Disco Elysium is Probably the Best Detective Game of All Time into Infinity: A Writing Retrospective
From the first stirrings of atmosphere that we get from 2019’s Disco Elysium by ZA/UM, the world is shrouded in mystery. Two all but disembodied voices tally up sides of an upcoming conflict that will ultimately go unseen before one mentions the name of our protagonist, Harry. Not that we know that Harry is our protagonist. Not that we know anything much at all about the world of Disco Elysium.
And that’s the point. We don’t know much of anything. What greater mystery can there be than the nature of the world around us, which is similar in some ways for the proverbial player, but alien at the same time?
A lot has been said about Disco Elysium. So much so that I probably don’t need to be writing this, but here we are, at the writing for me and the reading for you. Are we spending our time wisely? Who cares? I’m not one for questioning how I spend my time. After all, I’ve sunken 102.9 hours into multiple runs of Disco Elysium. I have every steam achievement (before what remains of ZA/UM added a photo mode, for reasons we can only begin to fathom (and not in a good way)). I’ve experienced nearly all that the game has to offer (this used to say “all that the game has to offer, but then, well, what remains of ZA/UM added a photo mode, for reasons we can only begin to fathom (and not in a good way)).
What have I learned in all these playthroughs of 2019’s very loved darling? I think I’ve learned two things, really, and maybe a third if I’m honest. The first is something I always knew and hoped but it’s good to be confirmed here: you can pull off anything stylistically as long as the execution is perfect. The second is a little more of a stretch, but here it is: being a detective in the fictional sense is an awesome way to explore an unfamiliar world, doubly so if said detective has amnesia.
We’ll explore these two points further in, but I mentioned a third lesson and will not continue until I name it in full, that being - I do not know a goddamned thing about Disco Elysium. For all the time I’ve spent immersed in its world, inhabiting Harry DuBois and solving the murder that is at the centerpiece of this particular story, it amazes me how much I do not understand Disco Elysium on a fundamental level. I’m not sure there are many who do understand it, or can, really, because the game, while it can be defined and explored in very familiar terms, verges on the edge of pure magic. Of course science we don’t understand often looks a lot like magic, so let’s dive into trying to understand what makes Disco Elysium so good.
As Long as the Execution is Perfect
At the base level, Disco Elysium is a few things: a visually stunning detective story with over a million fully voiced lines, most of which are various parts of the protagonist’s psyche either failing or passing dice rolls to let you know more about your surroundings. If that sentence suggests that the game is a lot of things, good, that was the point. The real point is that a collection of separate pieces of this many jarring categories does not necessarily make for a good experience. Adding various pieces of plastic does not necessarily make a fire better even if they are of different colors and sizes. Despite what it does to the fire’s color (please, no one burn plastic).
There are so many factors of Disco Elysium that on paper sound like a mess to try to gel together. Watercolor inspired landscapes with impressionistic flair. Role playing game stats that veer toward the abstract such as “Shivers” and “Volition” that are tied to game mechanics and function close to the old “knowledge” system in table top systems such as Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. A main character with amnesia who is put into a role of authority, even more so the role of a cop in a town known for trying to police themselves. The ability to slot a concept into a thought cabinet to spend a couple of in-game hours ruminating that can result in either a better understanding (and bonus stats) or a complete change in personality (the realization of one’s core philosophy). Dice rolls. All of these things on their own could carry a game or story with compelling force if done well, but put them all in the same box and it runs the risk of feeling as though someone emptied out their junk drawer before moving house.
These are your skills.
What saves Disco Elysium from feeling like a bogged down gimmick-laden nightmare of a game is a deft touch. Each of these elements are given the weight and importance they need to have in as soft an introduction as possible to hold off any feeling of pressure that the player might feel when they don’t quite grasp the meaning of it. Some of the first framing of our protagonist Harry comes from the abstraction of his psyche talking to him in order to rouse him. This inner dialogue continues throughout the entire game and is the only real handhold the player has on the situation, and it’s cutting. Harry’s broken psyche does not like himself. It’s a taunting, jabbing antagonist that does little but mock the current state we start in as Harry and it barely lets up at all throughout the course of the game.
