Disco Elysium

Amazing blog post on the key takeaways from the game and the underlying symbolism inherent to the very hopeful messages spread throughout the game.

Major spoilers for the game, its ending, and many characters and events. Be warned.

“Un jour je serai de retour près de toi,” French for “one day I will return to your side.” These words are painted in the streets of Martinaise, outside of a local hotel. A few days prior a shootout occurred on the site between members of a local dockers’ union and mercenaries hired by their employer to break the ongoing strike. As the artist painted her graffiti, the paint mixed with the blood spilled onto the street that day. How many died depends on the choices and abilities of the detective, who those playing the recently released Disco Elysium control. While the graffiti is only a moment in the wider story of a game filled with many threads, it acts as a rare glimpse of hope in an otherwise depressing and exhausted world. Disco Elysium is a game haunted by possibility, of both what is to come, and what could have come, from the lost futures embedded in its past. [...]