Introduction
Disco Elysium is a 2019 role-playing video game developed and published by ZA/UM. The game was written and designed by a team led by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz and executive producer Kaur Kender, featuring an art style based on oil-painting and music by the English band Sea Power. The game was released for Windows in October 2019 and macOS in April 2020.
An expanded version of the game featuring full voice acting and new content, subtitled The Final Cut, was released for consoles in 2021 alongside a free update for the PC versions. In August 2025, the game was ported for Android. Disco Elysium follows a troubled detective with no memory of his identity or the world around him. As he investigates a murder with a detective from another precinct, the player can piece together the protagonist’s identity and discover what led him to his current state.
Disco Elysium is a non-traditional role-playing game featuring little combat. Instead, events are resolved through skill checks and dialogue trees using a system of 24 skills representing the protagonist’s different aspects and personalities, each of which can speak directly to the player to influence their decisions. The game is based on a tabletop role-playing game setting that Kurvitz had created before forming ZA/UM in 2016 to adapt it into a video game. This is the second time the Elysium setting is explored, following the 2013 novel Sacred and Terrible Air.
Disco Elysium received critical acclaim upon its release, winning numerous awards, notably at the Game Awards 2019 (Best Independent Game, Best Narrative, Best Role Playing Game, Fresh Indie Game). It has sold more than five million copies and is regarded as one of the greatest video games of all time, as well as a strong example of video games as an art form. Though a success, conflicts at ZA/UM around 2021 led to several of the lead developers and writers, including Kurvitz and Kender, leaving to form their own studios. As a result, by October 2024, at least four different studios in addition to ZA/UM had announced projects to develop spiritual successors to Disco Elysium.
Gameplay
Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game that features an open world and dialogue-heavy gameplay mechanics. The game is presented in an isometric perspective in which the player character is controlled. The player takes the role of a detective, who suffers from alcohol and drug-induced amnesia, on a murder case. The player can
move the detective around the screen to interact with non-player characters (NPCs) and highlighted objects, or move onto other screens. Early in the game, the player gains a partner, Kim Kitsuragi, another detective who acts as the protagonist’s voice of professionalism and offers advice or support in certain dialogue options. The gameplay features no combat in the traditional sense; instead, combat is handled through skill checks and dialogue trees. There are four primary attributes in the game: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Each attribute has six distinct secondary skills, for a total of 24, which the player can improve through skill points earned from leveling up.
Upgrading these skills helps the player character pass skill checks, which are based on random dice rolls, but may also result in negative effects and character quirks, discouraging minmaxing. For instance, a player character with high Drama may be able to detect and fabricate lies effectively but may also become prone to hysterics and paranoia. Likewise, high Electrochemistry shields the player character from the negative effects of drugs and provides knowledge on them, but may also lead to substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors. The choice of clothing that the player equips on the player character can also impart both positive and negative effects on certain skills.
Disco Elysium features a secondary inventory system known as the “Thought Cabinet.” Thoughts are unlocked through conversations with other characters and internal dialogues within the protagonist’s mind. The player can then “internalize” a thought over a certain amount of in-game hours. Once completed, internalizing a thought grants the player character benefits, but can also occasionally produce negative effects—a concept that ZA/UM compared to the trait system used in the Fallout series. A
A limited number of slots are available in the Thought Cabinet at the start, though more can be gained with experience levels. For example, an early option in the Thought Cabinet is the “Hobocop” thought, in which the character considers living on the streets to save money. This reduces the character’s composure with other NPCs while the thought is being internalized.
Once the Hobocop thought is completed, it allows the player to receive twice as much money from collecting and recycling trash. Later, the player can spend a skill point to “forget” completed thoughts to make space for new ones. This removes the thought from the Thought Cabinet for the rest of the playthrough, along with any bonuses gained from its completion.
Synopsis
Setting
Disco Elysium takes place in the fantastic realist world of Elysium, developed by Kurvitz and his team over several years, which includes over six thousand years of history. The fiction has been constructed with attention to the theory of historical materialism, which posits that, even if the details were different, human history would play out in a similar way. The game takes place in the year ’51 of the Current Century. Elysium is made of “isolas,” masses of land and sea that are separated from each other.
