Disco Elysium 🪩🕺👮🔫🚬

🎵 The song for this post is Ecstatic Vibrations, Totally Transcendent, by Sea Power for the game's OST. 🎵

Disco Elysium is probably the game that's impacted most me since Celeste 6 years ago. I was transfixed for days, and about halfway through I realized I was playing something extremely special. I've got a few big "islands" of reactions, with rapid-fire at the bottom. Light, light spoilers but nothing that would have diminished my enjoyment.

If you want to read reactions to other art, I've done deep write-ups of some novels (God of Small Things, The Sympathizer) and video games (BioShock, BioShock 2, Tunic).

Quijote and I

Don Quijote and I have a weird relationship. It's one of the most meaningful and inspirational art pieces of my life, a personal North Star, where I've almost gotten tattoos of it, where I've named many computers "Sancho." On the other hand, I read it in high school in the most game-of-Telephone way possible, in my second language, and almost none of the cultural criticism I've read matches how I remember and understand it. Fittingly, like Quijote did with caballero novels, I might be mythologizing it? And living according to my own version of it?

To describe why I love Don Quijote, I use a quote by Akira Kurosawa:

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

Don Quijote traipses around Spain behaving completely untethered to the reality that everyone else lives in. His quests are hopeless (it's where we get the word "quixotic"). You make choices every day, by simply agreeing to a shared reality with everyone around you, to never act like him. And yet. He's the most fulfilled person of any room he's in. He inspires every life he touches, and leaves the world better than he found it. His unquenchable optimism and goodness comes off as delusional but not saccharine, and it works! Virtually nobody on Earth lives like him, and yet we all want to feel like he does: operating with an undying sense of purpose, leaving positive impacts all around us.

I doubt this was their intention, but Disco Elysium is my favorite adaptation of Don Quijote. Kim Kitsuragi as Sancho. It takes the Quijote formula to make something new, beautiful, and of our time, grappling with modern questions of being and ideology differently than Quijote can. It uses the interactivity of games to take this template to places a novel couldn't. To be clear: it doesn't diminish Quijote. But rather than simply "make Quijote, but modern" as a straightforward adaption would, it uses the tech of today and modern storytelling norms to add another level to the ziggurat.

You inhabit a madman, but over the course of the game, you reach and touch the lives of everyone in Martinaise. For most of my playthrough, my detective was carrying a plastic bag with empty bottles to recycle for pennies in one hand, a decorative katana in the other, wearing an open silk robe and mesh tanktop, like some kind of arthouse hobocop. He was also a brilliant detective who solved a murder. Through the narrative and mechanical choices they've put in there, the only "sane" way to play the game is to play it insane. And there are so many "insane" ways to play this game! Its construction makes it feel as though any possible path was, narratively, the only way that murder could get solved, and each of those ways feels like a differently-colored flashlight shining into your own psyche, teaching you new things about yourself.

(you don't have to be totally mad, of course. for a stretch of time I was getting tired of all the flavor, and was more invested in the case. I was also feeling hopeless that no political ideology looked promising, so I picked all the dialogue options to just focus on the case. The game mocked me with with a "world's most laughable Centrist" achievement)

I've been seeing my current therapist for about two and a half years. I'm also about a year into ketamine therapy. One of the storylines I'm coming to understand: yes, everyone is unique and their lives have deep, meaningful challenges, but I really, really don't fit. Most brains don't work like mine, don't drive like mine. This has me feeling extremely lonely for most of my life. Sure, the aesthetics of my choices are a bit odd (things like: blogging in 2024, with a blog engine I built in OCaml, the code for which is hosted on a code forge built and run by an open source radical. Playing the accordion). But when I talk about not fitting, I mean the very fabric of how one processes the world. What's joyful, or funny, or interesting, or disgusting (or not). What connections get formed between which islands of thought, and how often that happens. How few people I can share all that with. Every week, I have thousands of internal conversations with dozens of people, entirely in my head.

