playing you as you are playing it. Furthermore, a high skill is not always a benefit, a low skill is not always a fault.

The game confesses through the novelty dice maker: “That’s why people like role-playing games. You can be whoever you want to be. You can try again. Still, there’s something inherently violent even about dice rolls. It’s like every time you cast a die, something disappears. Some alternative ending, or an entirely different world…”

The Thought Cabinet develops this idea further. Your personality is a violent composition forming from obsessions that can enter your mind from unexpected, seemingly inconsequential circumstances. These elements, thoughts, can distort you and make you worse while you are grappling with them, they take time and impose costs, then they alter you, not always for the best either, becoming part of a shaky narrative of self. “The Precarious World” concentrates the game’s determinism into a single unstable mechanic. It begins with the childish wish to win at everything: work, love, sex, politics, money, identity, life. During its internalization, red checks fail. Once resolved, both critical successes and critical failures become more likely. The world grows sharper at both edges. The thought does not give Harry mastery over chance. It makes chance more extreme.

Content and structure collaborate towards the narrative’s central themes in cohesion. They are present everywhere. Clothes modify your skills and thus your world in self-hypnotic fashion, they change what Harry can attempt and what he can imagine himself to be. All of us do this: the item that we can trust to make us feel and in so feeling be more sexy, more comfy, more confident, more creative. The city of Revachol itself is a historical body, mirroring Harry’s damaged self: it’s occupied, ashamed, wounded, exhausted, full of old ideologies and unfinished grief. Harry and Revachol are grappling with how to move on from collapse. Waiting for a star to shine in their name, redeeming their ruin.

The Pale is a cosmological version of the wound. Come into contact with it and the space between things stops holding, meaning is eroded, your voice is swallowed, your mind shattered in its image. A surrounding absence, the isolas’ great outside: a substance or anti-substance that covers most of the world and makes ordinary continuity impossible. It is crossed through technology, radio, mathematics, and institutional courage, but it damages those who pass through it. The Pale is filled, somehow, with the past: with human information, with what has already happened, with signals that should have vanished but continue to press against the world. It surrounds the present, but resists its impulses to define and give shape. This is, again, in dialogue with Harry’s predicament: a man separated from his own continuity, still affected by what he cannot access.

The word “disco” carries its own demolished history. Historically, Disco Demolition Night was a 1979 Chicago event where disco records were blown up at Comiskey Park, leading to a riot; later interpretations have debated how much the backlash against disco was entangled with racism, homophobia, and resentment toward the Black, Latino, and LGBTQ communities associated with disco’s rise. The game understands the impulse to demolish forms of life that feel too excessive, too bodily, too feminine, too queer, too collective, too joyous, too humiliatingly alive. Disco in the game is already ghostly: a dead style, a failing shimmer. Though Harry wears disco as a beaten-up shell of a personality (personality, as we’ve already discussed, carries costs as it tries and fails to impose a cohesive narrative onto the chaos of any person), but I feel that by helping Acele, Andre, Noid and Egg Head establish their anodic dance music nightclub (the kids let me name it!! Disco Elysium!!), I helped Harry move on, turning the broken shimmer into a new star of hope. This was when I recognized the game is optimistic: (again,) a comedy, not a tragedy. Not cynical.

The game is, unexpectedly, congruent with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It dramatizes defusion constantly: thoughts speak, but they are not automatically truth. It turns self-as-context into interface: Harry is not any one voice, urge, memory, ideology, or shame-state, but the unstable field in which they appear. It demands acceptance, not as passive resignation, but as contact with the present, with all its wounds and wreckage. And it keeps returning to values, because beneath all the failed identities there remains the question of what Harry will move toward now. ACT’s core processes aim at psychological flexibility: contacting the present and persisting or changing behavior in the service of chosen values. Is this not what the game is asking of the player? Is this not the whole problem with Harry, with Revachol? Here I’d like the reader to revisit the Eugene O’Neill quote I introduced this essay with. What if, by the grace of encounters, we let go of our True Self, What We’d Like To Be, and move with the present, towards what really matters every day in our reality? This is what I felt when I helped the kids with their nightclub, or when talking to the Washerwoman and feeling her wisdom and kindness I refused to help Evrart turn her village into a “youth center”.