Other by the Pale, an inscrutable, mist-like “connective tissue” in which the laws of reality break down. Prolonged exposure to the Pale can cause mental instability and eventually death, and traversing the Pale, which is typically done with aerostatics, is heavily regulated due to the danger.
Events in the game take place in the impoverished district of Martinaise within the city of Revachol on the isola of Insulinde, the “New New World.” Forty-nine years before the events of the game, a wave of communist revolutions swept multiple countries; the Suzerainty of Revachol, a monarchy that up to that point had been Elysium’s pre-eminent superpower, was overthrown and replaced by a commune.
Six years later, the Commune of Revachol was toppled by an invading alliance of moralist-capitalist nations called “the Coalition.” Revachol was designated a Special Administrative Region and remains firmly under Coalition control decades later. One of the few governmental responsibilities that the Coalition concedes to the people of Revachol is policing, which is carried out by the Revachol Citizens Militia (RCM), a voluntary citizens’ brigade turned semi-professional police force.
Plot
The player character wakes up in a trashed hostel room in Martinaise with a severe hangover and no memory of his own identity due to an extreme case of drug-induced amnesia. He meets Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, who informs him that they have been assigned to investigate the death of a hanged man in an empty lot behind the hostel. The victim’s identity is unclear, and initial analysis of the scene indicates that he was lynched by a group of people. The detectives
explore the rest of the district, following up on leads while helping residents with a variety of tasks. In the course of the investigation, the player character learns that he is a decorated RCM detective, Lieutenant Harrier “Harry” Du Bois. Harry experienced an event several years ago that began a midlife crisis, and on the night he was assigned to the hanged man case, he finally snapped and embarked on a self-destructive three-day drinking spree around Martinaise. When the player goes to bed on the first night in-game, Harry has a nightmare where he discovers himself as the hanged man underneath a disco ball. When he talks to his own dead body, it tells him that everything is hopeless and he will inevitably fail to solve the case or put his life back together.
Harry and Kim discover the hanged man killing is connected to an ongoing strike by the Martinaise dockworkers’ union against the Wild Pines Group, a major logistics corporation. They interview union boss Evrart Claire and Wild Pines negotiator Joyce Messier. Joyce reveals that the hanged man was Colonel Ellis “Lely” Kortenaer, the commander of a squad of mercenaries sent by Wild Pines to break the strike. She warns that the rest of the mercenaries have gone rogue and will likely seek retribution for Lely’s death.
Harry and Kim discover that Lely was killed before the hanging, and the Hardie Boys, a group of dockworker vigilantes who act as the de facto peacekeepers of Martinaise, claim responsibility for the murder. They assert that Lely attempted to assault a hostel guest named Klaasje. When questioned, Klaasje reveals that Lely was shot in the mouth while the two were engaging in consensual sex. Unable to figure out the origin of the bullet and fearful of the authorities due to her past as a corporate spy, Klaasje…
enlisted the help of a union sympathiser named Ruby, who staged Lely’s hanging with the rest of the Hardie Boys. The detectives find Ruby hiding in an abandoned building, where she incapacitates them with a radio wave-based device normally used to aid in traversing the Pale. She claims that the cover-up was Klaasje’s idea and has no idea who shot Lely. Harry manages to overcome the Pale device and contemplates arresting Ruby, but she believes Harry to be a corrupt cop and either escapes or kills herself, depending on the player’s skills and choices.
Development
DiDisco Elysium was developed by ZA/UM, a company founded in 2016 by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, who served as the game’s lead writer and designer. Kurvitz, since 2001, had been part of a band called Ultramelanhool, and in 2005, while in Tallinn, Estonia, with the group struggling financially, conceived of a fictional world during a drunken evening while listening to Tiësto’s “Adagio for Strings.” Feeling they had a solid idea, the group created a collective of artists and musicians, which included oil painter Aleksander Rostov, to expand upon the work of that night and developed a tabletop role-playing game based on Dungeons & Dragons on this steampunk-like concept. During this period, Kurvitz met
Estonian author Kaur Kender, who helped him to write a novel set in this world, Sacred and Terrible Air, which was published in 2013 but only sold about one thousand copies. Kurvitz fell into a period of depression and alcoholism for about three years following the book’s failing.
