it is simply embarrassing to play Disco Elysium for the first time in the year of our lord 2026. And still here I am. Better late than never I guess.
Funny enough, I actually tried to play it like 4 years ago - and I couldn't do it. I was too impatient, too young and maybe too stupid to enjoy it. Well, at least one of these things has changed.
The real reason of my returning to this game actually has nothing to do with its legacy in the gaming world - it was one really persistent booktuber's (who never played games, apart for this one) posting that did it for me. And because of that the question of "why" never left my mind. What was so special about this game that enamored that one specific person, who was not interested in games as a genre of media altogether? What made Disco Elysium feel so book-like? (And, more precisely, why did she liked it so much? I looked up to her for, like, last ten years, so this is important for me, even though it really shouldn't be)
Lets start with basics - is it the sheer amount of the text? Of course not, thought it could've played a part. I saw a post on this site about how Disco Elysium, along with Citizen Sleeper and Roadwarden, which I had not played (yet), were that person's favorite "books". It was meant as a joke (and a good one, at that), but it got me thinking. There is some elusive quality that makes DE stand out.
The quantity of the text is not to be overlooked at. In Disco Elysium reading is the main activity - the whole gameplay is: talk to somebody (be that NPCs or voices in Harry's head) - go to another place - talk again. All skill checks come in form of dialog questions - you read, reply, walk and sometimes open doors or crates. That's it. And it should remind me of Citizen Sleeper - even the element of surprise is the same - controlled unpredictability of your actions - throwing dice and taking chances. And yet not even one time did I think about these games as something alike.
Besides, there are visual novels, which are even more text-heavy, and yet i never found anything remotely close there either (sadly, I've gotta admit i have limited experience with those, so do not take me for an expert). Of course, there are a lot of words in DE, but their abundance is not the answer I'm looking for (and what a boring answer would it be).
So if it's not about quantity, then it's about quality? Well, that's a convoluted question.
First of all, "good" is a debatable descriptor. It is rooted in peoples' own perception - one's man's trash and all that. Is it grammatically and logically sound - yes - and it is easy to see. But if i find its story grasping - that does not give any information about the text itself. Aside from that, a lot of games have good writing both narratively speaking and addressing in-game texts. So if it's not about being just well-written, what else there is?
One could say that Disco Elysium has a lot of real-life problems addressed in it. Racism, war, poverty, mental health, alcoholism, corruption - you name it, they got it. But it's not that either - games do address social problems all the time, and it is not necessary for a book to have more that one problem.
Maybe it is about the forth-wall breaking? Now we are getting closer. That is, of course, not the first time a game does this. But as it says in my bio, i am a casual gamer, so it was a first for me. So I have never played anything of that sorts, but i have seen bits and pieces - Portal, Slay the princess, that one ragebait game with Connor in it, DokiDoki and many, many more. It is used for the shock value, it is meant to unsettle you. Or sometimes it is there for funsies. But Disco Elysium acknowledges your actions in a very particular way.
You have voices in Harry's head - you inclined to trust them, you rely on them. You perceive information through them - and they comment on your every move. What an interesting way for the game to communicate with you without breaking the illusion. It is forth-wall scratching - and sometimes i did feel called out on my dialog options (too centrist). And being called boring by the game made me reflect on my choices - it is not even a bad thing (I'm just a cop on duty, i am no fun) - but it makes you think "what do I want from my gaming experience". But i digress.
The final scene is the in-game evaluation of your every move. What you did do, what you didn't. And it could be read as a mere statistic - but for Harry it is literary a catharsis - all his sins (drinking, drunk driving, losing his stuff) are forgiven, he is reunited with his team, forever changed by his journey. And that is one of the thing that remind me of literature. The reader is not only being kept in mind in the process of developing the game, but also is on the same level with Harry when skills talk to him (or do they talk to you? after all, it is the player who makes all of the decisions). There is a believe that literature as an art form exist only in the moment of reading - as a dialog between the author and the reader (the dialog is in the reader's head, of course). So let's put a pin on that and move on, because I actually have one more obscure connotation.
There is one literature critic - Bakhtin, whose theory of polyphony I kept returning to. Polyphony (as far as i understood it) is when there are multiple "points of view" that belong to different characters. Of course in a good piece of art every character has a distinct voice of their own - but polyphony is deeper than that. Not only their beliefs exist and expressed, but they are treated with the same amount of respect. Other characters live beyond the main character's perspective, all of them are imagined as a mc, just with lesser time on screen.
In games sometimes characters are simply a tool - this one is a helper, this one is an enemy. Even the story revolves around relationships between characters - one voice is overpowering the others. The characters are "stories" - written and set. In a polyphonic novel there are worlds inside characters. They change, they collide, but there is an astonishing depth inside them. This is how the contemporary literature started. And this is how the characters in Disco Elysium are written.
This leads me away from Harry Du Boir straight to ... hanged man (although others have it too - really noticeable in Cuno - or those two gramps playing ball. or even in the killer). He is in an interesting position - he is only defined by others (scene in the dream does not count as self-defenition, it is Harry's interpretation). So it creates intricate web of information - do people lie to you about him, some describe him as an rapist - some don't. People loved him, hated him, made his corpse into a morbid pinata, avenged him. There is a million interpretations - every one is true and each one is false - because they come from outside. He demonstrates ocean of meanings that we will never discover. It's complicated. It's beautiful.
The killer is interesting too - not to spoil anything - they are allowed, no, expected to share their story. Who are they, how they see themselves and other people. Why they did it, what brought them to this place in the world. The game insist on them being heard. That what I meant by respect - not agreeing with them, but just letting them exist in the world as an equal voice (it is an art form, so one of it's goals is to depict reality in it's fullness).
TL;DR - DE is a literature masterpiece first, game second
