What is Disco Elysium about? About fighting against oneself. About understanding the origin of social and political defeats. About finding an identity when life (alcohol) completely erases everything you wanted to leave behind. About class struggle. About the defeat of labor movements. About the farce of social democracy. About what is beyond. About the masks in each ideology. About mirrors. About ghosts. About decadence. About ideals. But above all, Disco Elysium speaks of dreams.

It is very complex to focus a discourse around a game that seems to contain within itself every possible theory and its criticism; Disco Elysium loads itself with a suffocating density that seeks to condense into an extremely complex system of dialogues, decisions and actions that define us within its world the fundamental bases of the most important political theories, their possible acceptations within a society that has lived through an armed uprising, the overthrow of a crown and the violent response of a liberal coalition. In each character we encounter in the world there is a different interpretation of what it means to take a political position within a context as explosive as the almost literal calm between storms. From old communists who mourn the loss of the revolution that raised them, fascists who celebrate their fall but lament that the monarchical regime did not re-establish itself, social democrats who believe themselves above the failed and neoliberals who believe that the future is theirs.

It is a very general image because the vast range of grays that Disco Elysium generates from these ideological premises is fascinating, and it is because from a clearly leftist perspective it knows how to criticize and approach each ideology from a position of deep understanding (not respect), through which the decisions that each individual in its world has taken to get there are legitimate even if their results have led them to be on opposite sides. Putting ourselves in the skin of a policeman from a self-established faction that "upholds the law" is the ideal point to fully immerse ourselves in a world that we find as newborns. Our protagonist loses his memory and we find him naked, in a dark primordial void that calls him to lose himself within himself, that asks us, shouts at us, not to wake up in that world full of pain and noise; to heed our little reptilian brain and sleep, cease to exist and not seek a return to a world that has abandoned us.

But we wake up.

Revachol opens before us in full view, with as much misery as mysticism; we find it frozen in time, in a social convulsion as enormous as to contain within it the seeds of a new war without anyone seeming alarmed by what is to come, too concerned with what was and without the perspective to think about what will come. Echoes in the streets of a return, of a new change that will awaken from lethargy a society consumed by misfortune and death. And in the background Disco music and an inspector who does not even remember his own name.

Disco Elysium then begins with a murder, a disruptive element that stirs the streets with virulence. The catalyst for an explosion between factions that needed a stimulus to raise their flags and fight again without the moral burden of starting a conflict as the aggressor. A small-scale war between a corrupt union and an abusive company, which in seeking to form their own interpretation of organized crime pervert and destroy their workers. It is the first example of a politically charged climate, on the verge of explosion, where every corrupt system takes advantage of the needs and hopes of its members to exploit them for the sake of a greater end that actually only benefits the interests of its leaders.

This first clash between social democrats and neo-liberals is a perfect example of how each of these currents has replaced its predecessors in Revachol being more moderate but also more profoundly corrupt. After the struggle between absolute ideals comes a lowering of aspirations that betrays its origins, and in the search for a status quo that allows them to survive and gain weight they are irremediably perverted by playing under the rules of a system that cannot maintain anything incorruptible. The neo-liberals only crave growth at the expense of the worker and the social democrats create systems to "help" workers that necessarily lead them to exploitation, and assuming the premises of capitalism they seek growth and expansion at the expense of their workforce forming something much more like a criminal gang than a union of the working class with a collaborative purpose. It will be by meeting their leaders and representatives that we will begin to see the nuances; the disenchanted neo-liberals beheaded by their own nature represented by a woman who takes advantage of her ideological strength; a neo-liberal textbook so disenchanted with the rest that she could only trust herself and has been dragged into an egoistic and destructive worldview. A union led by a coward who seeks to hide his shady business under a veneer of paternalism and does not hesitate to use extortion and deception against those he should defend to expand his command. Both are perfect representatives of the betrayal of their ideology to their own worldview but fervent defenders of thoughts they have not wanted to develop enough to fall under their own weight. They live obscured by the need to find a reason to live in a convulsed world where the absolutes of the past have been destroyed and nothing seems firm.

They live confined by the need for an ideology that defines them.