I think the root of my depression was internalizing these differences as something wrong with me, something that made me broken, instead of merely different, let alone something I could leverage. And being ill-fitting hurts: the world seems built for people who only zig, but you frequently zag, and after getting punished enough for this, you just want to give up. The metaphor I've been using recently is to imagine people with physical needs the default-world doesn't fill, like wheelchair users who need ramps. You're allowed to feel frustration that the world isn't built for you (e.g. many places don't have ramps or elevators), and you can recognize that your existence is not the one most structures are built for, and that it makes your life harder. But if you feel that frustration, it's a mistake to take away the belief that you are deficient, that you deserve the alienation, or need to be "fixed" before you can be worthy, or loved, or you can exist happily.

I don't feel like I choose my differences. Believe me, I've tried to choose "normal," and only "zig," for decades, and it didn't bring me closer to collectives of people, or make the urge to die go away. To bring back Celeste, you can't outrun your shadow. I feel like I have to be the way I am, and I can't conceive of being any other way. I feel like it's a rational reaction to the mad world I grew up and live in? But it seems to be only driving me (and the 5 other weirdos I really relate to) mad?! Most people just… live in this world, pretty contentedly? They laugh at Young Sheldon?

So I love art that says, hey: let's show you how beautiful and powerful being mad can be. Let's show you a world where it's a superpower. Let's remind you how it can really make sense, actually.

Speaking of mad worlds…

"A world more honest than our own"

I use this phrase to describe representations of the world that are exaggerrated to be unrealistic, but feel more emotionally honest as a result. If the people of Disco Elysium were painted or voiced realistically, had realistic dialogue, and reacted realistically to your protagonist, let's be real: the game would be boring as shit. It's because they make Evrart "a walrus of a man," with that voice, that you feel something more true, powerful, and sincere about the game's questions of labor, power, tradeoffs, and likeability. Playing to extremes also makes the game's sincere moments come through more effectively: without the bitter, the sweet doesn't taste so sweet.

It's a bit related to the concept of kayfabe, the thing where professional wrestlers pretend the schtick is real, to which the audience pretends to believe it too. I love this write-up on the idea of kayfabe when describing the appeal of Donald Trump:

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years "kayfabe" has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it's real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.

To a wrestling audience, the fake and the real coexist peacefully. If you ask a fan whether a match or backstage brawl was scripted, the question will seem irrelevant. You may as well ask a roller-coaster enthusiast whether he knows he’s not really on a runaway mine car. The artifice is not only understood but appreciated: The performer cares enough about the viewer's emotions to want to influence them. Kayfabe isn’t about factual verifiability; it's about emotional fidelity.

[…] The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump supporter whether he or she thinks the president actually plans to build a giant wall and have Mexico pay for it, and you might get an answer that boils down to, "I don’t think so, but I believe so." That’s kayfabe. Chants of "Build the Wall" aren't about erecting a structure; they’re about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy.

One of my favorite things fictional worlds can do is present fake things that feel more real. One of my favorite movies of the last decade, which did this extensively, was Sorry To Bother You. It calls itself "magical realism," which is their way of warning the audience that it will exaggerate reality. But per my point, I think it's mostly being more honest about what's happening under the surface.

There's a scene where Cassius, the lead, is invited to a party hosted by a CEO. It's like many of the parties I've gone to here in the Bay: tech yuppies, mood lights, homogeneity, drugs. Cassius is one of the only Black people at the event, so partygoers ask him to "freestyle." He tries to explain that he doesn't rap, but he gets pressured into it, and his first attempts are pathetic. Then he does this:

Now, there are multiple ways to read this. One is: he just said the n-word over and over, and Boots Riley (the writer and director) is showing us how eager White people are to say it. This reading is fine, and I like it too.

But another read is: imagine a world where White people can't tell that he's not actually rapping, because to their ears, it's all just "[n-word] shit." Imagine if he's making up lyrics about marketeable Black stereotypes that White people love, but the storytelling shorthand for that is just "[n-word] shit."

