Disco Elysium: One Day I Will Return To Your Side

"Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart.”

Disco Elysium, the 2019 role-playing game developed and published by Estonian developers ZA/UM, is one of the most vast and affecting works of art I have ever experienced. This following piece will spoil many significant aspects of Disco Elysium’s story, plot and characters. If you have any interest whatsoever in playing Disco Elysium, I believe it is best experienced knowing as little information as possible about any and all of its many reveals and story beats, and I would urge you to not read beyond the next paragraph of this piece and to play it yourself before reading any more. If you don’t care (and I hope at least at least a few of you don’t, someone’s gotta read this thing) I believe I still do a good job explaining the shape of its story and world and I assume no prior knowledge of Disco Elysium at all. Due to the role-playing nature of the game, the excerpts and conversations featured in this article also may well not represent your own potential experiences and decisions in Disco Elysium. If you care, I want you to play it, and if you don’t, I won’t let you get lost.

“Hear that? That's the sound of meaninglessness.

Meaning, ideas, theory -- all that has evaporated.

Now there is only dry silence -- the sound of a mind

made up. Just like four billion others. I am so sorry.”

Disco Elysium is set in the fantasy world of Elysium, in the ravaged formerly-communist city of Revachol, once the capital of the entire world. Following a civil war that resulted in the Communist execution of Revachol’s Suzerain and the ending of its monarchy, the city was shelled into submission by a coalition of Elysium’s world governments and taken back, carried far away from the dream of the Revacholian commune. But it worked. It happened. It existed in living memory for many Grandparents and old-timers of Revachol and that dream never quite went away, it became inherited by their children and their children’s children. Nowhere is this more apparent than the small, seaside Revacholian district of Martinaise, the location where the entirety of Disco Elysium takes place. Martinaise was the epicentre of the beach landings and hellish bombardments that ground the Commune to paste all those years ago, left to fall into disrepair and slip unfathomably deep into the crack between districts it finds itself in. Nobody wants to touch Martinaise. The place is too dirty. The people are too strong. The history is too bleak. It doesn’t even have it’s own jurisdiction of Revachol’s police force, the RCM, and is protected instead by self-anointed peacekeepers of the local Dockworker’s Union, the only people who believe they can keep people in check best without forsaking who they are and what Martinaise represents. Disco Elysium’s world is one greatly concerned with what the dashing of hope looks like, with how easily a place can be forgotten when it outlives its effectiveness as a political symbol and with the vacuums that faith can leave behind in a people when it is taken away from them. And then, we have our protagonist- cataclysmically hungover, awakening in a grotty hotel room, in his underpants and half-alive, unable to shake the feeling he should be remembering something…

“You won’t like what you will see there, and you will never un-become it.”

Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Harrier ‘Harry’ Du Bois, disco-loving Detective of the RCM, tried to annihilate himself last night. Not metaphorically. Not recklessly. An earnest, honest-to-god attempt at destroying himself through drink and drugs so severe that when Harry awakens, he has forgotten everything. Everything. It takes him a few moments to even recognise what the sensation of being alive and having a thought is, let alone his name or job or wherever this shitty hotel room is. Harry gets up, finds his strewn-about clothes and begins to ‘feel’ out this ‘world’ around ‘him’. Harry soon learns that he’s a decorated homicide Detective and is in Martinaise for good reason- to solve the murder of a lynched, now-rotting man in the back garden of the hotel he is currently staying at, a case he has apparently not made a modicum of progress on since arriving at in Martinaise and beginning his self-annihilation three days prior. The role-playing element of Disco Elysium comes down to how you choose to rebuild Harry’s personality from the smouldering debris of whoever he was the night before the game’s story began, and this is done through extended conversations with, intrusions by and dependence on several voices in Harry’s mind, each representing a difference facet of… being a human. Volition, Shivers, Authority, Logic, Composure, Endurance and many other identifiable emotions and personality traits are given unique voices, observations and quirks as they chime in on the world around Harry, coerce and guide him, and bicker amongst themselves inside his head. It is up to you who you listen to, which parts of Harry’s utterly broken brain you allow to take the reins and when, what parts of himself are worth saving and relying on. You must rebuild him, you must make him a person again. Even as Harry relearns everything about his job, his co-workers, his home and his case, he still can’t shake the feeling that he should be remembering something… something really, really awful…

“I can't help you. I am totally useless. Everything

I've said is lies. I want the exact same bad things

you want. To stand here, like a pillar of salt,

saying...

