I was never particularly interested in Disco Elysium since I always got the impression that it just wasn't for me. But hey, it's my girlfriends favourite game and probably the only thing she loves more than me so I decided to give it a chance since she's gone for a week.
The game is at it's strongest when you're doing the non optional content in my opinion. The highlight of every day was always the murder mystery. The peak of the game was early in the second day when I was speaking to Titus and Klaasje and really got into the murder and started piecing it together. In these moments the conversations were amazing, filled with hidden depths and requiring you to pay attention and make connections. But that only took a few hours in game... and then I had to figure out how to spend the rest of the day. The "side quests," are generally boring and uninteresting to me. They're all meandering and lacking in drama, for others this works because of the intimate melancholic atmosphere, or the comedic writing, but it never hit home for me. The atmosphere to me feels similar to something like A Night in the Woods or A Catcher in the Rye, two works which like Disco Elysium were clearly extremely well crafted but just didn't appeal to my sensibilities. There's a reason I prefer fantasy books after trying to get into literature, I guess I just don't find subtlety appealing.
I've seen people describe the comedy as "cringe comedy," which is true in a way, it definitely makes you cringe. But it's a different sort of cringe comedy than the "haha lets laugh at autistic people," that's common on the internet today. The comedy was always extraordinarily sympathetic to Harry, even if you find it funny unlike me you're just as likely to want to give the main character a hug. This is one of the best parts of the game in general, every character no matter their beliefs or actions is sympathised with. No character is malevolent, they're all doing their best in their own way.
This becomes relevant especially in the way politics relates to characters. Coming into the game I expected the sort of spiritually devoid leftist posturing that is common in politically focused media, probably because of the way so many leftists reacted to the game. Instead I found a very mature, albeit incomplete, view of the way politics exists in the world and relates to people. Politics of course exists as a backdrop, of worldbuilding, as it has to when it takes place in a world so much like our own. There have been revolutions and political conflict in recent history in Disco Elysium, and it reflects on the socioeconomic tensions that surround the main conflicts in the game. But if you ask me the real insight is the way Disco Elysium sees through politics.
This is clearly evident in the games penultimate conversation, the one with the communist on the island. Sure the conversation mentions dialectical materialism and other aspects of Marxist belief, but this is a backdrop to what the man on the island is and what he represents. This man has internalised communism, it has become an inseparable part of his identity. It is through ideology that he understands himself, that he understands the world, communism is his ultimate justification of everything that he is and everything that he does. This is important because it shows us that the writer(s?) have a clear understanding of the way people use ideologies as a part of their life, and of the individual behind the ideology. This is why the game can be so sympathetic to every character, despite being a political game the people in it are never reduced to their ideology, they're first and foremost people. And ideologies work the same way they do in real life, as comfortable lens with which to colour life and make it comfortable and understandable.
There's also the other side of the political coin, which is parody. When the game directly speaks about and confronts ideologies it almost never takes them seriously. At first I disliked this, it was funny when I put on pants and instantly became a centrist, but I thought it was a shame that the game didn't have anything to say about them. I was wrong. This is incredibly important because it shows how fragile and ridiculous adherence to ideology can be in real life. From the outside perspective, as a player, we see it for the silly game that it is. Yet for the characters inside the world these are serious, moralism is serious, race ideology is serious, the things we're laughing at are real. I'm sure if we lived in the world of Disco Elysium and we looked into our own world, we would find our ideological conflicts just as ridiculous as they are in this game. Anyone who thinks this game is some sort of communist propaganda is illiterate.
Unlike seemingly everyone else, I quite liked the ending. I didn't feel like it was changed particularly much by my choices, but I didn't mind. The ending was the moment at which the two Harry's combine; the player's Harry who you controlled for the past 5 days and the Harry from before you played. No longer was Harry's past just fragmented bits of memory and strange nightmares, it was real, represented by people from your past confronting you about your actions. I thought this was a really interesting and thematic way to end the game. Through the conversation it felt like the "sorry cop" I played ended up slowly falling out of my hands, as the Harry of before integrated with the Harry of now. It was sort of upsetting in a way, Harry was controlled by Harry again, and Harry always treated himself worse than I treated him.
The side quests however sort of killed the experience for me. This isn't a James Joyce novel where even the simplest events can be hilarious, I just didn't find it funny, I didn't find it engaging, I didn't find it dramatic. I couldn't find it in me to care about the drunk homeless men I partied with or the teenagers that wanted to start a night club. There were a few good characters/side quests, Acele was great and I really loved the small conversations we had, and I found the children of the game universally interesting and well written. But most of the time the meandering glacial pace of the side questing left me extremely bored, and the writing wasn't enough to carry it.
Overall it was an alright experience, even if it bored me to literal tears at times it had a lot of insight. I look forward to whatever the devs make next