The whole movie has examples like this. In order to expose wrongdoing, he has to join a TV show where you watch people cheerfuly get the shit kicked out of them. It feels otherworldly, until you remember the UFC. Before he's allowed to share incriminating evidence of massive wrongdoing, he has to swim in cistern full of literal shit. Again, why would exposing the truth in the public interest require something so humiliating and stupid? But think of what we did to the lives of Christine Blasey Ford, or Amber Heard. There's fantasy, where shit is just "not of this world," there's satire, where there's winking and nodding to remind you we know it's all fake, but then there's this: it's an exaggerrated world played totally straight, like upping the contrast on a photo to show you what's happening in yours. Disco Elysium feels this way.

Race and politics as the Sun: you can't look at them directly

For years I dated a woman who inhaled dozens of a certain kind of novel. It's called "speculative fiction", but like "jazz," the genre is so broad it means a ton of different things. In her case, it was stories for and by adults, but that also had a little something-something of fantasy: things like secret vampire societies, or werewolves, or fairies. Not teen lit like Twilight, but things like True Blood, or Patricia Briggs novels, where the main character Mercy Thompson can channel her Native American heritage to become a coyote.

She'd say something like

What I like about these novels is that they teach you empathy. You can see themes of having to be "closeted" in the ones where vampires are kept secret, or structural prejudice and discrimination if the vampires are known about, but ostracized.

And my response was always something like

or you could read a novel with Black or gay people in it? Or by Black or gay authors? Why do they need to be vampires?

She was White and grew up in a town full of White people. In retrospect, I was being dismissive and cheeky, and it might have been my indirect way of surfacing real tensions in our relationship. But also? I think I'm pointing at something real? A lot of people can't swallow heavy themes like politics or race when presented as such. Like the Sun, it hurts them to look at it directly, so you need these indirections.

(taken to its extreme, you get funny results. how popular was "The Hunger Games" before Americans voted for a fascist? Paul Ryan listed "Rage Against the Machine" as a favorite band (buddy, who was the machine they're raging against?) and JD Vance apparently loves "Lord of the Rings," where the One Ring's only defining trait is corrupting people who seek power for its own sake, when he's one of the most venal, opportunistic people in a town famous for venal opportunists. Often, people seek this indirection because it lets them avoid being accountable for their own actions)

The setting of Disco Elysium isn't Earth, but it's Earth-like. It's got Communism and Fascism, named as such, but also unbridled capitalism is called "Ultraliberalism" and centrism is "Moralism." There's a deity named Dolores Dei who is an "innocence" which has a lot of echoes of Christianity and sainthood but is neither. Your partner Kim is Asian, but there's no Asia, so he's "seolite." Latinos are "mesques."

Here, you have conversations about oppression, military rule, government systems, and colonialism, but the setting puts wax paper over the camera lens so it doesn't feel as present. If you play the detective as a hardcore fascist, it just feels different than if you played a game set in 1930's Italy or Germany and you were advocating for the same political ideology, with the results we already know.

It also aids in the "create a more honest world" effect above. One of my favorite political caricatures in the game is "The Sunday Friend," a committed centrist beaurocrat working for an organization like the UN. He's in a full suit, speaks Ivy League-educated language with a posh accent. According to him, keeping the world economy humming and maintaining a 2% inflation rate are the most important parts of elevating the standards of living in the developing world. It seems far away, and it'll take generations, but slowly, through economic liberalism and sensible policy that never rocks the boat too much, we can help get many people out of poverty in these countries. He tells you all this while visiting such a place (Martinaise) at midnight, while he's in the apartment of an economically destitute young man "he's giving assistance to," and certainly fucking. "My politics will save you all! At a comfortable pace for me, eventually. But in the meantime I'm gonna stick my cock in that tight, delicious asshole of yours. This will cost me what a night of drinking costs in my country, and I'm convinced this is moral, actually."

