EDIT: This is far and away the most popular thing I’ve ever put on the internet, and with a largely international audience. Just so you know, Disco Elysium also comes up in some of our other articles, but if you’re finding this in June of 2020 or later, we have a new Current Events tag where we’re trying to stay up to date with things — I know it would make me feel gratified to have readers from outside the states keeping up with things. And while we don’t have a Patreon, if you like our work, please consider purchasing my cowriter’s book.

All of the thoughts in your head — arraigned like the characters in a Hieronymous Bosch painting.

The furies are at home
in the mirror; it is their address.
Even the clearest water,
if deep enough can drown.

Never think to surprise them.
Your face approaching ever
so friendly is the white flag
they ignore. There is no truce

with the furies. A mirror’s temperature
is always at zero. It is ice
in the veins. Its camera
is an X-ray. It is a chalice

held out to you in
silent communion, where gaspingly
you partake of a shifting
identity never your own.

“Reflections” by R.S. Thomas

The original title of the subject of today’s piece was No Truce With The Furies — it was pitched as a police procedural RPG, and I learned about it through Steam’s recommendation feature. I had never heard of its writer and deisgner, Robert Kurvitz (who also wrote a novel in this setting, the title of which The Sacred and Terrible Air, lends part of the title to this piece), or its production company, Estonia’s Studio ZA/UM, but Disco Elysium is my tentative pick for game of the year (I need to get a copy of Outer Worlds with this next paycheck — but anyone who knows my taste in video games will know that it’s high praise for me to put a game next to the work of Obsidian.). It is, potentially, my game of the decade, if only because of its weird design approach and novel plot. Though, honestly, it's unwillingness to cater to nerd-bro fascists is refreshing.

So, for those who don’t know: what is Disco Elysium?

This game is, of all things, a police procedural RPG with a surprising depth of thought, as well as deep political and philosophical consideration; it pulls no punches, and layers a naturalistic and emotionally effecting story over the top of a thoroughly-drawn and not-entirely-realistic setting. That’s the thing: when someone can pull of Naturalistic Un-Realism, I sit up and take notice — and I think everyone should, too.

In the game, this is referred to as The Expression and is treated as a horrible thing that you can’t bring yourself to stop doing without herculean effort. — In the game, this is referred to as **The Expression** and is treated as a horrible thing that you can’t bring yourself to stop doing without herculean effort.

In this game, you play the Cop. The Cop is having a bad time, but can't remember why. In fact, he can't remember anything, and the various impulses within your head are speaking to you — whether it is your active imagination (in the form of Conceptualization,) your no-nonsense commitment to realism (in the form of Logic,) your self-destructive appetite (in the form of Electrochemistry,) or your devotion to honor and status (in the form of Authority.) These are all subordinated to progressively deeper and more atavistic portions of yourself: the Limbic System, the Ancient Reptilian Brain, and the Spinal Column (all of which you speak to at different portions of the game — not to overly spoil, but in the discussion with your Spinal Column, it describes each vertebrae as a failed skull, all ready to pop up and take over like the bullets in an automatic weapon’s magazine. The game is full of disturbing images especially if, like me, you mainlined Inland Empire, the which is essentially the dream-logic skill.)

The Cop wakes up naked one day in a destroyed hostel room, having drank and partied himself into oblivion for…some reason. Your first tasks are to recover your clothing, then to discover who you are and meet up with a temporary partner, because you’re on a case.

Specifically, you’re there to investigate the dead man that’s been hanging up in the yard behind the hostel for a week, who you have just left hanging there.

The Cop is not a together person.

Kim Kitsuragi, portrayed here in the marginally icon-inspired style of the game, along with a halo to indicate his saintly patience with your antics.

But your new partner, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, is there to help you get your shit together and work the case. And you can prove to be an effective, if eccentric, asset. Or you can prove to be the equivalent of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Frank Reynolds with a badge and gun (provided you can find them.) Or you can be a sad-sack milquetoast ashamed of the mess he’s made of his life. Or you can be a revanchist communist intent on using the position of Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Or you can ditch it all to hunt cryptids and help a group of speed freaks establish a night club in a church. Or you can be a mixture of these things.

Look, there’s a reason that the Washington Post described it as “riveting delirium.” They felt so strongly about it that the put it in the title of the review.

I was originally holding off on writing about it because I wanted to finish it before I elucidated a theory about the emergence of a genre I’m thinking of as the “weird procedural.” Having finished it this evening, I feel the need to discuss it in particular.

