How the ladies see me now that I have finally beaten Disco Elysium after 2 years: (imagine me doing The Expression)

What a blast, with a soundtrack that I’ve been listening to for days while commuting. What’s to say about DE, which has not been chewed through enough? I’ve shelved it multiple times before–for no particular reason, really, as life just got in the way. Each time I have started the game anew in hopes I would get to know its world a little better, understand Revachol’s history and make sense of its citizen’s political stances inside my cranium. It’s a bit of a slow pacer and I highly recommend you to enjoy it like that. Boot it up, spend half an hour talking to one or maybe two inhabitants and then, if you find yourself skipping dialogue, put it down for the day. It’s a much more riveting experience to break the game up like that instead of rushing through it.

Honestly, I’m glad that it took me a while to fully play it to the end. The past 2 years also turned me into a full on Marxist-studying communist, and with the thought in mind that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, makes immersing inside this cleverly built world so so so much easier. The game is unabashedly sensitive and hopeful, each character and side-mission interwoven with the overarching plot in ways you wouldn’t expect. It’s aware of its contradictions and ideologies which sprung out of Martinaise’s history of war, oppression and exploitation and puts them to the test through each individual you meet, their philosophies and place in the world coherent. I still find the idea of navigating as a DIY drunkard cop, who is allowed to be unhinged and weird and nosey and a freak because of his position as a cop, completely ingenious.

Disco Elysium is funny, depressing, heart wrenching, nail biting, stress inducing, beautiful, well-crafted, thoughtful and all the other adjectives you can think of. I’m in the middle of my second playthrough now as a libertarian doom cop who’s plagued by visions of his ex-wife, and can’t wait to see what the game has to offer once I try a sorry cop who refuses to look at the corpse.