It is an interesting and rich world construction because it allows us to speak, observe and even define ourselves as these new currents that have taken command today as well as those factions of the past that have fallen into disgrace. We will meet both elderly people who belonged to opposing factions in the war and young people who believe that under a new prism the ideology of the past can be that of the future. We encounter clashing discourses that allow us to long for the past as much as to insult it and literally spit on its legacy; from the perspective of a game proclaimed as communist the constant struggle with its failure and its inability to change in a post-revolutionary society is fascinating.

Disco Elysium is communist, but it is knowing itself worn out and discouraged by the little resonance it can have in the real world. It is a universe built on events that sound close to us, that try to replicate historical facts with their own weight from the Soviet Revolution to Chernobyl or the fall of the USSR itself. It is not difficult to imagine Revachol as an uchronian Russia that contains within itself fragments of France, Germany or the United States for its language and its ideological references, but also for its atmosphere and its aesthetics. Through all these references a world is constructed that wants to reflect on issues that affect us day by day, and that is not afraid to introduce within all these sociopolitical issues supernatural elements that appeal to us emotionally. And that is where Disco Elysium manages to make a difference by being not only a passionate political fiction that reflects on ideals, their underpinnings in postmodernity and the need for identification in a political and moral organization, but also a reading as focused on ideology as on cosmology.

Although the world of Disco Elysium presents itself so marked by its politics we always perceive signs of something that works beyond our own perception. Our protagonist is defined under our command and the attribution of experience points classifies him as a man more devoted to his emotional part, to his intellect, his physical or his motor capacity. Within these four sections there are subdivisions but the most interesting thing is that by defining ourselves under these categories we can increase the preference or style that marks us but not absolutely close any path; our detective is a pre-existing man within the world and one of our missions is to decipher him as much as to define him. The barrier between avatar and character being so blurred in Disco Elysium allows us to delve much deeper into how the consolidation of its world precedes us, its politics is one that we discover but we are also susceptible to being carried away by our perception of what escapes our reason. Although he is a man led by logic if we so decide we will always have, even if we do not want to, a spur of Inner World or Chills that we could easily translate into our instinct. And that instinct constantly incites us to seek in what, despite being outside reason, calls us and seeks our attention.
Our definition within the world comes, like everything in Disco Elysium, from translating its mechanics and pulling one thread or another in its conversations. Our self-determination in the game is what integrates us, marks our path and what we are judged more or less veiled. What clothes we wear, whether or not we do a series of secondary ones, or take or not take alcohol, is something that identifies us and allows us to choose our path within a range that closes us to perceive a concrete reality. These decisions are marked within a context but defining ideology and cosmology within Disco Elysium is very different because one is a conscious decision and the other is, as in any role-playing game, a throw of the dice.

Our closeness to the paranormal and the irrational is what allows us to approach universal truths within what the game allows us to see. The extraordinary, the unusual, works in Disco Elysium as a kind of missing link, always completely out of reach of our gaze but present in the amalgam of drama, tension and comedy that underlies almost every scene in the game. The closeness of our character to perceive those things that we should not be able to perceive naturally is always framed in a character who, let us remember, starts from a hangover so strong that he does not even remember his identity; such a powerful premise gives rise to the lens through which we look at the rest of the game always starting from a lack of full confidence in our avatar. Within its range of dialogues there will always be purely illogical or comical things, and when we are asked for an act of faith it would seem complicated to give it to him knowing his background. But that is precisely where Disco Elysium fuses what makes it so special and where it manages to generate through these two pillars a true discourse that unifies everything.
Yes, Disco Elysium is about dreams.

From here on, the content of the text is direct spoiler of the final stretch of the game. I highly recommend that if you have not finished Disco Elysium you do so before reading it because the game is incredible and because little sense will make this out of context.

Why does such a cynical and disenchanted game decide to define itself so decisively as communist? Disco Elysium proposes a failed revolution; a worn and abandoned world by its own failure where the possibility of revolution was real, where the right steps were taken and the armed uprising was successful, but where the war ended the dream and the fall of the working class did not return it to its previous state, but destroyed the idea of a better future. It seems that Disco Elysium is burned out. That it speaks from defeat and despair. And it's true. Halfway.

