Disco Elysium: A Great RPG and a Healing Journey

Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game that came out in 2019. It is undoubtedly one of the best, if not the best RPG games ever. As someone who played this game two times from start to finish and spent hours losing myself in this game, I will attempt to put in words how much of a masterpiece this game is.

As all the RPGs do, you first select your skills and build your character. You will play a detective, but what type of one you will play is all for you to determine. You can choose to be the traditional Sherlock Holmes type of detective who uses your intellect to figure out the world around you but lacks empathy and human connections with weak physical abilities. You can choose conceptualization as your main skill in the intellect tree and be an art cop, being able to see the art in the world. Or you can choose rhetoric and make your way through intellectual discourse, see the fallacies in people's arguments, and open up them like a can through your discourse. I created an intellect-heavy genius character in my first gameplay but in my second gameplay, I went on a different path and played with a character that made sense of the world around him through his psyche. He was not the smartest but had a strong volition that helped him get up from his depressive state. His empathy allowed him to see perhaps a hidden sadness he could coax out a little more, a strange joy from someone who should be bereaved, or a hidden resentment that could return to harm him later.

Among all the skills, however, the inland empire might be the most endearing to me. Throughout the game, your inner skills talk with you constantly, from warning you about dangers and helping you notice something that you missed to having existential conversations. Inland Empire, however, even allows you to speak and empathize with inanimate objects. It's like seeing dreams in waking life, it is the unfiltered wellspring of imagination.  It enables you to grope your way through invisible dimensions of reality, gaining insight into that which sight can’t see. I sensed how a trash can felt, hugged it to console it, and even talked to a thousands-of-year-old phasmid about the secrets and wonders of the world.

Horrific Necktie: *Bratan*, don't push me away. I want to be there for you. Also — how can you be sure *you* are not just a figment of *my* imagination? -Inland Empire

Insulindian Phasmid: The moral of our encounter is: I am a relatively median lifeform, while you are extreme, all-engulfing madness. A volatile simian nervous system, ominously new to the planet. -Inland Empire

After you choose your skills, the game starts with emptiness, a blank screen for you to look at. Then, your limbic system and your lizard brain start to talk with you, like our conscious self left us for good, leaving us with the most primitive parts of ourselves. They whisper desperate words, humiliate you, covet who you've become, trying to convince you to disappear to nothingness to end your misery.

There is nothing. Only warm, primordial blackness. Your conscience ferments in it — no larger than a single grain of malt. You don't have to do anything anymore. Ever. Never. — Ancient Reptilian Brain

Then, the game starts, and you see a beautiful oil-painted expressionist art style that welcomes you. Your character is in a miserable state, blanked out from all the alcohol he consumed, and can barely walk. It looks like he has lost all his memory, even his name. You can understand that he used this, no, even needed this self-destructive behavior to forget who he was, to erase the loneliness that he caused, and solely embrace the comfort numbness and nothingness brings. You will play with this character who doesn't even remember his name, who is depressed and self-destructive whom you hear horrible things about the people around him.

You can see that he is at rock bottom in every way possible But, it is always up to you to choose between feeding his nihilism and depression or helping him heal. This game gives you all the options, but I chose the healing path in all my gameplays. With each little action that helped him accept himself with good and bad, and choose to change little by little, every time he was able to see the magical and beautiful sides of life that it was worth living again despite all the pain, I was healing with him. You see, I've been there, and probably you've been there too. That's why it was such a healing game for me. He was worse than I've ever been, but even he was able to face the reality instead of escaping, accepted the horrible decisions he made, grieved but accepted the people he had lost, and accepted all parts of himself. Then after that, he found the strength to start changing little by little.

There are some quotes that I will never forget from this game that helped me get up in real life:

The road to healing is going to be a long one. Stay the course. You will make it, someday. Just remember: You've made it this far... and it's just a bit farther now. Let's finish this- Volition

Subdue the regret. Dust yourself off, and proceed. You'll get it in the next life, where you don't make mistakes. Do what you can with this one, while you're alive.—Volition

"Here is the secret: there is no love in the past. Only the present. The past is made of static images, distorted memories, and demented nostalgia. This, the present — with all its possibilities, innumerable hits and misses — is far superior. It is a *living* organism."— Measure head

Similarly, these are some of the scenes that engraved themselves into my soul:

This is a dream, a brutal one at best. We are hanging down a tree, lights illuminating out of the disco ball like our death is supposed to be welcomed with joy and partying. We talk with the hanging version of ourselves, and this is the point in this game where we've come to face just how much of a horrible person we were, and are still. Maybe we deserve to die, there is nothing worth living anymore. But, no. This is the starting point for accepting. We were to be coveted, are now maybe, but will not hopefully. We will accept, but change.

A dream again. We are slowly picking up the fragments of who we were, we have a wife, no, we had. She has a suitcase, hurrying to leave. She's not real of course, the real one had left long ago. Because of our selfishness, alcohol abuse, and lack of everything. Even hearing her name feels like they are ripping our souls apart now. When we start remembering how much we were in love with her, how much she was too, it is all just instantly shadowed by harsh reality. She's gone, long, long ago. She moved on, already falling in love again. This dream is for you to say your final goodbye to her. You will never feel her love again. It is time to accept now. It is time to stop living in the past.

We talked with an Insulindian Phasmid. He is maybe one of the greatest secrets of the cosmos. It is a magical, godlike entity that bears wisdom we cannot imagine, yet, it said "Of all the creatures I've met you are the kindest" No matter how much we suffered, how much life has humiliated us, how much we felt like we had nothing to live for and cannot carry on; if we keep walking, maybe we will come across something that makes it all okay, something that makes life meaningful again. This is one of those times. We suffered so much, but who could imagine? We encountered something magical. It feels like we can get up even when we fall now. Because we know now, that there will be moments to make it worth sometimes.

This game has left so many things with me. Even if the game was mostly depressive and felt nihilistic, there were rare magical and hopeful moments. But that's what made them so special, like in real life. I hope everybody gets to experience this game and find their meaning.