Disco Elysium And The Quest To Conquer Consciousness

I recently finished Disco Elysium. Guess what? Everyone was right. The game rules! I also recently finished Planescape: Torment. Guess what again: everyone in 1999 was right! It also rules. Completing those two splendid adventures back-to-back got me thinking about the relationship between the two, so perhaps foolishly, I decided to write some words about that subject.

Planescape is very much an epic fantasy. It’s more intimate than other RPGs but it’s stilled rooted in themes and tropes that go back to Homer and company. Flawed protagonists punished by the fantastical, otherworldly settings governed by twisted yet familiar logic, a journey that ends in despair, enlightenment, or both.

Disco Elysium performs the same modernist transition to Planescape: Torment that Joyce’s Ulysses did with Homeric poetry. Ulysses, a 1922 novel set in a single day in Dublin, blows out that single day into epic proportions, letting the reader follow the 730-page intertwined journeys of protagonists Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as they navigate crises of faith, loveless marriages, racism, and the meaning of life.

Nothing traditionally exciting happens in Ulysses. There are no explosions. No one dies or falls in love. However, there are moments when each character has a thought, a small epiphany that’s probably backed by a burp rather than booming fanfare, that might point them in the right direction and get their life back on track to contentedness. A son without a father might find some much needed advice and compassion from a fatherly stand-in, and another man come to terms with being an outsider in the country he lives in.

Ulysses is great because it takes the structure and themes of all those epic poems, specifically The Odyssey but also Dante’s Inferno, The Aeneid, and The Iliad, and applies them to a cast of character and situations that are completely ordinary. At first that seems like a great joke – and it is – but also, that’s kind of how stories function. We learn archetypes and tropes and apply them to our own lives. How can we not? We are the center of our own stories. It is impossible to be anything else, though empathy plays a great deal in helping us extend beyond that center to help other people as they live out their own stories, filled with their obstacles and triumphs.

Right. Literature. Fun stuff. How the fuck does Disco Elysium fit in?

Elysium is built on Planescape’s foundation: an amnesia-stricken protagonist exploring a mysterious world in the hopes of recovering their memories and confronting the carnage of their past. However, Disco Elysium’s setting, its characters, and its systems are much more rooted in the mundane.

Sure, a police investigation isn’t something everyone gets to do, but it is much more realistic than an epic journey across dimensions of time and space in the Dungeons & Dragon’s multiverse. Revachol, Elysium’s setting, is a city where capitalists and communists are at one another’s throats, the economy has tanked, and deeply entrenched racism rears it head around every street corner. Revachol isn’t completely free of the fantastical but it is a city that you or I are more likely to have explored or even have an intimate knowledge of than most settings in video games.

Much like Ulysses did with its epic poem inspirations, Disco Elysium discards much of the fantastical qualities of its inspirations and invests in consciousness – both class consciousness and literal consciousness. The detective of Disco Elysium is a disaster of a human being. He wakes up in a hotel room after a night of blackout drinking, with no memory of how he got there or even who he is. The hotel staff hates him. Soon he learns he’s a detective, though he’s somehow misplaced his badge and gun, and that there’s a murder case swinging from a tree in the backyard of the hotel he’s responsible for solving.

The actual case at the heart of Disco Elysium isn’t what makes the game so interesting. Instead, it’s the constant bombardment of consciousness on all sides. Our detective’s mind has been split up into many voices, all of them vying for control, trying to seduce, persuade, or intimidate the him (and the player) to do what they want him to do. Sometimes that means a voice screaming you should steal a woman’s drugs to use them for your own ends. Other times, another voice with a penchant for the otherworldly (called Inland Empire) might spot something odd that no one else can see and encourage you to examine it.

Outside of your own inner turmoil, everyone in the city is more than willing to add fuel to your mental fires, letting you know how disheveled you look or reminding you about some awful thing you said or did while you were drunk. Some people are flat out terrified to talk to you. Disco Elysium shifts rather quickly, becoming a game that’s more about finding out just how shitty you are and how (and if) you can repair it.

The answer turns out to be, as it often is, other people. During your investigation, you’ll find a number of disputes happening around Revachol or people just in need of plain help. As you become embroiled in Revachol’s happenings, so your detective is altered by their actions – perhaps becoming something resembling a decent person or a depraved asshole taking their anger out on the rest of the world. Embrace racist ideology to get past a skinhead and you might unnerve your partner with just how convincing a racist you are. Pushing for a detailed account from an unfortunate witness might get you some information you need but might also leave them even more traumatized than they already are.

Your actions are boldly acknowledged by the game for their political alignments. Where Planescape fits you and your party members into the traditional alignment system, Disco Elysium doesn’t beat around the bush. Your detective’s consciousness will reach out to you to inform and mock you when your choices have made you fit into a particular alignment, like when the voices in my fellow’s head informed him that he was “the world’s most laughable centrist.” The remark stung in how fair it was, with my character scrambling around to keep the peace between the capitalists and communists at all cost instead of promoting any real change either way. Shortly after that, I became a bit bolder and more leftist, eventually finishing the game in my true form: superstar communist cop. I loved that the game’s prickling of my character’s consciousness (and thus my own) actually convinced me to change how I played through the story so drastically. That’s a rare feat, personally speaking.

At the end of the day, I don’t think Disco Elysium is about saving the city or even solving a case. It’s about taking stock of yourself, not liking what you find there, and then deciding if you’re going to do something about it, an inward journey concerned with conquering what you are as opposed to the things that surround you. The goal isn’t to bring nations to their knees or bully villains into bowing to justice with a combo of wit and violence. Instead, it’s to navigate what you are, fix what you can, and then make peace with the rest – if such a thing is possible.

How bold, strange, and wondrous for something so simple to feel revolutionary. I certainly hope this isn’t the last we see of that kind of game.

P.S.

Go read Ulysses, you cowards.