Suppose you were playing a game and a forty-something French-from-actual-France diplomat is having this conversation in actual Thailand, and the young man he's taking advantage of a barely-of-age actually-Thai man; well, I think you'd really struggle to make light of this. You wouldn't howl and cackle like I did as you listen to him expouse his politics; it would just be pretty sad. While challenging art is good, you do want it to be fun, actually: nobody invests 30 hours into something that only hurts. So the setting, on top of being rich and interesting and allowing for things Earth doesn't, also allows you to thematically connect with material differently. Ideology talks can be awful. But here? It's actually kind of fun. Especially since it feels less didactic, and more "exploratory." But on that note…

Can you compare ideologies fairly? Apathy as its own politics

One thing that rattled me: how does this game feel about Communism? After my playthrough I couldn't tell if they liked it or hated it. I played for 30 hours and felt plenty entertained by the political content, but was it just lampooning, or did it actually try to present an angle? I've since read a lot of analysis and it appears there is some consensus on this, and I've got my own opinion that I haven't seen in other places (next section!), but while I was confused, I was afraid they were pulling a play that I hate, the "equal opportunity offender."

I don't mean thematic cowardice, where your art is all about Big Feelings (honor! glory! legacy!) but doesn't say anything interesting about people or societies, lest you alienate thematic wusses (I wrote about it here). I'm talking about something different: work that does engage with big topics, but stupidly. Pieces like BioShock: Infinite, which by including racism, thinks it's engaging with racism; or tries to argue for "both sides" when one of those side was literally "I should be allowed to oppress starving Brown people for profit."

The other bad strategy is, to borrow a phrase, to "flood the zone with shit," and just stuff as many simple narratives as you can, or try to "offend everyone equally." A lot of mediocre comedians do this, their jokes are something like "I met an angry lesbian! wow, she was angry!" but then are like "it's okay! White people can't dance" or some shit. This is tremendously boring: you live in the same rich cultural stew I do, and you're just going to nod at top-level narratives? And pretend there's no impact to history, or that the conversation hasn't changed in the last 60 years? The bar to making that kind of thing funny or interesting is so much higher now, and most people fail; it's more interesting to count the wrinkles on my dog's ballsack.

So playing Disco, I saw it made caricatures and mockeries of all of its political positions. It initially felt a bit South Park. where in trying to hate all sides of literally every issue, its only real commitment is to childish apathy. I'm pretty cynical on political ideologies, but I'm worse about nihilism, hopelessness, or being smug to people who dare to give a damn. While I no longer think that's what Disco is, it reminded me of it, enough to confuse me, because I was loving Disco.

Why I initially thought Disco hated Communism (spoilers)

It's made by Estonians, and the Slavs in my life really, really hate Communism.

I talk about this a bit later, but Joyce Messier (representing capital and The Company) speaks in a posh, commonwealth accent, is "reasonable," and self-aware. She talks about how fucked the world is and fully grasps that she's a part of it. Evrart Claire, on the other hand, is a caricature with an annoying voice who never, ever acknowledges how conditional any help he offers is. If you were making one side look "better," you'd pick the capital side.

The Deserter also: pathetic, hateful, jealous person who justifies his complete lack of decency or humanity with clinging to a lost Communist revolution. Gives meaning to the line "Communism killed me" from the body.

So much of the dialogue and narrative around Communism is clownish and hilarious. When you make the choice to study it:

People think Communism was some crazy idea that had its comeuppance 40 years ago. A fever that shook the world, never to return again. They were right. Until he woke up today…

[…] 0.000% of Communism has been built.

This exchange:

So what do I think happened here?

Coping with the loss of the Cold War

The game takes place 50 years after a Communist Revolution got quashed, violently. Communism gets a fair bit of airtime, but it's clear it has lost, whereas the "ultraliberals" (big capitalists) and the "moralists" (centrists) rule and have ruled, without real challenges, for the better part of decades. Meanwhile, the world has all the challenges the Communists were a response to, plus a few new ones. This feels familiar.

When you first learn about Communism (like, as a set of ideas, not any specific attempt at it) frankly, it makes some sense? We can all work together, and fewer people will starve? Seems good, and when you consider how much wealthier some people are than others, and the importance of living in a society, any person with a shred of empathy would think it's okay to redistribute things to be more fair, and help the starving eat.

