Hurting. Longing. Dancing to Disco Music
Image description: Concept art for the game Disco Elysium. The image shows a dramatic sunset over the city of Revachol. At the center stands a statue of a rearing horse, with the main character, Harry Du Bois standing on the horse’s rider, with his arm flailing in the air holding a bottle. The sky bursts with radiant colors, while below, the city is worn and industrial, filled with trucks and old buildings.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
When I finished my freshman year of college, I felt that I had gone through so much change that I transformed into an entirely different person. I hoped that I’d changed for the better, but 18-year-old me was left confused and scattered by a whirlwind of conflicting emotions: pride, guilt, appreciation, and resentment. I began walking around my hometown to reflect, but the summer heat was too much to bear, so I stayed indoors. I turned to books, but a reading slump left me scrolling aimlessly through TikTok instead of flipping through pages. Fortunately, that led me to curiously stumbling upon a TikTok edit of the game Disco Elysium. Strobe lights from a disco ball hanging awkwardly from an abandoned tree-house filled the screen, invoking a strangely nostalgic and somber feeling. As Instrument of Surrender played in the background, the edit transformed. What once felt desolate was now warmly lit like the sun at eight in the morning, quietly promising a better day ahead. I was invigorated, so I quickly added the song to my playlist, only to find out that its entire album was made specifically for the game. I had to play it. Perhaps there was truly a better day ahead.
It’s difficult to describe Disco Elysium, especially when its entire fandom jokes that it’s actually a book or an interactive TV series due to its dialogue heavy style. From the first moments of playthrough, you are met with a convoluted conversation between your character and your character’s ancient reptilian brain, printed over a black screen. Suddenly, light brightens the screen and you are faced with the premise of the game and your character comes face to face with himself. This is a journey both you and your character take together, not side by side but as one. You wake up from your mystifying dream in a pile of your own filth, in nothing but your underwear and socks. Dazed from the night before, not remembering your name nor your own face, you begin the game confused and scattered. You have become Harry Du Bois and Harry Du Bois has become you. From that point onwards you are born into the city of Revachol, the former capital of the world that was devastated by a failed revolution 20 years earlier. The game is made uniquely yours by allowing you to amass a combination of skill points in your character’s Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics domains. The main story is constructed through dialogue options stemming from a tree of over 1 million words. It would take multiple playthroughs to even scratch the surface of Disco Elysium. The world contained within the game is extremely vast— you can choose to solve an obscure murder as a drunken, unhinged detective, or you can choose to explore numerous side quests with revolving characters. Regardless of the route you take, you are confronted by the sincerity of its characters and the frenetic and electric world they live in.
One of the beauties of the game is the dichotomy between familiarity and unfamiliarity presented for its world. Harry Du Bois does not remember a single thing about himself: his job, his past, and especially the reason for his anguish. Yet, he feels it, and can choose to run away from it. But the physical constraints surrounding the world of Elysium force Harry to have no other option than to retreat mentally when he is unable to face his reality. Physically running away is impossible, as the setting of the game consists of vast continents of isolated land surrounded by a separative tissue called the Pale, which exists in a 2:1 ratio to matter. Many of the details of the Pale remain unknown. The revolutionary characters of the game describe it as “ideological plasm”, a manifestation of human political thought that can affect physical reality. Regular citizens suggest it is an amalgamation of difficult memories of the past, which troubled people can absorb through osmosis. In a sense, the Pale is both a metaphysical void, an expanding absence that erodes meaning, identity, and history, and a psychological mirror to the decay of the social and political structures of the game. It literally blurs the boundary between thought and matter, making reality fragile and uncertain. The Pale and its despair are destructive, as one the game’s characters explains to Harry at the end of the game:
“You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing — just by accident.”
And yet, within this vast emptiness, there is a reminder of our humanity which captures the paradox at the heart of Discoy Elysium: even in the face of cosmic indifference and inevitable decay, human beings persist. The pale may be a manifestation of despair, but its very presence implies resistance to agony. In Elysium, the failed revolution and nostalgia of a past superior to the future linger in the air, leaving a poisonous trail behind. The game reminds us that without hope, nostalgia is metastasized into caustic bitterness and self-destructive nihilism. When the past offers only ruin, and the future appears barren, hope becomes elusive. The present becomes lost somewhere between memory and dread. For as long as we have known happiness, we have also known loss and grief. The allure of annihilation, fed by a growing population that is increasingly without hope as the world quite literally burns due to climate disaster, leaves people with a sense of eternal doom. We lose sight of the present and in that absence, the Pale creeps in, distorting memory and dissolving the future into a haze. Many end up taking to video games to avoid engaging in reality, but it is games like Disco Elysium that force you to confront the real world. The game pushes you to be curious and to calculate the outcomes of your words and actions, or lack thereof. Curiosity inspires action, and you commit yourself to exploring the “primordial blackness” of the world. However, it is easy to turn away from the sadness entrenched within the world of Elysium, to turn off the game and never play it again. It is easy to give into despair, to look away from the dread that continues inching closer and closer. It takes strength to try, to battle the unrequited love, lost hopes, and regrets that can never be recovered. It is those battles that are the most rewarding.
“How not to lose? It is impossible not to. The world is balanced on the edge of a knife. It’s a game of frayed nerves. You’re pushed on by numbers and punitive measures: pain, rejection, and unpaid bills. You can either play or you can crawl under a boat and waste away — turn into salt or a flock of seagulls. Your enemies would love that. Or you can fight. The only way to load the dice is to keep on fighting”
Once the player reaches the end of the game, that is considering they haven’t died from an uncomfortable chair or a turbulent memory that causes a heart-attack, they are met with the discovery of a marvel of the natural world, a potential miracle to a dour and dying planet: the Insulindian Phasmid. Long thought to be a myth, this towering, dreamlike insect steps out of the realm of rumor and into reality. It is delicate, almost otherworldly, and impossibly real. Harry’s encounter with the creature is one of the most surreal and tender moments in the game. The conversation between them is not dramatic, but quiet and reverent. Harry doesn’t interrogate it like a cop or attempt to subdue it through intellect or strength; he listens. The Phasmid communicates through psychic impression, offering its thoughts not in words but in calm, alien, and deeply empathetic sensations. It tells Harry his mind is broken, that it fears him in a way, but that he is also not beyond understanding. For perhaps the first time in the game, Harry is seen — truly seen — by something that is completely outside of his human world. This moment strips away all pretense. Harry isn’t Detective Du Bois, or a washed-up drunk cop, or the king of disco, he is just a human being, fragile and searching. And the Phasmid becomes a witness to his humanity. The game ultimately teaches the player that even the most implausible of things are still worth hoping and searching for. This final discovery becomes a call to the imaginative and creative dimension of our lives, for the hope that cultivates.
“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You’re still alive.”
Disco Elysium has taught me to “subdue the regret, dust yourself off, proceed.” A simple and reiterated lesson, yet a fundamental one nonetheless. Even though the road to healing is a long one, we must stay the course because we will make it someday. In the times we feel sad, hurt, and angry, we can ask a friend to lend a shoulder to cry on. Or an ear to chew off with complaints about our day. Or perhaps a rage room to smash glasses and computers. Or a canvas to paint our troubles away. We must stay true to the beautiful, unashamed parts of our unfettered self. We must say what is on our minds, we must run in the open air like wild horses, we must embrace the cringe and the embarrassment, and we must go dancing to disco music.
Afterall, in dark times, must the stars also go out?
