Failure is not (always) the end
Disco Elysium open with you on the floor. Your character, whoever they are or whatever remains of them, is in an indescribable hotel room facing down. You get to the levels and break the plane between the void and the living, only to find the great-grandfather of all hangovers.
This is the introduction to the character in which you will live Disco Elysium. These are many things and can become even more: calculate, feel, think, judge, determined or repentant. But right now you are at a low point, possibly the lowest of a low point.
Moments later, you can die by getting your tie off the ceiling fan. The headline reads ‘Policeman suffers from final heart attack’ and boy, does the word ‘Final’ do a lot of work.
Some people can pick up Disco Elysium for the first time at the moment, as it has just been received Final cuts updated and made their way to consoles. For some people, that moment can be quite frustrating – going through the whole creation process, just dying of a heart attack while trying to repair a garment. But I’m here to tell you: embrace those moments.
There are many ways you can die Disco Elysium. Very few of them are noble or worthy. You can die by kicking a mailbox, by fighting, you have no business, or even just suffer mental damage if you see your own face in the mirror.
Disco Elysium‘s moments of failure are also not all terminal. If you managed right at the beginning to wake up the glove and put on clothes, you can gather your composure and step outside, just to be face to face with a beautiful woman. With intense, possibly undeserved confidence, you can try to flirt with her. And the words that come out can be the eloquent “I want to fuck with you.”
In other games, failure can feel really bad. If you get such a large, all-caps FAILED tag, it means the content may have just been shut down. Disco Elysium however, it is good with failure. It was written to embrace failure. And you really have to do the same.
Take the flirtation example: after your detective wanted to talk and still failed, the woman – Klaasje – laughed. She even asks you to say it again. It’s a humanizing moment that can even lead your character on the path to defining themselves, as someone who is remorseful and always says things they regret.
You’re now learning more about one of Disco Elysium‘s key characters, while possibly also establishing an identity for your own character. After all, your policeman had just gotten up at a cataclysmic bending space; maybe they are apologetic for all their wrong decisions, or at least should be. Those thoughts can thrive until you finally become the Sorry Cop.
This route opens due to failure and may continue to present the dialogue throughout the game as it is the kind of story Disco Elysium weave. Failure could potentially be a game over the state, but playing in a kind of “perfect” way means you can miss a lot of this world.
The failures are the shaping of your narrative, because let’s be honest, your cop is not Sherlock Holmes. With enough points, they can set up the Visual Calculus and Logic to represent crime scenes in real time, to distinguish the size of the boot from the prints in the mud, and then to calculate the number of people when a murder occurred. Oh, that’s right, a murder happened – apparently your character is in the Martinaise district to find out why there’s a corpse hanging in the garden behind the hotel.
But often you can not perform a task that a theoretical inspector could possibly do. It’s a struggle to even move the body, a task that becomes the core of the early game. Every effort can result in your character simply being overwhelmed and unable to accomplish the task. Your failures are not just fatal mailboxes and exchanges, but as you have heard, your character has been in Martinaise for some time. Your eternal companion, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, is not only here to help you, but to ensure that the task is completed, because you are probably no longer ready for work.
It can feel bad to fail a check and see the health meter drip or simply face humiliation. It could lose your important cash in the early game, or it could just make the road ahead a little harder. But if you play Disco Elysium for the first time, I can not stress it enough: embrace those moments.
Failures can eventually define your cop, and you by extension, and make you play out more like your own. The loss of one option makes the next opportunity to progress all the more difficult – I did not want to literally beg industry negotiator Joyce for money just to have another night’s bed, but I had to because there was no source of income over. In a brief moment, I had to set aside my morals to stay warm just one more night, because I had failed so catastrophically during the day, and so many times before.
It’s not just your character either; many people in Martinaise have their own shortcomings. They may struggle to understand each other, or they are considered wrong in their old lives, or simply bad people. One of my favorite moments is seeing Kim Kitsuragi, a shining human being, say something wrong during a brainstorm and immediately realize it. As you see this internalized realization and correction, clashing with the anxiety of admitting the error out loud and recording it, you can make him think and correct him at that moment.
It’s a small miscalculation without critical narrative consequences, but it’s a small kindness you can bestow, as someone whose mistakes go much deeper than a simple inaccuracy. Since the man is currently trying to drag out of the abyss, this is the least you can do.
Disco Elysium is shaped by the shortcomings, and I strongly urge you to accept them. I’m just as guilty of rescues as the next man, but writing Disco Elysium feel like it rewards those who are not afraid to fail. Each lost check adds so much more to your character than it takes away, and it makes their own destiny feel like your own. Of course, yes, you’ve dead to get a tie off a ceiling fan, but you – the player – were also the person who encouraged your character to keep trying.
Failure can finally create some of the most memorable moments in your time Disco Elysium. It may mean that you end up playing the saddest excuse for a detective who will ever flush out in Martinaise, but it’s at least rarely a boring person to be.