Meanwhile, on the capital side: I saw a tweet in ~2010 saying something like "capitalism has a great way of making sure that for all the evils of the world, you can't blame any single person, while we all contribute to it." Employees listen to their bosses, who listen to the owners, who answer to shareholders, who have stakeholders and customers of their own. If any of them stop, they don't get to eat, and someone else will fill in their place, and it's all bigger than any single person's wants or desires. Ted Chiang points out that the thing many people fear out of AI—that humanity will perish and die because of an all-consuming, ultra-powerful entity will kill us by satisfying goals other than "the betterment of humanity," like making paperclips—already exists, and it's capital. We're making the planet uninhabitable chasing quarterly returns, we have people who profit from the creation of misinformation, bombs, and guns, and all it feels harder to stop than it should.

So: I love markets and I love trade, but if you can't understand the appeals of a socialist society, or you can't get why people complain about conditions and incentives of modern life using the blanket term "capitalism," you must have your head up your ass. A lot of people are struggling, and a lot of shit feels like it's getting worse, and a lot of people are left wondering "could this be different?" just like they did the last time Capitalism was eating the planet without a competing ideology, around the late 1800's.

But: unlike that last time, something called Communism has been tried. Capital hardened its immunity to another uprising, like our bodies after getting the first dose of the COVID vaccine. I'd argue Capitalism is still in its victory lap, but in an era of militarized police, and generations of people being raised on a history written by winners, the dream of a more fair world, where workers are empowered, feels further than ever.

I believe the political wrangling of infighting ideologies in Disco Elysium, on top of also adding fun to the damn game, comes from a similar "well… now what?" of the post-Cold War generation. The authors are obviously very educated on Communism, capital, and political thought. They know what they're lampooning. But they also understand how damn hard it is to dream of a world where we stop profiting off the poverty and exploitation of others.

In life, I think a lot of us struggle with feeling like what we want doesn't matter, and the bar to actually shape the world is higher than it was for previous generations (e.g. home prices, education prices, healthcare prices, militarized police, anti-democratic structures, crufty capital-preserving legal structures creating a "vetocracy"…). So what do you do? Well, you can bicker about it, noodle it over, much like the voices in this game. And you can make art with every terrible contradiction and joke about it you encounter.

(note: there are "political vision quests" that got added to the DLC. I turned mine down, and I suspect this section could be better supported if I'd played them all, or even one of them)

"What is to be done?" about forgotten nations

Disco Elysium is made by Estonians. Estonia reminds me of Guatemala (where my family is from) in that it's largely ignored by the populations of powerful countries. I call places like Estonia and Guatemala "forgotten nations": upon hearing the name of one, a typical American's brain may fire neurons as they recognize a proper noun ("I know there's a place called Guatemala!"), but otherwise, they have zero concrete associations or knowledge of it.

Most of you won't have answers to this section. Can you name any Guatemalan food? Could you locate it on a map without looking? Do you know other Guatemalans than me? Have you seen them on the global stage, like the World Cup or Olympics? Could you name a single Guatemalan president? A celebrity, author, or figure of history? Whereas if you ask these questions about Mexico or Germany or China or India, folks tend to have answers.

I don't mean to imply something is wrong with you if you can't answer those questions; I can't do this 👆 for most countries on Earth, including Estonia. But having roots from such a place colors my upbringing. These are real places with food and families and dancing and dreams; where people fall in love and cradle their babies and battle cancer and have affairs; with wars and torture and political thought and half my family. But to nearly everyone I grew up around, I seem to have come from a vaguely Mexico-flavored Moon.

This upbringing also colors how I looked at Martinaise (the setting of Disco Elysium). From the fan reactions I'm reading, I think a lot of the players read Martinaise like "slum of Revachol" or "poor place," which is more about "class difference, domestic politics" rather than "colonial narrative and international meddling." It'd be like a resident of San Francisco considering the social problems plaguing Appalachia, and the pro-Revachol movements to be like Appalachian pride in opposition to the big cities.