This is everything I always warned you about.”

There is a moment in the final act of Disco Elysium, where Harry and his unflappable partner Kim Kitsuragi find themselves in a three-way standoff between themselves of the RCM, the Dockworkers Union muscle and a band of mercenaries hired by Wild Pines- the employer of all Dockworkers in Martinaise- to stoke flames and incite uncontrollable, unjustifiable unrest under the Dockworker’s Union. It’s a hard, slow standoff. The few guns to be found in Martinaise are all here in the hands of the mercenaries and Harry & Kim. There are bystanders on their knees in the plaza where this is all going down, there are elderly, there are children. The hanged man in the garden of the Hotel was a mercenary, allegedly killed and hanged by the Dockworker’s Union for sexual crimes committed against the lover of their leader and of course, the corporate mercenaries will not see any reason that will not arrive at their idea of indiscriminate retribution. It’s a hard rub. It’s a hard talk. No matter what you make Harry do or say, it will escalate and shots will fly. Union men and mercenaries will both take bullets and so will Harry, be it one or two or three- that’s down to you and your decision making up until that point. There is resolution, and one way or another, the mercenaries will cease to blight Martinaise by defeat or victory alike. Days later, Harry will recover from his wounds, full of holes but alive. He’ll hobble down the stairs of his Hotel and piece together the events of the standoff after he was shot from the bystanders and Union Men present. Stumbling out into the cold, onto the plaza where the standoff took place, Harry sees there is now a mural. A local girl, Cindy the Skull, some gang member and aspiring graffiti maestro, always said she was waiting for her masterpiece to come to her. It seems it finally did. Painted in bright red letters, from what was left behind by a damaged RCM vehicle and the men who did not get away unscathed, ‘Un Jour Je Serai De Retour Pres De Toi’, a sentence written in the broken, halfway-recognisable French that is the language of Revachol. ‘One Day I Will Return To Your Side’, painted in a mix of government issued motor oil and the entwined blood of Cops and Union Men.

“I smell heavy fuel oil.”

“And blood. Some of it even yours.”

This is what Disco Elysium is. A forgotten nook of a city desperate to return to the dream they so proudly had, full of people who refuse to give up the idealism that won their forefathers a revolution because it’s all they have left, full of ghosts and dreams and shell casings and soot from a time that might not have been so much better than the present, but that was almost wholly theirs. ‘One Day I Will Return To Your Side’. By this time, when Harry looks at those words, he is seeing all of that. But he is also seeing something else. Something greater. Something that haunts him. Something… really, really awful… Harry is seeing her.

“It's breaking. You feel fractures across you. Out of

the cracks comes nothing at all. No king, no man,

and no king's man. The cracks were all there ever

was. We are a spiderweb of glass that's painful to

look at. And she's turning her head.”

The terrible thing that lurks in the recesses of Harry’s under-construction mind, the thing that pushed him to his attempted self-annihilation, the thing that tints and shades every single sweeping story beat and aspect of the world around him- is how his wife left him.

The most simple thing. The most terrible, painful, simple thing.

“I think of you less and less every year,

weeks go by without me remembering you.

You get sad, Harry. Too sad. People can’t

get that sad. Other people get sad too, but

not like you.”

Something in Disco Elysium I am consistently moved by, among many things, is how subtly it explores parallel personal and political feelings of loneliness, abandonment, separation and longing throughout its entire story. It never forgets, it never lets it slip, it is omnipresent and important and it touches every single theme and idea presented throughout itself.

“Total annihilation. We got annihilated, Harry.

You never had any power, you never were a

moralist --or anything. You can't even be insane

or shit any more. You have to be *nothing*.

Nothing without the light and grace of love.”