The tipping point, the moment where I knew that this game deserved a dedicated piece written about it, came (spoiler alert) deep in a nest of side-quests, where my apocalypse-obsessed, communist supercop with an actual art degree helped a trio of rave kids set up a night club in an abandoned church that had been constructed to contain a 2mm hole in the sidewall of reality. They had to share the church with a computer-programmer-cum-crusading-scientist studying the hole in reality and the drug-addled mystic who lived right by the hole. I had helped these kids combine their electronica with a local folk song and the sound of the world ending, and then taught them how to dance properly and dragged my straight-laced-partner into it: four speed-freak rave kids, two cops, a scientist and a homeless man creating a technique to try to hold off the end of the world with dance music and joy. And that’s a sidequest. That’s a subplot. And it didn’t feel out of place at that level (spoilers end.)

Specifically, there are three, qualities I want to discuss about Disco Elysium here in the review, now that I have sang its praises enough. One has to do with the world it is set in, the second is the way it approaches identity, and the third is the way it approaches conflict.

The world of the game is vast and complex, but you never leave a single neighborhood, Martinaise, a lower-class industrial neighborhood in Revachol, formerly the capital of the world, but now under occupation by the other nations of the world. The nature of this ultra-tight focus is commented upon in the VICE review of the game, which was part of what encouraged me to take the plunge and actually buy it. The emphasis on location and hyperlocalism really drew me in, but it wasn’t the only thing that helped me enjoy the game. However, what I want to draw attention to is the fundamentally metachronic nature of the setting — Metachrony being defined in the piece that I wrote about the band Blackbird Raum as “a work of metachrony is something that uses a temporal flattening of the syntax to serve a particular purpose of the syntax.” That is it hearkens back to a prior era in a way that makes it present without softening it.

Note also the industrial design — this machine has more in common with a horse-drawn carriage than a sports car, but it’s utterly believable within the setting.

Revachol is still recovering from the Antecentennial Revolution — something halfway between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, where the Communists executed the cocaine-addled Suzerain by tossing him under a streetcar. In addition, the police of the setting — the Revachol Citizen’s Militia — regularly wear highwayman’s cloaks in the course of their patrolling, and you encounter at least one character clearly dressed in a style more reminiscent of a muskateer or grenadier in the French military than a modern soldier, but there is no disconnect. The aesthetic is not only new but points to a method to generate the new: it has been so thoroughly thought out that these things have been set as equivalently believable within this setting and so the fusion of these two disconnected periods of history have merged, temporarily in my mind, into a third thing that draws equally from the two.

Each with a distinct character and temperament.

The second point, that of identity, is that the main character is not supposed to be a hero — he is supposed to be a cog in a much larger machine that takes in the chaos of day to day life and produces stability out of it. This is not necessarily a functional or effective machine, but it is a machine nonetheless, and he is supposed to be more akin to a drillbit — a specialized tool — than any sort of crusading investigator (which I think is something of a hallmark of the procedural.) This is reflected by the fact that he is, himself, something of an organization. Within his head, he has a full cast of sometimes-functional, sometimes-dysfunctional sub-personalities that reflect his various skills. This is apparently the result of some serendipity — the character designer had to take over the work of someone designing skill icons, and produced a character for each one. The end result is a game skeptical of the idea of a unitary self: you are, instead, a consensus reached by all of the various skills and ideas within your head, a sorry of psychological democracy. It's a fascinating sketch of the mind.

Lastly, I want to talk about the approach to conflict: there is a grand total of one unavoidable combat in the game and — beyond that — the game lacks a dedicated combat system. This is an extraordinary and bold move for an RPG to take, given that the genre is often synonymous with grueling, tactical combat that leaves mountains of corpses behind. The game makes it clear that killing someone —or even allowing someone to die — is a failure on your part, and it is your job to make sure that as many people as possible come out of everything alive (if only this were how the police always worked. A discussion for another time.) I think that this is a fascinating reorientation of the genre’s tropes, and I look forward to seeing the influence of this game play out.

Well-drawn characters like Germaine Egg Head, who I accidentally turned into an Acid Communist in my play-through: “NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR! NO NATION BUT TRANCE NATION!”

There is more that I feel should be said about this game — especially handling of politics and ideology, the well-conceived but inexpertly-implemented Thought Cabinet system both spring to mind, the design ethos they elucidated about tabletop roleplaying, and there were several well-drawn characters that I wish to praise, from the cryptozoologists to force-of-nature-delinquent Cuno and the Rave kids — but I need to go and deal with a storage unit, and so I need to sign off.

※

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To Breathe the Sacred and Terrible Air: On Disco Elysium by ZA/UM