In Revachol, it is always small: you can help cryptozoologists with their research, help a little girl find shelter, and give answers to a worried family. There are people who Harry has hurt, who he can never reconcile with. It is, thankfully, not a clean redemption. By the end, Harry can be at least somewhat put together, restoring what he can, and making restitution for what he cannot. Every dialogue option or choice emphasizes that, while for you the right thing might be a mouse click, for Harry, it is not so simple.īy emphasizing that effort, especially in the face of the existential powers of the Pale and your addicted bloodstream, Disco Elysium gives voice to a quiet human hope. Especially in a world that encourages simple cruelty and when, of course, you have been an unrepentant jackass for so long. Rather, it is true that being kind and empathetic can be very, very hard. I say none of this as a knock against the game. The game gives you innumerable opportunities to be horrible and cruel to others, especially to your ever patient partner Kim. The disrepair of your life, including wrecked cars, destroyed relationships, shattered windows, is scattered all over the city. The lingering thoughts of your ex-wife imply past, and allow present misogyny.
No matter how you play him, Harry Du Bois is a marvelous shithead. As well as a belief in people’s ability to change. What Disco Elysium offers instead is a quiet, existentialist hope in the face of annihilation. The better world was killed in its cradle. Seeds that will one day grow beyond the wooden walls that hold them. The heart of churches, all abandoned and decayed, were formed around the seeds of the Pale. A climate crisis, far more fundamental to human life than global warming, expands across the world. Rather, the game is about living in a place where a better world is, in all likelihood, not possible.
Though Harry can be a communist, that rarely means anything more than shouting slogans. The local union, nominally left, uses racists as its muscle and is structured closer to a mafia than something meant to give power to workers. However, what remains of communism are abandoned bunkers, graffiti, scribbles in notebooks, and old ruins. I will grant that this is the only RPG I know of with abilities that make your character communist. He had to feel the “ shivers ” of the city in his bones or face the “ inland empire ” of the surrounding world.ĭespite all these wreckages of history, Marx’s influence on the game is actually pretty minimal. To do so, he, or at least my version of him, had to attune himself to the ghosts of Revachol. He has woken up, mind empty, only to find a hanging man whose murder he must solve. Wandering through this blooming, dying world is a different kind of spirit, a vengeful one: Harry Du Bois, the world’s shittiest, most forgetful cop. Someday the world might all be empty noise. Traveling through it is essential to international trade, but it ravages the minds of those who do. Furthermore, the real world is all in patches between “the Pale,” a ghostly sea of static, fragmented memories. Revachol is haunted, because it is communism’s grave. Bullet holes, craters, and decay spot the city streets like cuts and bruises on a corpse. Revachol, the town in which all of Disco Elysium takes place, was the incision point for communism’s downfall. The liberal democratic nations of the world united to destroy them. Decades before the game begins, these islands underwent revolution. Christ’s second coming would bring the equality of a new world. A point where all of history converges, after which, the unimaginable and incomprehensible happens. But there is something of the Christian apocalyptic about it. It is based on the real conditions of the working class, on the contradictions of capitalism itself, and where those realities will lead, given time and the proper pressure. Of course, Engels would describe Marx’s theory as scientific. A spirit that will speak in other tongues, cleanse with fire and blood, inspire slaves and laborers to prophesy and bring those words to bear with the strength of their hands. One that will sweep up the working people of the world like it did the apostles on the day of Pentecost. In their most famous words, Marx and Engels call upon a spirit: “the specter of communism.” This specter is not something dead, but a holy ghost. Killing Our Gods is a monthly column from Grace Benfell about Christianity, religion, and role-playing through a queer, Marxist, and lapsed Mormon lens.
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