But really, it reminded me of Guatemala, a colonized power whose entire history has been one of getting fucked by nations who pay lip service to development. Said another way: a lot of American poverty doesn't feel like it's a result of Guatemalan policy or laws around trade, I don't think there's a Guatemalan middle class that is large and thrives because of how they create, enable, and profit from American poverty. But the reverse is a much more defensible position.

In Disco, there's a ton of narrative about the international coalition that overthrew the Communists, set up and oversee the Citizens Militia, and continues to exploit Revachol. With the right playthrough, there are hints of another revolution brewing (not Communist, but for proper nationhood, self-governance, and independence from the Coalition, a decolonialist move). It's rare that I see a "developing, colonized" nation vibe in a game that penetrated popular consciousness.

(while I've got you here with Guatemala stuff, most people don't know that its government's dysfunction for the 20th century is largely attributable to American-backed dictators, followed by a straight-up CIA-backed coup for banana profits for American companies. most people don't know when American academics gave them syphilis on purpose, just to see what would happen. most don't know about the extractive, mobster-like nickel mining operation. most don't know about creating a profit incentive which powered stealing babies for the international adoption market. most don't know about Coca-Cola beating down Union leaders and threatening their families when they wanted better working conditions.

the point about "forgotten nations": most have stories like this, and these only scratch the surface of Guatemala's. I don't think I'm a Communist, but when I talk to people who go rabid at the mention of Communist states, they bring up body counts e.g. "do you know how many people died under Mao and Pol Pot?" And yeah, there's lots to say about that and how horrible it was, but I can't help but notice that they don't ever acknowledge the body count created by capitalist states. It may be ignorance on their part, but it seems to them, the big sins of Communism that make it uniquely worse than Capitalism is that a) nobody gets rich when Communism kills its own people (after all, the Sacklers made a lot of money getting millions addicted to opiods, but they don't condemn the country's ideology for that), and b) Capitalists are better at sending their most brutal exploitation outside their borders. somewhere they don't have to think about)

Extras

lol this got long. I'll finish out with some rapid-fire thoughts, unconcerned with spoilers.

Rapid-fire points with spoilers

Wow, an indie game for depressed people. I'm glad someone finally made one! /s

Rebirth, remaking. A lot of people who do summer programs or foreign exchange in high school talk about "getting to be someone else," e.g. maybe you were maidenless in school, but over the summer at camp you formed a romantic connection, and realized you were lovable after all. I think we cast ourselves in roles that are restrictive, but in reality we're more flexible than we believe. When I went to college, I was an "arts guy," not a "STEM guy," and it was only through light masochism and some of God's funny dice rolls that I had to confront that I could, with effort, be good at computers. The impact this had on my life cannot be overstated, but to be clear: the hardest part was changing my conception of myself.

The idea that you can make Harry into so many different people, that they all actually work in-game, with little regard to the backstory you inherit: I think it's a magical reminder that actually, you can have the life you want. I mentioned that I started ketamine therapy last year and they've got a great little prompt while you set intentions for your session: "consider that this session could change your life (because it can!)." I think this is a nice thing to say every now and then. You can wake up like Harry and decide today, you start being someone else, someone you want to be.

Self-destruction, hating yourself, needing to break before you heal. One of the lines I love most, was Jacque sharing something Harry said on his spiral: "I don't want to get better. I want to get worse." I feel like many people in my life will never understand this. I can, and its a very, very expensive lesson that I both wish more people could share with me, but also wouldn't wish on anyone I love.

Sometimes you have to break a bone to re-set it correctly. I wonder, for the psyche: can you heal without undergoing such pain? I met someone with a psychology background at a hippie festival in SF who said she believed "rock bottom" was a myth. She's got expertise over me, but I also don't trust hippies to confront the realities of life; their lifestyle is about avoiding pain and hardship, and I think this is childish. I don't want to romanticize pain, or hurting yourself, or making yourself into someone who hurts others. But I'm increasingly of the belief that, like poop, pain and hardship are horrible but necessary for a human to function, and maybe to grow.