But Disco Elysium is a role-playing game, after all. You have a great degree of agency in exactly the kind of man Harry can begin becoming all over again, you are largely in control of who you talk to and what you say to them, you are the captain of your own thought cabinet and can decide exactly what to make Harry ponder, forget and hyperfixate upon. You can even control what politics capture Harry’s imagination as his brain reforms. From turning him into the most dedicated Communist or the most gutless ‘Moralist’ (centrist). He can be the most smug ‘Ultraliberal’ or even become the most proud and overconfident Fascist- the latter of which largely entails entertaining the few outright racists of the world that Harry may meet, developing an obsession with ‘turning back the wheels of time’ and being told by quite a few characters that they aren’t convinced he believes in fascism as much as he just wants to spout a rhetoric that makes him appear distinguished and stoic. Your Harry is your Harry, despite the heartbreak, despite the oppressive history of Martinaise and despite the murder investigation. People are more than their pasts, their surroundings and their goals of course, and the freedom to explore the astoundingly complex worldbuilding and lore of Elysium created by ZA/UM as one of hundreds of possible Harrys and unravel the story of Disco Elysium in dozens of different ways is what makes it a role-playing game- and your role? A brand new human, of course, with free reign to guide and explore all the eccentricities, preferences, emotions, beliefs and morals that you think your cop should have. Always a cop. You have tremendous freedom in how you develop Harry’s minutia of character, so how come you have to stay a Detective of the RCM? How come you have to always, at least half-heartedly, further the murder investigation that brought pre-annihilation Harry here in the first place? Because of Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, of course.

"If the windows came crashing down and the whole world descended upon you - this man would hurl himself in death's way to save you. You are sure of this - but why?”

Martinaise, lacking its own jurisdiction of the RCM police force, is very often allowed to remain out of sight and out of mind by the two RCM precincts that sandwich it, the 41st and the 57th, Harry and Kim’s respective precincts. A likely-murdered, hung and rotting corpse left strung up in public is unfortunately enough of a precedent for the RCM to sanction a joint, formal investigation between precincts 41 and 57, neighbours and longtime rivals. Kim arrives in Martinaise three days after Harry, first meets him the morning of his re-awakening into complete amnesia, and will almost never leave Harry’s side until the investigation is concluded, or he is physically unable to. Kim Kitsuragi is Harry’s grounding rod and a firm hand upon his shoulder, a strong stake in the ground to which Harry’s leash always remains attached as he bumbles through Martinaise. Kim is a competent, efficient, patient and reserved man, the polar opposite of Harry- no matter how you elect to play him, Harry will never come within a prayer of any measure of stoicism- and is frequently the diegetic voice in Disco Elysium beyond the confines of Harry’s skull who tells him when he’s being weird, or when he’s wasting time, or how telling everyone he meets that he’s lost his loaded service pistol is rarely the wisest move. 

Harry: “Where are we, lieutenant Kitsuragi?”

Kim: “In Elysium… Behind our eyes. Like all human beings, detective.”

He looks around and sighs.

Kim: “The world is what it is. I’m glad to see you’re stable. Keep it that way.”

Harry is never actually alone- he is never without someone watching his back and keeping him accountable- he is never alone because he has Kim Kitsuragi. Over the course of the game, Harry and Kim can develop a truly warm relationship (unless you indulge in an excess of fascistic tangents and endanger the public just a tad too much) and during that critical, climactic shootout in the game’s third act, the sincere trust that you may have fostered between Harry and Kim is critical to whether Kim pulls through unscathed or is hospitalised and absent from the game’s final hours. Kim had to be Harry’s partner, he is often his crutch, and he can even maybe be his friend- but beneath that all, Kim represents something far more valuable and tangible to Harry. Kim is accountability, he is regimen, he is discipline. He is structure given a face and voice who is unrelenting in his mission to make sure Harry- at the very least - stays upright until his job is done. He’s there for Harry because he has to be, and because everything he stands for in Harry’s second crack at life won't always be there for him, but it probably should be. We should all be so lucky.

“Detective, each of us has our part to play in the

world. My part is to solve crimes. I am under

no illusion that my role isn't a minor one, in

the scheme of things... But I embrace it because

it's my role, and it's yours too, detective, whether

you accept it or not.”