But it does so in waves! That’s the genius of the deft touch. We might get the hint of these disembodied voices not liking the protagonist, but the realization that these are the inner shattered thoughts - disembodied in the literal sense of the word - of Harry does not sink in until the player has walked through the city of Martinese, perhaps examined the body, and met the inhabitants of the world. The pacing is immaculate. We get that Disco Elysium is weird from the get go, but we don’t understand the depths of its weirdness until we’re submerged into the world and caught up in the literal plot and game of it all. We’re intrigued by waking up in a trashed hotel room and baited by our first interaction with Miss Orjane Disco Dancer (she literally gives us our first clue to our identity - we are a cop) that is exacerbated by the fact there is a body hanging from a tree and we are responsible as the one charged with solving the murder.
You spend your first day learning about the immediate surroundings, the immediate goal from a gaming standpoint, and the immediate complication (you have amnesia, Harry, and boy can you just let people know) and when it’s time to turn in, the game hits you over the head with the cementation that this game is going to continue to get even weirder still. As your conversation in your dream state with what could be the corpse still hanging from the tree and glowing like a disco ball ends and the camera pans up to reveal the title as the music swells, the first snapshot of the game is complete - the vertical slice demo is over - and it’s time to put on the outlandish tie hanging from the ceiling fan in your hotel room and get to work.
From the outside, the elevator pitch of Disco Elysium must look like a complete and total trainwreck. You want to make a video game for gamers where the “action” is having the mental fortitude to deal with the sorry state that the protagonist finds themselves in? You want to make it possible for the player to trigger a Game Over from the protagonist feeling so sorry for themselves that they just give up? And you want a convoluted stat system where only one category out of four is tied to real world attributes like strength and agility and the other three are more conceptualized abstractions such as “Esprit de corps,” which according to you is sort of unspoken bond of brotherhood that all cops feel? This is going to appeal to gamers? Have you met one of those?
The lesson of Disco Elysium is to not sweat any of that and just make sure you execute it perfectly. Nail the pacing, nail the dialogue, nail the gameplay, nail the music, nail the art style all to the highest levels of achievability you or anyone else possibly can and all from the standpoint of a complete newcomer to the scene with notoriety. Easy. When you spell it out like that, it’s no wonder they succeeded. They just had to get everything 100% perfect*.
While there are many clips of this bug on the internet, this particular one belongs to reddit user Bruhmoment567.
*I will admit that the game is not perfect. There is a bug that persists to this day that occurs when the player tries to enter the apartment building behind the Whirling-in-Rags. The door is locked and upon trying to enter the door, Detective Kim Kitsuragi states calmly “There must be another way into the building” in the loudest voice the game can produce due to an audio mixing glitch. And it is hilarious and should never be removed.
Doubly So if the Detective Has Amnesia
We need to introduce the player to a world that is similar but wholly different from our own while simultaneously setting up that this is a detective game and there is a mystery to be solved. The world of the game is different in various ways that could be hard to get across as most of them are just understood facts and common knowledge of the world. It’s a challenge akin to explaining to someone that they need to breathe in order to survive - they most likely were already breathing and on some level already knew that, so why are we expending effort and attention span to it?
If you’ve ever cringed when one character says to another “Ah yes, my friend of 20 years, how are you doing since your recent divorce last month?” or “I don’t need to tell you that, you’re my sister!” then you’ve experienced a writer struggling with the same challenge. Getting across to the audience information that the characters in the scenes should already ostensibly know if they are functional humans in a world not too different from ours. It is a persistent challenge, ever present as the amount of information that characters have that the audience does not have is potentially limitless. The characters live in the world, after all, and the audience is experiencing that world through the characters via a medium. There is no way for the audience to experience the world without that medium.