This is why the Deserter’s reveal, despite being a previously unknown character, feels satisfyingly mundane. The present to him feels like betrayal. He is completely fused with his thoughts, his ideologies, his self-story. The revolution failed, but to him it never became past tense; it became the only tense available. He watches the world continue without permission and experiences continuation itself as an insult. People love, fuck, unionize, drink, betray, build, dance, get old, become ridiculous, become ordinary. He cannot forgive them for living after the sacred thing died. Everything the game has been saying about history, fixation, ideology, and the violence of the past suddenly appears in one sick, lonely, armed body.

This is where the game’s optimism lives. Harry can still continue, still receive reality. He can still be embarrassed by it, moved by it, transformed by it. He can still encounter something outside his self-story and fail, briefly, to reduce it to himself. The Deserter cannot. He looks at the world and sees betrayal everywhere because betrayal is the only shape his world can take. The Insulindian phasmid’s appearance is absurd, fragile, almost indecently beautiful after so much human ruin. It does not redeem, however, it simply exists. It proves that reality still exceeds the systems people use to destroy and explain one another. The world contains something the Deserter did not account for, something Harry barely deserved to see. This is the grace of alterity, of encounters.

This is Kim Kitsuragi. His presence does not redeem Harry, but it makes Harry visible to himself. He decides to give Harry a chance, to treat him with enough dignity and respect to allow him to earn more. It is not because of Harry he does this. This is how Kim is, treating people this way is a value to him. Still, it’s a decision he makes everyday, even with Harry. He is not rigid, his patience has limits, but that is what makes it meaningful. Kim acts as a foil for Harry because he is just living his life in contact with what matters to him in the most meaningfully mundane way possible. Unlike Harry, he is always unseduced by Grand Narratives, of self or politics. He is concerned with what he can do. What that means for him. Not with dreams of Superstardom and Revolution.

Harry, at his best, can still be surprised. That is a modest form of salvation in the game. He can stand before the phasmid and be reduced to wonder, receive Kim’s grace and do his best to return it. He can help a group of kids build a nightclub in a church and let them give their own meaning to the dead word “disco”, while turning it into something communal and hopeful again. He can speak to the Washerwoman and feel the moral gravity of ordinary decency. He can be seen by others without immediately converting the encounter into proof of his greatness or damnation.

The good ending understood this better than a grand ending would have. After the Pale, the phasmid, the failed revolution, the murder, the corpse, the nightclub, the dream, the city speaking through the skin, the conclusion becomes almost administrative. People stand around and talk about work, procedure, consequences, credibility, whether Harry can still function, what happened, what happens next. I loved how mundane it was. Harry does not need a cosmic acquittal, but to answer for himself in front of other people and then go on living. A person is made by forces outside his control, and then still has to act (no pun intended).

Disco Elysium is a comedy, but its irony is not a constant. Harry first wears irony as a shield against sincerity, and the game laughs at Harry constantly because Harry is laughable. It makes his every attempt at self-mythology ridiculous, but it never lets the ridicule settle into contempt. The joke keeps opening into pain, and the pain denounces the present, the open wound. It knows that grand narratives are broken, embarrassing, historically dangerous, personally humiliating. It also knows that people cannot live without meaning, without commitment, without some wager placed on beauty, politics, love, friendship, work, dance music, insects, the possibility of another morning. The game is too intelligent to believe simply, and too alive to stop believing entirely. The comedy breaks open the false dignity of the ego so that something more vulnerable can appear beneath it. The absurd line, the failed check, the horrible karaoke, the little theatrical poses of masculinity and despair: these are all degradations of the fantasy that the self is a stable, heroic, coherent object. Once that fantasy is degraded enough, Harry becomes available to other people.

Disco Elysium is about determinism, yes, but more importantly it’s about the complicated moral consequences of determinism. We are made before we know we are being made. We inherit bodies, histories, addictions, cities, languages, politics, heartbreaks, and voices in the head that speak before we choose them. But there are encounters that loosen the shape. There are moments when the world enters from outside the self-story and something has to respond. Disco Elysium does not ask whether we can become innocent of what made us. We cannot. It asks whether, inside the life that has already happened to us, among the voices that are not fully ours and the ruins we did not choose but continue to enact, we can become just flexible enough to meet something real and not immediately destroy it.