Disco Elysium, and the Voices I Already Had

2026-07-12 · games

I finished Disco Elysium yesterday, and I'm writing this before the game settles, because I suspect that once it settles it will pretend it was always part of me and do that weird thing media does with me, where my brain pretends this was just me all along.

The game opens with a voice, and before you see anything, something ancient and reptilian speaks to you in the dark and suggests, quite reasonably, that you stay there. Then you wake up as a middle-aged detective in a trashed hostel room in Martinaise, a district of Revachol that history chewed up and spat out, and you have no memory, one shoe, and a dead man hanging from a tree behind the building. The corpse is the case, but the case is only the excuse the game uses to ask more important questions.

What the game actually asks, from the first minute to the last, is a simpler and much harder question: who are you going to be? Amnesia is usually a lazy plot device, but here it's the whole architecture, because every conversation doubles as a small referendum on the self you're rebuilding. Your detective can become a communist, a moralist, a wreck, an apologizer, or a superstar, and the world will let you become any of them, but it remembers.

The mechanism for all of this is the skill system. There are twenty-four skills and they TALK, constantly, and which ones talk loudest depends on the specializations you picked, though whatever you picked, the dialogue is almost always worth reading, which is why two players can finish the same story having read substantially different books.

I recognized the voices very quickly, because I've been living with them my whole life. 'Encyclopedia' is the one that hijacks a conversation to deliver lore nobody requested, and mine works exactly the same way, because someone at work only has to mention my middle school passion for Ben 10 and I'm suddenly spelling so much lore that people regret bringing it up. My Encyclopedia has niche specializations and no sense of timing, and watching Harry's do the exact same thing mid-interrogation was one of the closest a game has come to holding up a mirror.

Volition is quieter, and it's the sound that makes you feel like a person again after a bad day. Mine speaks up at the end of a week where nothing shipped and every ticket rolled over to the next sprint, and it says roughly what it says to Harry, which is that you're still here and that counts for something, and while it's never eloquent, it doesn't need to be.

Electrochemistry wants everything, wants it now, and is very charming about the asking, and mine mostly negotiates with my food log, since it knows exactly how many grams of protein I've had today and it simply does not care. I've also caught something like Rhetoric running the show in seminar, the voice that hears an argument and wants to win it slightly more than it wants to understand it, and I'm still working on that one.

Is it strange that a game about an amnesiac alcoholic detective contains one of the most accurate renderings of my inner life I've found in any medium? Maybe, but I don't think the experience is rare, because everyone carries similar thoughts around, an adult version of Disney's Inside Out.

Revachol is beyond saving, and the game never pretends otherwise, because the revolution failed decades before you woke up, foreign powers administer the city through committees, and the strike you walk into on day one is a symptom of forces no police detective touches. Harry cannot fix any of it, and the game is honest enough not to offer him the chance.

What he can do is smaller, though, because he can be the reason a kid on the coast leaves with him instead of rotting where he is, or the reason a scared woman gets a head start or doesn't, or the reason his partner's faith in the institution survives another week. By the end I had solved the murder and changed almost nothing about Martinaise, since the fishing village was still poor and the war was still coming, but a handful of specific people were living slightly different lives because of things I chose, and whether those lives got better or worse was entirely on me. That's the trade the game offers: you don't get the world, but you get the people in front of you, and you get yourself.

It's been a day and the voices haven't stopped, but then again they were here long before the game and they'll be here long after, and all Disco Elysium really did was give them names, while somewhere underneath all of them a reptilian one still suggests staying in the dark.

I will get up anyway, and that's the whole game, and it might be the whole thing, generally.

Video on Youtube: https://youtu.be/K9Xm46_7AA0?si=iR4Iv9YoGZRSb2RX