Roughly halfway through Disco Elysium’s story, on the third day of Harry’s investigation, you will meet Acele. She’s only a young woman and far too frail, far too hollow in her eyes. You meet her on the icy Western shores of the Martinaise inlet amongst discarded, rotting timber beams collapsed from a nearby abandoned church. She kneels on the ice with a clunky contact microphone and tape recorder, recording the deep sounds of the moving ice beneath her, seeking interesting sounds and samples from which to make dance music with. A few metres away is a tent, music and laughter and warmth pouring from it- her boyfriend and his buddies, aspiring club owners who want to turn the abandoned church into an ‘anodic dance’ landmark. Harry can ask her why she’s out in the freezing cold. Not enough room for the guys and their equipment, of course, she tells him. But she doesn’t mind, she can take the cold. “That stuff is more expensive than I am”. Usually when Harry interacts with the populace of Marinaise throughout Disco Elysium, it is as a bewildered and erratic element, inquisitive about their beliefs and their place in this unknown world and disarming in his lack of tact and social grace thanks to his less-than-robust mental state. When Harry speaks to Acele, however, it is the first time you do not entirely see that person. He’s still erratic and disjointed in his subjects of choice, but he immediately sees in Acele someone worth comforting, someone who probably could do with some answers, not questions. Not that she asked this smelly, hungover, greasy-haired curious cop for anything, mind you.

She mentions in apparent embarrassment that her contact microphone experiments are just childish distractions, ‘kid stuff’, nothing really worth talking about to strangers.

Harry: “I’m sorry you have to sit here on the ice, feeling miserable. At your age — or at any age — in this weather… waiting for it to get dark.”

She looks you in the eye, her pupils wide, surrounded by a ridiculous amount of make-up.

Harry: “The people who built this world intended it to be better for you, but they failed. It is easier to live in their failure with this by your side.” (Tap on the tape recorder.)

The wind howls. She remains silent. It’s real. Tell her.

Harry:  “It is not a childish fantasy. It can be a real weapon against what’s coming for you now.”

Acele: “What is…?” (Her shoulders shake a little.)

Harry: “Nothing, if you got this. Don’t be scared.”

Acele: “Okay.”

Her teeth rattle. She takes the device from you and places it in her lap.

Acele: "I'll stick to it."

Harry just can’t let her shiver alone, he clearly must have needed what he gave Acele once upon a time and never got it, and maybe he wouldn’t have drunk himself into what he is now if he had. Even in the state he finds himself in, a man who needed three days to recollect his name and who still doesn’t know what his home address is, he couldn’t bear to see another embarrassed, scared person in the cold go on without telling them something good, without at least trying to impart something that the people of Martinaise are probably all very unfamiliar with. Harry does not have a tape recorder, he does not have the dream of an anodic dance club to keep him chugging along, he just has people like Acele. Lonely people who will talk and lonely people who will listen, people to learn about as he continuously tries to forget the most beautiful thing that ever happened to him. Martinaise is full of people failed by their governments, failed by their lovers. It is full of Aceles, full of people left outside of the tent because what is inside costs more than they do. 

“True love is possible only in the next world, for

new people. It is too late for us – Wreak havoc

on the middle class.”

By now, Harry has realised that his memory is not coming back, he will not be the man he killed in that hotel room with paint-thinner booze and amphetamines, even if he does eventually find him scattered across Martinaise. The one thing he always knew he had forgotten, the one thing he was trying to escape, was his ex-wife. He seeks answers about his past in the world so he may better understand what he lost, why he lost it, if he can ever have anything like it again, if there is anything in the world like it. Harry ran from it, and now he marches toward it, an ouroboros of pain and hard feeling with a fat, hungover cop between its mouth and its tail. Harry often asks the bickering voices in his head trying to build him anew why he asks the things he asks, why they make him say unprompted the things he says unprompted, and all their various answers- superstardom, communism, facism, nihilism, comedy, drama, the supernatural- all eventually boil down to the pursuit of a place for Harry in the world once this murder is solved and when he must leave Martinaise. He’ll change the world! He’ll make the world his bitch! He’ll be the most famous Cop who ever lived! The grandest ideas, the most incredible delusions. It all changes, it is all recontextualised, when Harry finally learns about the Pale.

“Time to go to work in the shit factory.”