What is a writer who has invented an entire world that is vastly different from our own in terms of setting, philosophies, day to day life, societal structure, etc., I could go on but won’t, to do? There are a few ways to address the gap of audience knowledge versus character knowledge. I won’t pretend like there is only one and that the writers of Disco Elysium found the sole solution. That would be limiting an art form that is nearly limitless. So here are some of the greatest hits at the disposal of a writer facing this kind of problem:
Ignore the Problem - Charge head first into the world and gradually reveal information to the audience as necessary
Example: The Dresden Files
Drag That Fish out of Water - Introduce a character who is also learning all of this for the first time to give the audience someone to experience the new information through
Example: Harry Potter (no, all of the examples will not be magic-based).
Balance the Equation - Somehow, render the information that the character has and the audience has to be equal - could be through a literary means such as a Fish out of Water story (see Drag That Fish out of Water) or by trying to address the gap of knowledge before the audience experiences the piece
Example: Did you know that they handed out explainer flyers at the opening of 1984’s Dune that tried to explain some of the vocabulary, setting, and characters to try to better inform audiences of what they were going to see? Woof.
Super Cringy Dialogue - Look, we’ve got to hit this deadline and we’re introducing a new recurring character for a ratings boost. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be done, so get in there and finish it.
Example: probably most soap operas where someone meets their long lost twin or something, I don’t know, I usually try to highlight things done well
…And Much, Much More!
There are probably endless ways to address this problem, I’m just highlighting a few that I’ve personally experienced in my degenerate consumption of media. Which of these did the writers of Disco Elysium choose? Buckle up, reader, for I have pulled one of those famous Joker’s tricks on you for it is not one option from the above, but it is TWO (or possibly more, I haven’t decided yet).
The equation of knowledge between the player and the character of Harry DuBois is equal at the start of Disco Elysium in that neither knows really much of anything save for the immediate surroundings they find themselves in at the game’s onset.The writers gave the detective amnesia. He doesn’t even know he’s a detective. Or that the world is strange. Or that there is more than one mystery.
All of this is revealed to both Harry DuBois and the player at the same time through the core gameplay of Disco Elysium: exploring the world and talking to people. The first actions the player can do in Disco Elysium once the game has begun proper is to choose dialogue choices. Dialogue choices reveal information based on what the player has picked with some passive stat rolls peppered in to add flavor to that information. Based on your stats picked at the beginning of the game, you may learn a lot about the city of Martinese and the world that city’s in - or you could keep failing those rolls and have the inhabitants of that world explain basic concepts to you in increasingly frustrated tones and exasperation. Either way, it’s great.
The second action the player is able to do upon starting the game is to click around the world. Doing so moves the protagonist, Detective Harry DuBois, around the environment. Green circles pop-up as Harry moves. The player clicks on those green circles. More dialogues start. Items are collected. A shoe. A jacket. Why is this circle yellow? Ah, the yellow circles line up with the yellow attributes. They are physical challenges. The player decided to keep clicking on the different colors of circles, learning more about their surroundings and this man they inhabit. And now they’re talking to their tie. And the tie is talking back. What is going on?
The game calls this a Horrific Necktie. It is your friend.
Exploring the world and talking to people is the core of Disco Elysium’s gameplay. Nothing can happen without engaging with the world’s people and items. Literally, time does not move without talking to people or learning more about the world or yourself. During my first playthrough of the game, I did not understand the time mechanic and lamented at Harry’s face-paced but still slow jog through the ever-expanding map of Martinese. How are you supposed to meet certain time-based conditions at this rate? It seemed unfair. It was only at a certain junction where I needed to wait for nighttime to engage with a certain balcony smoker that I realized the truth. Time wasn’t passing at all as I traveled. There’s no way to pass time by moving through the world physically.
