Searching for Disco Elysium

Timestamps:
00:00-15:40 No Spoilers
15:41-18:43 Spoilers
18:44-23:55 No Spoilers

Additional Voices by

Games Shown: Disco Elysium, Microsoft Flight Simulator, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Music Used (Chronologically): Instrument of Surrender, Ecstatic Vibrations Totally Transcendent, Martinaise Terminal B, Miss Oranje Disco Dancer, Tiger King, Polyhedrons, Precinct 41 Major Crime Unit, The Cryptozoologists, Krennell Downwell Somatosensor (Disco Elysium), Second Confluence (Journey), The Insulindean Miracle (Disco Elysium), Atonement (Journey), Another Voyage (Chrono Cross), The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns (Disco Elysium)

Description Credit: Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Video Supplied by Getty Images

[phelanii]

After 23 years of living in the same small Eastern European city, where everyone knows everyone and everything you need is within an hours walk, I have moved to a big city in Germany. When I am in my family house, I refer to the small apartment in Germany as "back home". When I am in Germany, I refer to my birthtown as "back home". Home is not only where the heart is, it's where you are not.

[razbuten]

I'll be back for those last 8 minutes in a couple months.

update: I came back for those last 8 minutes. good game. good video.

[tychoazrephet]

I...never realized the main menu is The Deserter's view of Revachol. That adds such an incredible depth to the imagery of this city, depth that was already fathoms upon fathoms. If it's the same view, the first view we the audience get of this city, how differently do we see it compared to him? Both views are voyeuristic, separated, removed and yet why are we filled with wonder while The Deserter is overwhelmed with fossilized disgust? This isn't our home, it isn't his home either, we're both foreigners to this strange city. Perhaps there's an inherent value to novelty, a value lost over decades, or perhaps it's easier to enjoy the view when you aren't carrying the weight of failing to change the world. We're all ghost's of our own pasts, but to us, Revachol isn't the corpse of a future we lost.

[RPBiohazard]

Dumping all your points into Shivers is the most Jacob Geller thing imaginable.

[funguy]

I took 1 damage from Light bulb and 1 damage from running into a wheelchair Lady and died not even leaving motel.
Best game ever.

[magnificmango]

I knew this game was gonna be great when I finished the first day, chatted with Kim, and then he mentioned I wasn’t wearing shoes. I checked my inventory and realized that yep, I forgot to equip my shoes.

[cf]

For the first few hours I played Disco Elysium I took the voices that interrupt dialogue as instructions. I thought the game was telling me what to do, a goal to orient myself around in conversation. It was only when several conflicting thoughts interrupted me that i realized these things were meant to represent thoughts and not instructions. Like even though I was in control, I chose the dialogue options, I really for a time wasn't. I was a slave to my psychie. And I wonder how often I am just the same in my day to day life, mindlessly following the orders of my most immediate thoughts instead of pondering for even a moment.

[steve]

One thing that you said that really struck me was in your description of the skill Shivers vs. Encyclopedia, the way you described two ways of knowing something. It reminded me of something I learned while studying German, the two verbs they have for "to know". They actually have this dichotomy you describe built into their grammar in that the verb "wissen" directly means to know, to recognize and understand something, whereas the verb "kennen" means to know of in an intimate sense, of knowing who someone is or why something does what it does. An example would be, I might know the location of my house ("wissen"), but I also intimately know my house, the cracks in the tiles in the bathroom, how the burns on my kitchen counters were made, etc ("kennen"). Just thought that was pretty cool to think about, idk

[buzhichun]

Just finished the game a week ago and all I can say is:

Mr. Evrart is helping me find my gun.

[gyozapunk]

As someone who has lived in the same washed up midwestern town ever since I was born, and for reasons out of my control will likely never leave, this really choked me up. It's really something when you experience something that makes you see the same things you always have differently. This will probably stick with me for a while.

[luccasliuti]

Disco Elysium Essays are my favorite kind of videos on the internet. This game means so fucking much for me. I actually broke up a 7 year relationship right before playing the game and was stuck in the past, i also tried to kill myself on this timeframe. So playing this game i didn't even see Harry as Harry, i saw him as me. Facing Dolores at the end was like facing my own dark toughts and it helped more then months of therapy could. I'm facinated by the power this medium has to change people, and i can say that Disco is maybe not the best game i've ever played, but it is the most important.

[s.masoodkazemi]

It is quite melancholic to see that a person (Robert Kurvitz) sees his homeland (Estonia) the same way I see my homeland (Afghanistan). To put in short, Revachol does reminds a lot of my country. My parents always tell me how good it was when USSR was in their, at least they know they wouldn't be torn to pieces because of a bomb each day they leave their home. Like Revachol, my country never was the same and never was fixed once the USSR was defeated. There are places in my city that you can still see the bullet holes, the fractured walls because of bombs, the fractured souls of all the people who died, who lost love ones, who lost themselves.
Revachol is like a second home to me. As much as it is broken and torn to pieces, it is the only place I have.

