Some Thoughts Upon Replaying Disco Elysium

This post contains spoilers for Disco Elysium. 

Last year, a lifetime ago, I played through Disco Elysium with my then partner. We built a character with high psyche and followed our emotions and Inland Empire to discover the mysteries of that strange world. Last week, I decided to replay it on my own. I created a high physique and intellect character in the hopes of finding different dialogue. A part of me thought that maybe playing it through, facing Harry’s fears, might help me face my own. The ex-something who haunts him. Who his brain keeps telling him to forget but who he can’t stop picking at all the same. I know the feeling.

Disco Elysium is a story about many things. One of those things is love. After all, if you have a high enough Inland Empire when examining the body (as I did in my first playthrough but not my second), the victim will tell you that love did him in. But no one you meet in the game is much in love with anyone or anything. Every character is hurt and jaded in one way or another.

Instead, Disco Elysium dwells on a lost love that haunts you like a ghost. There is a moment towards the end of the game where you can sleep in an abandoned bunker. If you choose to do so, you dream of Harry’s parting with his ex, in the form of Dolores Dei. There is a red check which taunts you throughout the conversation. You can try to kiss her and prove she still loves you. I stared and stared at that check as I exhausted every other avenue for dialogue, even reciting from memory the old love letter you find in your police ledger. But I knew that down this road lay only sadness. You can’t make someone stay when they want to go. And you won’t like what you get for trying. So I let her leave for the aerodrome without trying to kiss her. Perhaps I let myself feel a sense of pride. Perhaps I told myself it was proof I had let her go.

Still, I’ve always been curious. Later that week, reflecting on the game, I searched up what would happen if you tried, if you succeeded. And of course, what happens is that you try to kiss a woman who doesn’t kiss you back. Who instead steps away and is suddenly pregnant, taunting you with her new love and her new future while the children you may have had together had been aborted. As horrific a scene as I expected. And now I knew I had made the right choice. But I only knew because I looked up, because despite being resolved (or perhaps simply too scared of failure) in my own playthrough, I still wanted to try. I wanted to know for certain what would happen. My curiosity has always been a powerful thing. One of the reasons I enjoyed Disco Elysium so much, a game full of mysteries which rewards a dogged determination to leaving no stone unturned. A game wherein every tiny question builds towards unraveling the mystery. A world in which so many things are connected rather than being random. A world in which every little thing has meaning.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it is only meaningful because we believe it so. You can gain a quest from looking at the stained glass in the church called offer figurines to Dolores Dei. If you to give a figurine to Dolores Dei during your dream you will complete the quest and an achievement called: the figurines won’t win her back, they do nothing. The figurines mean nothing to her, or as your Empathy will warn you, they mean something different. An obligation she does not want. While your brain was trying to piece together quests like it always does, telling you that the Innocence was often shown with a figurine, telling you that all the junk you can find in the thrift store must somehow be connected to the case just like every other detail, the truth is that there is no meaning to the Headless FALN Rider except that he reminds you of her. Maybe that’s all the meaning there ever is.