Disco Elysium Is A Painful Elegy As Told By The Grieving
Grief is everywhere in Disco Elysium. It lingers in the detective’s mind in the Mazovian Socio-Economics thought, which states that even though “0.000% of Communism has been built” and “evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin”, all the detective could manage to do to rebuild communism in the year ‘51 is to make himself very sad. The detective carries a grief so monumental that he has drunk himself into amnesia, as he drags around the abyssal depth of his despair, barely able to carry out his responsibilities as a member of the Revachol Citizens Militia. Then there’s the very city of Revachol itself, a place barely recovering from the atrocities of a civil war that took place decades ago. Disco Elysium doesn’t shy away from serving grief in platitudes, embodied by the crumbling city and its broken protagonist.
But these aren’t the only major moments of grief in the game. A particularly searing instance involves an incident involving a working class lady at a bookstore. The detective had, in his trademark bumbling manner, decided to take it upon himself to look for her husband, only to later chance upon a dead body on a boardwalk that greatly resembled her description of her partner. Her reaction to the news was so heartbreakingly raw, that all she could do was to look at the two cigarette butts he had left behind just a few days ago. Privately, your empathy skill was only able to remark that, “he was just here. Alive.”
Related: Disco Elysium’s Approach To Racism Is Incredibly Cynical
What makes these depictions of grief so resonant is that they go beyond grand displays of devastation like shelled cities, but present themselves in smaller, quieter moments. These can be seen in
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