This time mechanic reinforces the core gameplay of Disco Elysium. Time only passes when you’re learning about the world. Repeating dialogue with a character does not move time, it’s only when you reveal new dialogue options, get characters to say things they haven’t before, that you advance time. It is a curious mechanic, but I think it ties back into that balanced equation between audience and character. You aren’t punished by retreading over old information in case you get lost in this strange city of Martinese; there is admittedly a lot to learn. And the only way to advance the plot, so to speak, is by learning more about the world, yourself, and the various mysteries you come across. The reward for learning more about the world, beyond just potentially breaking open the case of the hanged man, is that time advances and unlocks more people to talk to.
On your first day in Martinese, the Union Room at the Whirling-in-Rags is closed. You are told by the Cafeteria Manager that it’ll be open later, which is good because you should probably speak to the union boys who are tied to this community as the defacto peacekeepers as Martinese is a disputed precinct. These union workers could literally be the key to finding out exactly how the hanged man became the hanged man - the core goal of this particular mystery.
Your assigned partner Kim Kitsuragi suggests that you check out the crime scene in the meantime and if you do, you are rewarded with several opportunities. The opportunity to profile the crime scene, to investigate up close, to autopsy a body - all of which causes time to progress and gradually move you closer to the Union Room opening and allowing you to interview the workers.
But what if you don’t heed Kim Kitsuragi’s suggestion? There are a lot of things going on, after all. The local dock is shut down, causing a traffic jam of lorry-drivers. There’s a protest of some local scabs trying to get hired to reopen the dock. A kid is throwing rocks at the hanged man, possibly contaminating the crime scene. There’s a wheelchair-bound cryptozoologist who has quite a few stories about cryptid expeditions. Oh right, and you don’t have any idea of who you are or what this place is or the nature of your world.
The player and the character of Harry are in the same boat, one that is so far from the water - it’s a balancing of equations via fish out of water by way of amnesia. You give Harry an identity from the start, the logical progression of what the character would do probably plays out the same way - by investigating the crime scene, this strange world be damned. You give Harry amnesia, the player feels more open to explore for more hints about who they are and maybe they wonder where they are a little more freely than if they zero-in on the crime scene. Giving the character amnesia frees the player from falling onto the track of the story makes the world feel more open than it is.
And the best part is either option advances time and rewards the player with the same outcome - more people to talk to, more clues for the main mystery and the secondary mysteries therein, and more information about who you are, where you are, and the nature of your world. It is a positive feedback loop that keeps giving the more you explore and talk, which are the only things you can really do anyway. But none of it works quite as well without giving the detective amnesia.
Not a Goddamned Thing
So here we are, at the end of this very weird, passionate rant/retrospective of Disco Elysium and what have we really learned? I started out this endeavor saying I learned two lessons from the game and followed up with a third lesson that I didn’t know a thing about the game. In truth, I think that’s true and that acknowledging that I don’t understand why Disco Elysium works is alright. Because deep down, I don’t want to understand why the game works as well as it does. I want to tear through the innards of the game with all lenses of science and analysis at my beck and call just to find out there is no science here. Magic is real and the writers cast a spell to will Disco Elysium into existence. It’s a modern miracle. It shouldn’t exist, but it does.
What I can do is keep exploring how Disco Elysium works, the inner-workings that gell together to pull the seemingly disparate parts together into the messy, gummy masterpiece that the game is. Not to further the exploration of why it works, but to steal techniques for my own writing and to stand in awe of something that feels so very rare in video games - a game where the writing is doing the bulk of the work but is equally matched by every other aspect of the game. The visuals are wholly unique. The music is haunting and has compelled me to listen to the OST on Spotify no less than a hundred times just as I drive around the city (preferably in winter on a gray, sunless day).
But I have to admit that even with the amount of studying and analyzing and breaking this game down into its basest forms to try to understand it, I still don’t know a goddamned thing about it, and that’s what keeps me coming back for more. I may never understand Disco Elysium in its entirety. But that’s alright. Science we don’t understand yet is the closest thing we have to magic, and I’m good with keeping the magic of Disco Elysium going for as long as possible.
