My Disco Elysium was, like I think it is for many people, about trauma and how we wield it against ourselves and others. I've been abusive in relationships. I've been an alcoholic. I've been codependent, which was as addictive as alcohol and did at least as much damage. I've never drunk myself into amnesia, but I know how it feels to suddenly not know myself.

This game doesn't give a solution to the horror of your trauma. It doesn't say we'll all get through together, or that everyone will be healthy and happy if we work hard to be. And that's its most beautiful and impressive accomplishment, I think: it just reminds you you can choose. Some choices will make you kinder. Some choices will make people leave you. Sometimes the best choice you have is to just stay alive, even though you hate yourself and everything you've ever done, because if you can keep choosing, maybe someday you'll have the choice to not hate yourself.

Don't get me wrong: I love a story about how people can come together to build the loving systems we need, and care for each other in a world to which we are purely incidental. I think that's often true, and you can accomplish it sometimes in this game. But the constant truth is, we can't force those things to happen. Our efforts will, sometimes, fail. Then we choose what we do after we fail. Until an incomprehensible and unstoppable cosmic force destroys reality as we know it, we can choose. And Disco Elysium gets how incredible and terrible that is better than any other story I've encountered.