At a certain point, when the Pale is referenced by a person of interest in the case, Kim tells Harry that he has thus far managed to guide all their conversations and interviews away from the subject as Kim believes it could potentially devastate Harry while his amnesia-numbed mind is still adjusting the world around them, and does not want Harry to fall apart and lose sight of the murder investigation if it can be helped. Harry can insist on being told about the Pale, at which avenue Kim will wash his hands of you temporarily and leave you be for a moment while the person of interest fills Harry in.

The Pale is the name given to a phenomenon that encompasses roughly 70% of the surface of the planet of Elysium that separates the known continents, a great opaque fog in which time and space functions erratically, organic matter cannot sustain, memory is unreliable and mathematics cease to function nor apply. It eats people, it eats the planet. The Pale eats everything, nobody can live within it, the cargo lorry drivers who must occasionally ferry through it are vulnerable to immense psychological damage and they still cannot describe what it is like to be in it, because the Pale devours sensation and memory also. And it’s growing. Unavoidably. Indiscriminately. It is simply a matter of time before the Pale swallows every speck of Elysium up and erases… everything. Even history, eventually.

“You cannot see it but you know it’s there. And

it’s big – bigger than anything. Bigger than all

the other things combined.”

This reveal of this existential horror that everyone in Elysium must dutifully accept and with which they must coexist rocks Harry. He drove himself to the point of oblivion in a doomed world, he’s been bumbling through Martinaise as the two-sheets-to-the-wind Sheriff of Revachol harassing everyone he sees for a conversation regarding what he’s supposed to be doing on a planet destined to cease existing, in spirit, in form and in thought. His heart is broken, the commune is dead and the world is going to fade away. And there he goes. The sad cop, the sorry cop, the superstar cop- asking everyone what they are and why. He had no idea how tragic this world really was, far beyond the ghosts of the revolution.

“You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The

vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it

are afraid of you. Given enough time you would

wipe us all out and replace us with nothing –

just by accident.”

When you lose anybody you love, in any way, you will lose some part of yourself. That’s an incredibly trite thing to say and has been centuple distilled across so much media by now, so very much, that the idea has probably lost all meaning, but it is true. When you love someone, when you share in life with someone, they walk away from every experience and go to sleep every night, every time, holding parts of you in their head, in their soul. There exists a version of you in the mind of every person you have ever loved, and if you’re lucky, it’s a great version of you. Sometimes it’s not. It might be you. It might look like you. It might share a lot of traits with you. Christ, you might hate it. Yet, It’s a version of you that is real, because love is real, and to be loved is to be profoundly important to someone even when you are not there. To be loved is to let someone have you, however they want you, and to take it with them everywhere. You do not get to choose what that version of you is, you will never get to have a say. You simply can’t tell someone how to love you just as you can’t tell yourself how to love- that is the frustration, that is the tragedy, that is the beauty.

“Black-eyed dogs wander the alleys, apple trees

hang their bony limbs low over the patchwork of

roofs: red and black. Revachol West, the evening

sun -- she's left and bloomed. Far away from us.

Our vast soul.”

Abrupt or expected, amicable or bitter, tragic or relieving- when it ends, that version of you goes with them. If it was good, you needn’t ever worry what that version of you was. If it was bad? Well, you probably know exactly what it was like. What Disco Elysium supposes is, what if you also lost that version of you? Could you love yourself? Could you create a version of yourself that would make you happy, in the face of overwhelming social and emotional tragedy and abandonment? Harry might- just might- discover what kind of man he is and if he’s lucky, it’ll be one worthy of the world, worthy of the ghosts of the revolution, worthy of all the Aceles, worthy of solving the murder of the hanged man in the garden and worthy of the fresh start he inadvertently granted himself when he needed it most.

“I don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore.”

A recurring handful of characters throughout the game who Harry can visit and converse with often are a team of Cryptozoologists, devout believers and studiers of all cryptids across the land. Of course, they have never seen, photographed, captured or produced proof of them, but that’s only because cryptids are tricky little things and almost always few in number so more direct approaches to capture are really quite reckless and- you get the idea. It is up to you exactly how much Harry chooses to believe in the nonsense that these well-meaning cryptozoologists indulge themselves in as a vocation, but almost all of Harry’s many mental narrators and those he tells about them are under no illusion whatsoever that the creatures this team loves so dearly are absolutely fictitious. None more fictitious than the cryptid Harry can choose to help them conduct field research on, The Insulindian Phasmid. Described as a giant Mantis-like creature that can become invisible amongst its habitat of shoreline reeds, as well as read and affect the thoughts and minds of anyone caught in its pheromones for long enough. The Insulindian Phasmid, sometimes called The Insulindian Miracle, is the bedtime story that charms and intrigues many a child across Elysium, as well as a good few amateur cryptozoologists. Let them have it, though!

