PicoBlog

Disco Elysium is a hard game to recommend to people. It is one of the best RPGs ever made with a complex story that touches on complex themes and political commentary without coming off as pretentious. It is one of the few RPGs that lets the player actually roleplay. But when you actually describe what the game is and how you play it comes off as a depressing game about a sad drunk with a pseudo-intellectual writing style and no real gameplay. Now this is not true but it is how the game comes when recommending the game due to it being unique and lacking actual combat. But when I recommend the game there is one scene that represents the games strengths and weaknesses. It is one of the final scenes of the game, the meeting with the Deserter.

People who experience traumatic events in war can often have trouble adjusting to society as the world slowly forgets what they saw. This is the state you find the Deserter at the end of Disco Elysium. He is the person who triggered everything that happened in the game. He killed a mercenary and indirectly caused the deaths of at least 5 people ( it could be more depending on how badly you mess up. ) Yet he doesn't care about any of it and is on an island far away from the city where the game takes place. He kills Lely in at most half a second and sits on his island and waits for you and your partner Kim to arrive. When you arrive he surrenders immediately and makes no attempt to hide the fact he murdered Lely. Unlike most people involved in the murder and most people in the city the game takes place he makes no attempt to manipulate you. He drops his empty sniper rifle and confesses to the murder he commited. The next objective is getting a motive for the murder. And doing that involves getting to know the depressing story of this man. The whole scene as you are questioning  him feels so melancholic. It feels like you’re here less to catch the convict of a murder, and more like you are putting down a once and loyal dog. He is the last surviving soldier of the failed communist revolution that happened forty four years before the game takes place. The revolution was against a corrupt king who bankrupted the city. They revolution succeed in taking over the city and putting down the royalist sympathizers and corrupt monarchs and in turn the communist were put down by the games respention of the UN the Coalition. He joined the revolution at 16 due to his dictation to the cause and his true belief in communism. But once he heard the Coalition airship were coming he fled and hid in an abandoned building. He then saw all his fellow comrades being killed in a matter of minutes. The way he describes it as apocalyptic as balls of fire  rain from above burning comrades alive and scorching the earth. When the firing finally stops and he comes out he sees what is left of his comrades and he breaks mentally. He sees them scorched from the airship bombs and the people in the lower levels in the fortress drowned from water pouring in. So he leaves and gives up on the revolution. He goes to his island and watches the city he fought so hard to protect and change slowly move on and forget about the tragedy that befell the city so long ago. Yet he can’t. His survivors and guilt and city moving on makes him a bitter hypocritical old man.  He raves about how he is the last communist left yet when given the opportunity to help Evart the socialist union leader of the harbor he refuses and if the player tells him they are a communist he will call them a fake communist who does not believe in the cause.  He calls every member of the city racist yet he himself calls a character named Rene a traitor to his race. He is not even a communist anymore. He is just motivated by hatred. The reason he shot Lely is because the mercenaries' presents reminded him of the worst of Coalition soldiers who landed after the communist were massacred in the city and the ones terrorized/ took over the city. So he sniped him from his island like he did to the worst of the coalition soldiers. It was not out of any sense of morality, it is because they reminded him of the people who beat him. He planned on doing the same to Rene, the only person still loyal to the former King. Rene kept him going when he wanted to commit sucide because there was one royalist left. The reason I say he isn’t a communist anymore is because he abandons his ideology and his hatred of humanity when you tell him Rene had died a day before you got to him. He realizes that all his hatred and wasted years were for nothing now that he truly is the last of his kind. Him and Rene are similar people. Both are old bitter men committed to war that they lost long ago, but the difference is Rene lived a better life than the Dester did. Rene managed to get over the loss of the war and spend the rest of his life playing a boule game with his best friend Gaston. Gaston truly loved Rene and cherished the time they spent together and Rene despite how mean he was to Gaston definitely felt the same. In a way the Deserter also felt that way about Rene. Rene kept the Deserter alive for decades and kept him from realizing he wasted his life. The Deserter repents one of the game's core themes. That failing to move on and dwelling on the past will cause you to waste your life and watch the world pass by.

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