In the first openly oneiric sequence of the game we find ourselves hung in the position of the victim of the murder we are investigating. It is the first of many nights in which we will find ourselves conversing with ourselves, lamenting our own existence, our decisions and our failures. It is a constant and alternating dialogue that we live in our waking hours, where only small hints remind us of our stored pain; only in solitude, in sleep, do we achieve a true dialogue that begins by drowning us and leading us directly to glimpse ourselves dead and hung but that each night gives us a little more truce. In each new conversation with our own brain we understand each other a little more, we empathize with our own pain and we are able to transcend pain. Our mind warns us that it will not stop hurting, that hopelessness and the desire to end it all will always be there, and that the defense mechanisms we activated the night we decided to forget will go away and face us with the greatest possible terror. The origin of pain. Lost love.

The last of these scenes presents Harry confronting our beloved directly, as always in Disco Elysium our attitude can vary deeply depending on who we decide to be, and in these sections of sleep it is even easier to get lost in our own sorrow, letting ourselves be carried away by impulses that make us do what will cause us the most pain. But despite the fact that the game remains open to our interpretation, the tone has modulated and this seems to be a point of no return. In her last intervention, the projection of our beloved tells us that she will not see us again, but we will see her; and projected into the body a divinity moves away from us, leaving us alone again, ready to wake up. But we are not the same, no matter how bad the conversation goes and we cling to the unreachable desire, we have come to a notion that is even clearer when we later talk to Kim about our dream. Harry accepts the pain and recognizes the trauma.
Despite the fact that Disco Elysium starts cynical and hopeless, after assimilating pain, loss and disappointment within itself, our character, and his own world, show us a reality much stronger than our sorrow. Harry does not understand how to live with such deep sorrow that not even alcohol has been able to erase, he is doomed to confront his trauma every night, and every time he remembers the slightest thing about his past, there is a palpable physical and mental damage, which the game marks as such and which can kill us of a heart attack. But it is in the passage of days, in acceptance and dialogue where we can achieve enough serenity to face mourning and move on, not forgetting and renouncing the past, but confronting it as an immovable reality from which to grow and believe.

Several of the most secondary elements lead us to do things a priori ridiculous and very out of tone for what a police officer investigating a homicide case "should" do. We can help a group of kids set up an alternative music club in a church, constantly try to appeal to our inner world or extracorporeal notions during investigations, or help an elderly couple look for magical creatures never found. During the mission to help set up the music club we can find an empty space, nothingness, a 2mm hole that absorbs everything. It is a terrifying notion, the existence of a tangible void that the characters look at with horror and seek to explain so as not to succumb to something they do not understand. It is the gaze into the abyss that confirms that such an abyss exists, and that in a world so ruled by rational notions or human impulses the supernatural is an imbalance that explains as much as it anguishes.

But despite this the game continues. The positioning of this cosmic horror is a secondary mission. Its discovery will not incapacitate us or stop us and the rest of the world will continue to spin and our role in it will continue to have value. A value that is discovered at the end, with the appearance of the phasmid.

The final revelation of Disco Elysium is that the elderly couple wandering in search of extraordinary creatures was right, and at the moment when reality shows itself harshest, with the identity of the assassin (an old communist refugee on an island) uncovered, the universe has a last message for us in the most beautiful scene of the entire game. The conversation with the phasmid gives meaning to all of Disco Elysium, above what shines as a game, of all the social, political and thematic construction that it has at every step, this conversation is the game's response to our doubts. Harry was right. The elderly were right.

In the series of missions when you define yourself as a communist, the last conversation you can have ends in a question. The greatest doubt about what communism means. And despite the fact that you build the phrase with whatever argument you want, the resolution will always be the same. Although it has failed, although its theoretical construction is not perfect and although its realization has involved a war, it is worth believing in an intangible. The dream of the liberation of the people is so strong because beyond all its theoretical construction the only thing that a revolutionary political current can really sustain itself on are intangible ideals. In dreams and hopes of a better future that supported by political theories generate unity. In the existence of a creature that seems rushes and modifies the mind of the human race. In a 2mm hole that absorbs everything in its path. That those flowers were at the crime scene for a reason and I promise you, Kim, that they had a reason even if it seems crazy.

Behind all the cynicism in Disco Elysium there is hope in its future; that Harry despite having seen that the reality in which he believed has changed axis completely continues to believe that he has to help people. The most revolutionary thing about Disco Elysium is that it believes that despite believing that we are doomed to fail, it is worth fighting because we are not certain that this is true. That even though we believe that reason and experience support us, we must believe above what our mind tells us. That that 8% throw can go well. That we can make the people of Revachol live a little better than the day before. And that we can be better.
Because deep down everything makes sense.
Because this is about dreams.

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