It is incredibly difficult to ever put Harry in a position where he can ever outrightly tell the cryptozoologists how silly it is to devote their lives to chasing monsters and storybook beasts, you have to really want to do that for a very long time before the game allows you to finally do so in that direct and chastising a tone. Harry wants them to have their hope, their optimism in finding something incredible, their wild adventure. 

Eventually, if you manage to crack the murder of the hanged man and piece together all accounts and clues to get to the truth, the investigation will draw to a finale where Harry and Kim find themselves on a shaggy islet a short sail away from the shore of Martinaise, confronting their suspect on the sandy, North-Western shore of an old Communist Anti-Aircraft sea fortress in the icy bay. As Harry prepares to slap the cuffs on the suspect, they begin to foam at the mouth and lose control of their speech, seeing things that aren’t there, responding to questions Harry did not ask. Then, emerging from the reeds and blotting out the sun before Harry, will stand The Insulindian Phasmid. It’s real. It really is a giant mantis creature, it really is invisible and it really is manipulating the mind of someone caught in its pheromones for too long! The Insulindian Miracle is real…

“No one believed I exist – almost no one. Until you came, detective. Dripping of blood that smells like strawberries. Across the calm sea, the first in a thousand years.”

The decision by developers ZA/UM to make this moment the emotional and narrative climax of Disco Elysium, Harry coming face to face with a giant, supernatural cryptid who telepathically communes with him, is often regarded as a strange one in many conversations about the game. For all the fantastical elements of Disco Elysium, for all the cosmic horror of the Pale, it is a relatively grounded narrative that treats all subjects with weight, rationality and consideration. I don’t blame anybody for finding The Insulindian Phasmid to be a leap just too far as the game winds down after tens of hours to its ending. But for Harry, there couldn’t ever have been true fate other than meeting such a creature.

It’s ridiculous, it’s unfathomable, it’s impossible- but so is Harry Du Bois’ rebirth. To relearn everything, to rebuild who he was, to become a version of himself he is unconditionally proud of no matter what, to be the kind of man who can comfort every Acele in the whole wide world, to find humanity in utter political failure, to lose the most beautiful thing in his life and keep being a human- it’s all as impossible as talking to The Insulindian Phasmid. And wouldn’t you know it?...

He did it all.

Harry: “Are you the miracle?”

Insulindian Phasmid: “No. You are the miracle.”

Harry: “How?”

Insulindian Phasmid: “The moral of our encounter is: I am a relatively median lifeform, while you are an extreme, all-engulfing madness. A volatile simian nervous system, ominously new to the planet.”

Harry has finally found himself, scattered all across Martinaise, and he is not the man his ex-wife walked away from, he is not the man who lost his gun and his badge and he is the furthest thing from whoever was drowned in the liquor-soaked shag carpet of his hotel room all those days ago- a lifetime ago. He’s the man who looked Acele in her big eyes under all that makeup and told her that the world will be just a little less frightening as long as you keep a tight grip on something you love that no system or government can take from you. He’s the man who managed to be better after losing his something. Harry’s fragments of personality and game-long narrators will sing him to his return-

“In honour of your will, lieutenant-yefreitor. That

you kept from falling apart, in the face of sheer

terror. Day after day. Second by second.

DETECTIVE.

ARRIVING.

ON THE SCENE.”

Disco Elysium is a game about the struggle to build something better from ashes, about the potency of faith and delusion and about the impossible pursuit of yesterday. 

“One day I will return to your side.”

Disco Elysium is about missing something that you loved.

"Here is the secret: there is no love in the past.

Only the present. The past is made of static

images, distorted memories, demented nostalgia.

This, the present — with all its possibilities,

innumerable hits and misses — is far superior.

It is a *living* organism."