Failure is not (always) the end
Disco Elysium opens with you on the floor. Your character, whoever they are or whatever is left of it, lies face down in a nondescript hotel room. You surface, break the plane between the void and the living to discover that you are home to the grandfather of all males.
This is the introduction to the character you live in Disco ElysiumThey are many things, and can become even more: calculating, feeling, thinking, judging, determined or remorseful. But right now you are at rock bottom, possibly the lowest of the lowest.
Moments later, you could die trying to get your tie off the ceiling fan. The headline reads “Cop Suffers Final Heart Attack,” and boy, does the word “Final” do a lot of work.
Some people may answer Disco Elysium now for the first time like it just are Final Cut update and made its way to consoles. For some, that moment can be quite frustrating – to go through the entire character creation process, only to die of a heart attack while trying to restore a piece of clothing. But I’m here to tell you: embrace those moments.
There are many ways you can die Disco ElysiumVery few of them are noble or worthy. You can die by kicking a letterbox, getting into a fight you can’t start a business with, or even just taking intense mental damage from seeing your own face in the mirror.
Disco ElysiumThe moments of failure aren’t all terminal either. If you managed to wake up and put on some clothes at first, you can stay calm and go out, only to be face to face with a beautiful woman. With intense, possibly undeserved confidence, you could try flirting with her. And the words that come out can be the eloquent, “I want to fuck you”.
In other games, failure can feel very bad. Getting that big, all-uppercase FAILED mark means that some of the content may have just been locked. Disco Elysium is okay with failing though. It’s written to embrace failure. And you really should do the same.
Take the flirtatious example: After your detective has collected the will to speak and still failed, the woman – Klaasje – smiles. She even asks you to say it again. It’s a human moment that can even lead your character down the path of defining themselves, as someone who repents and always says things they regret.
At this point, you have learned more about one of them Disco Elysium‘s main characters, while you may also establish an identity for your own character. After all, your agent just got out of a disastrous bending machine to get air; maybe they apologize for all their wrong decisions, or at least they should be. Those thoughts can linger until you end up being the Sorry Cop.
This route opens up through failure and can continue to inform the dialogue throughout the game, because that’s the kind of story Disco Elysium weaves. A failure could potentially be a game over state, but if you try to play in some “perfect” way, you could miss a lot of this world.
The failures help shape your story because, let’s face it, your agent isn’t Sherlock Holmes. With enough points, they can accumulate the visual calculus and logic to envision crime scenes in real time, differentiate the size of the boot from prints in the mud, and then calculate the number of people in attendance when a murder occurred. Oh that’s right, a murder has been committed – your character is ostensibly in the Martinaise neighborhood trying to find out why there is a body hanging in the yard behind the hotel.
Still, you often fail to complete a task that a theoretically good inspector could do. It’s a struggle to even move the body, a task that becomes the crux of the early game. Any attempt can result in your character just leaning over, unable to bear the task. Not only are your failures fatal mailboxes and clumsy words, but as you learn, your character has been in Martinaise for a while. Your ever-present companion, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, is here not only to assist you, but to make sure that the task at hand is completed, as you are probably not ready for the task anymore.
It can feel uncomfortable to fail a check and see the health meter drip down, or just be humiliated. It can lose you some crucial cash in the early game, or it can make the way forward a bit more difficult. But when you play Disco Elysium for the first time, I can’t stress this enough: embrace those moments.
Failures can ultimately define your cop and by extension you, and make your playthrough feel more like your own. Losing an option makes the next chance to progress all the worse – I didn’t like the fact that I had to literally beg the business negotiator Joyce for money just to have a bed for one more night, but I had to because there was no source of income left. In a moment, I had to put my morals aside to stay warm one more night, because I had failed so disastrously during the day, and so many times before.
It’s not just your character either; many of the people in Martinaise have their own shortcomings. They may have a hard time understanding each other, or they may be obliged to their old life due to a mistake, or they may be just bad people. One of my favorite moments is when Kim Kitsuragi, a radiant glimpse of a human, says something incorrect during a brainstorming session and immediately realizes it. When you see this internalized realization and correction clash with the fear of admitting and recording the mistake out loud, you can allow that moment to reflect and correct.
It’s a minor miscalculation with no critical narrative implications, but it’s a small kindness you can bestow as someone whose mistakes run much deeper than a simple inaccuracy. Since the guy currently trying to drag Kim out of the abyss, this is the least you can do.
Disco Elysium is formed by those shortcomings, and so I urge you to embrace them. I’m just as guilty of ‘save-scumming’ as the next one, but writing Disco Elysium feels like it rewards those who are not afraid of failure. Each lost check adds as much to your character as it takes away, and it makes their own situation feel like yours. Sure, yes, you died trying to tie off a ceiling fan, but you – the player – were also the one who urged your character to keep trying.
Failure can ultimately lead to the creation of some of the most memorable moments in your time with Disco ElysiumIt could mean that you end up playing the worst excuse for a detective to ever wash up in Martinaise, but at least that’s rarely a boring person to be.
