Disco Elysium is a game steeped in politics that is re-releasing during a climate of political uncertainty, with Brexit and the appointment of Joe Biden as US president being just two examples. Would you say the game accurately reflects the world in its current state, with the ability to play as a completely terrible person, an angel, or anywhere in between?
Before 2020, I used to tell people that I thought of Disco as a psychic or surreal reflection of our political reality rather than a strictly realist one. And I still think that’s mostly true. But — and this may count as a minor spoiler — there’s this moment in the game where you’re talking to a very smart person about the recent history of the world, and if you want you can ask about the causes of what we call the Antecentennial Revolution (a failed global revolution that’s the defining event of the game’s backstory). And then you’ll discover that one of the causes of this global conflagration was a novel pandemic that the world’s inept and sclerotic regimes proved completely ill-equipped to handle.
In the game’s timeline, this pandemic leads to the collapse of governments, a series of revolutionary uprisings, an eruption of anger, hope, and misery on a massive scale. When I first encountered the moment in early 2018, I thought it was a nice, strange detail — a little improbable, a little haunting — but who knows how it will look two or three or ten years from now?