Evrart vs Joyce vs. Deserter in presentation, plot movement. Representation is fascinating. Evrart is "a walrus of a man" who's got one of the most annoying and perfect voices in the game. Joyce, on the other hand, is wonderfully competent, willing to meet Harry where he is, exquisitely self-aware. When you make one person of the central conflict a self-centered presented-grotesque clown, and the other the picture of composure, are you taking a side?

The other ideologies get weirder representation. Cryptofascists get… Gary? Racists get Measurehead? Centrists get kind-of Kim ("I used to be a Moralist"), but also, The Sunday Friend?

It's also chewy to consider how much of the voice acting came later, with The Final Cut, or to consider other casting choices. How does it change the game to not have Evrart sound like that, with a voice you give him instead? What voice do you give him?

Incidentally, I'm disappointed in humanity that people haven't made a ton of voice mods to the game, either the re-localize the voice acting in other languages, or to play with questions of representation. Like what happens if you re-cast the internal voices with the actor from The Stanley Parable?

Jesus how do you even begin to make a thing like this? Artistic lightning-in-a-bottle. I have a draft post on Big Company Artistic Failures, but: I love that great art doesn't scale. There's no way Bethesda or Activision-Blizzard or EA could build a game like this. It's too human, it's too weird, it's too beautiful. Think of the artistic cohesion of the portraits and art style. Think of how much dialogue there is. Think of the "cock carousel" lines with Garte or Titus, or the description of war crimes by the strike breaker: no AAA writing studio would let that content ship. The use of drugs, and their mechanics!

The most popular posts I've written were about the tech industry and their relationship to creativity (namely, tech has failed because they've quashed creativity in the name of predictable returns and letting boring motherfuckers run it). To steal a line I keep coming back to: you're not going to make something innovative, amazing, or inspiring with Known, Riskless Process. The people who get the capital and connections to run things are usually the ones who live juice-less lives, so they fail to produce shops where anyone has the juice. Some goods can be farmed, but real good shit? You need to catch wild.

(fucking pity about follow-on work and sequels. See: the adults in the room, or the death of the rude press. I love money and it's great too, but it's a boner-killer for art. Be weird, please)

The Egg and DE's boundaries between people. Harry is better considered as "system" instead of a person, but Martinaise is arguably such a system (lore-wise, it might be "alive"), and many of the characters could be considered other sides of Harry (e.g. the Deserter being the part of him that never moved on). When we're talking to someone else, we're always, on some level, talking to ourselves.

Thank God the ending wasn't "Harry did it" (big spoilers for the ending, I know you were warned, but really, stop it now). I was really afraid of that after all the other "you were shithead in the past" reveals, like the driving your car into the ocean, or how you treated Sylvie, that the coup de grace would be that you also committed the murder. I'm actually conflicted about the culprit: I got really immersed trying to figure out who it was, and when it turns out to have been a character that you never met, for motivations you couldn't have derived, well… I hate when stories do that. And in the Dick Mullen book you get to read, it was a cop-out to have that book literally dissolve in your hands before it ended too. It's a good troll but I was worried it'd foreshadow a terrible ending.

But. The deserter scenes are pretty great too. The dream you have in the bunker has my favorite line in the game ("true darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart"). And after suffering so much loss in the last few years, the Dolores Dei scene with the "but I succeeded?" bit was muy emocionante for me.

And the phasmid? Perfection. I loved feeling extremely Adventure Games about checking these traps I knew would be empty, just to give some closure to the cryptozoologists and milk a few more XP. Some of Lena's lines on describing the most dangerous and mysterious made-up creatures was so charming, and so much of the game is about unlocking just a tiny bit of lore for a tender moment, that I figured nothing more would come of it. Also, "a creature that looks like reeds?" There was no way it couldn't let me down if they had included it. I didn't think there'd be a real payoff, but I also trusted the devs to do, well, something, so to checked the traps again anyway. I wasn't expecting the moment at all, and to have the payoff for Kim to use his remaining ampule for photography? Just… perfection. No wasted hint, and the perfect reward for believing in something more.