There exist inventions of art that while away an hour, and there exist inventions that lay hold of the very seat of reason and will not let it go. Disco Elysium belongs to this latter, dreadful company. I sat before it many nights running, in a state of fevered communion, until the small hours found me still murmuring to its shades as though they were old acquaintance.
A Man Who Has No Name
The tale concerns a man who has no name and wakes in a wretched chamber with no history and a conscience made entirely bare, as though some malignant hand had left the vessel of his soul quite empty. What follows is not merely an inquiry into a body found hanging behind a tavern, but an inquiry into the man himself — his vices, his old griefs, his almost forgotten political fevers. I have met few works of narrative art, in any form, so willing to let a man be thoroughly wretched, thoroughly pitiable, and thoroughly comic within the very same breath.
The invention by which one converses with one’s own faculties — a parliament of inner voices contending like so many devils within the mind — struck me as a singular device, unlike any I have known in this sort of occupation. One does not simply choose an answer; one is beset by one’s own drunken instincts until the choosing becomes an agony most keen in its anguish.
The city in which this misery unfolds deserves to be named a character in its own right, for it broods over every avenue and every broken wall like a guilty memory that refuses to depart. Its history of failed struggle against its masters, its poverty, its corrupted instruments of belief left me in a settled melancholy long after I had set the invention aside.
I have not felt a place so entirely, so completely, since certain passages of the most melancholy tales I hold dear.
Words That Wound and Console
The prose that accompanies this ruined place — for the work is, at its foundation, as much a thing of language as of interactive design — proved of a quality I had not expected. It is by turns savage, tender, absurd, and melancholy, often within a single paragraph, and it never once speaks down to those who read it.
Here is a thing I must praise without reservation: failure, in this work, is no wall but a door. Where lesser endeavours of this kind would stop the traveler at his first false step, this one simply opens a new and often more dreadful path forward. I lost a struggle early in the tale through sheer drunken folly, and the story did not punish me for it so much as reward me with new misfortune, new comedy, new sorrow.
The companion who walks beside the man who has no name throughout remains the most constant presence in this whole dreadful spectacle. His patience, his quiet humor, his rare touches of true feeling beneath a guarded manner — these make him, I think, one of the finest companions ever set down in this sort of endeavour. I found myself striving, against my own contrary nature, to earn his good regard.
If I must offer one complaint, it is only this: the political discourses, though admirably rendered, occasionally tarry past their welcome, and a traveler less inclined toward philosophical dispute may find certain passages wearisome. This is a small pecuniary grievance set against a vast treasury of riches.
What Remains After the Telling
I have turned this judgment over in my mind for some days, seeking some fault grave enough to refuse the highest praise, and I find almost none worth the naming.
Disco Elysium is a singular, melancholy, delightfully amusing, and finally melancholy work — one that haunts the memory like a ghost one did not ask for, yet would not now surrender.