[glasscreature]

I'm a senior in high school, about to graduate and leave my home, NYC, (well hopefully, yay pandemic) and this captured so well my sadness and excitement about leaving. NYC is such a personal place in that you can live there your whole life and yet never go to so much of it. It's so segregated, and not just by race, but by class, life experience, nationality, language. It's a "melting pot" in that these people coexist together, but oftentimes barely interact. One of my favorite habits is to just walk, try and find a street I've never been down before, to look up and see something so familiar in such a different way. I love it here, and yet it makes me so angry to live here, knowing how badly it fails people, knowing how stark the contrasts can be, and yet how easy it is for so many people to either ignore it or never see it. I feel sad to leave, and feel like all I've done is observe as neighborhoods get gentrified, stores I love replaced by "for rent" signs and laser hair removal shops. Even this summer's protests are only remnants; I saw the arches at Washington Square Park with scrubbed graffiti that said "ACAB" with two cops in front of it. The boutique stores with boarded windows are gone, and only the NYPD cars remain. Even CBGB's, which used to be a center of protest music, is now a John Varvatos store. It reminds me of Mark Fisher's book on Capitalist Realism, that capitalism acts like it was always here and will always remain. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

That was a long ramble barely having to do with Disco Elysium but! Thanks for articulating that feeling of city that is so hard to explain. Loved the video, thanks Jacob!

[IndirectCogs]

I watched for one minute, paused, bought and played the entire game and came back.

This game is fucking devastating. One conversation in particular had me fucking sobbing. I was sad in a way I'll never be able to express to another: and that makes it worse.

Disco Elysium is the real deal. An AMAZING RPG.

[sabinasabino]

I have a weird experience playing this game, that’s because I can’t actually play it. I am poor, very poor by American standards, I was not born poor, however, and have had access to an excellent education - I am sort of an anomaly. I couldn’t afford this game, I earn minimum wage, but it had been so long since I bought something from myself, so I went ahead and bought it, 56 reais, I am Brazilian, by the way, from São Paulo. The problem is, my computer is slightly more than a decade old, a laptop, of all things. I installed it, and it ran, but just the beginning section, the game would crash and chug horribly if I left the Whirling Rags. I tried everything, but in the end I was left playing just that small sequence, over and over again, in the hopes that by some miraculous mean my hardware could last me just a couple of steps longer into the game. A new conversation, a new skill check, and since it chugged a lot I was left with my own thoughts. And everything kind of reminded me of home, yes, the game is set in what is essentially a frozen tundra, and I live in a sweltering tropical mega city, but still, maybe it was just those small conversations I kept having over and over with the same characters that gave off this feeling of familiarity, but their weary faces in a worn down bar and hotel, that unmistakable hopelessness, it really stinks of home. We are often stereotyped as a happy people, but our happiness is just we laughing off the pain, most of the time. Life is harsh around here, inequality and strife to the point of caricature, and our fascist in power doesn’t exactly lighten the mood. There is this feeling of empty nostalgia, not for anything in particular, because the past isn’t really worthy of it, but maybe for the times when things did not feel so apocalyptic. Two years ago now, I think, the sky blackened with ash, night fell at four o’clock in the afternoon, it was ash from the intentional burning of the Amazon, here, in São Paulo, as far from the Amazon as NYC to Denver. That day our collective heart broke, and we’ve been sort of undead ever since, settling in this kind of resigned routine. This reminds me so much of this game, or this game reminds me of all this stuff. Sorry for the rant, it’s been a hard day, your videos are lovely. Thank you.

[RhysticStudies]

as a Calvino scholar, this video hit all the right notes for me, and you continue to inspire me with your ideas.

[relicondqypq]

Please, love and support the developers of Disco Elysium, we need another game from them

[MrTreespace]

Man hearing those horns gives me goosebumps every fuckin time.

[magnificmango]

The greatest novel of 2019 is here, and it’s a video game.

[clara]

I grew up in an economically depressed city and moved with my mom after my dad died. I remember in elementary school, I would walk home imagining what it would be like to live somewhere else and know different people. But after I moved, I found that I missed it. I am now perpetually homesick, and have been for years. The place that I left doesn't even really exist anymore; it's been too long.

The funny thing is, I know a bunch of people from the same city who feel the same way. Sometimes, I run into someone from the area, and we always spend a few minutes trying to figure out who we know in common. There's a sense that there will always be someone, or someplace, we have in common. This seems strange, but to me it just feels familiar.

I wrote a song about this city once. It started:

You're my love, don't ever change
Life's too sweet, life's too strange
To go away and not come back again