Kurvitz eventually managed to overcome this period of alcoholism and helped Kender to overcome his alcoholism. As a sign of gratitude, Kender suggested to Kurvitz that instead of pursuing a novel, he try capturing his world as a video game to draw a larger interest. Kurvitz had no experience in video games before, but once he had seen artwork of the game’s setting of Revachol as easily fitting into an isometric format, as well as Rostov’s agreement that they might as well continue taking the risk of failing on a video game together, Kurvitz proceeded with the idea.
Kurvitz wrote a concise description of what the game would be: “D&D meets ’70s cop-show, in an original ‘fantastic realist’ setting, with swords, guns and motor-cars. Realised as an isometric CRPG – a modern advancement on the legendary Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate. Massive, reactive story. Exploring a vast, poverty-stricken ghetto. Deep, strategic combat.” Kender was impressed by the strong statement, investing into the game’s development, with additional investment coming from friends and family. The game was announced as an upcoming 2017 game under the title No Truce With the Furies, taken from the poem “Reflections” by R.S. Thomas and published in Thomas’ No Truce with the Furies in 1995.
As originally planned, the game was to focus on action in a single city location to meet the 2017 release. However, as ZA/UM had indicated to investors that this would be a game spanning a larger world, they found it necessary to expand beyond that single location, forcing them to delay the game’s release and rename it Disco Elysium. This title plays on several double meanings related to the word “disco”; in one sense, it refers to ideas that briefly gain the spotlight before fading, reflecting the fleeting nature of fame and influence within the game’s world.
Burning out, similar to the fad of disco music, and reflected in the protagonist’s clothing style, while in a more literal sense, “disco” is Latin for “I learn,” symbolizing the protagonist overcoming his amnesia to learn about the world of Elysium. Kurvitz had always intended No Truce to serve as a working title, reserving it for when Disco Elysium would be bundled with a second planned game. Although ZA/UM initially planned to publish the game through Humble Bundle, they ultimately chose to self-publish it.
Influences and inspirations
The game’s art, drawn mostly in a painterly style, was led by Aleksander Rostov, while the soundtrack was written and recorded by the English band Sea Power (at the time of the game’s publication, known as British Sea Power). Members of ZA/UM were longtime fans of the band, and approached the group directly to request the use of their music in Disco Elysium. The band agreed to produce the soundtrack, contributing a mix of original compositions and instrumental remixes of
Previously released songs. Several tracks from Sea Power’s discography were reworked for the game’s soundtrack. “Smallest Church in Sussex,” from their 2003 debut The Decline of British Sea Power, was adapted into “The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns.” “Up Against It” from the 2012 EP2 became “Whirling-In-Rags, 8 AM.” “Red Rock Riviera” from the 2012 documentary soundtrack From the Sea to the Land Beyond was reworked as “Instrument of Surrender.”
Two tracks from their 2017 album Let the Dancers Inherit the Party, “Wants to Be Free” and “Praise for Whatever,” were transformed respectively into “Burn, Baby, Burn” and “The Insulindian Miracle.” “Cleaning out the Rooms” from the 2011 album Valhalla Dancehall was remixed into both “Detective Arriving on the Scene” and “ZA/UM.” The track “Tiger King” from the 2009 Man of Aran soundtrack was also remixed but retained its original title. Additionally, the name of the in-game hostel-cafeteria Whirling-in-Rags is derived from a lyric in the song “Hail Holy Queen” from the 2013 album Machineries of Joy.
Awards
The game was nominated for four awards at The Game Awards 2019 and won all of them, the most at the event. Slant Magazine, USGamer, PC Gamer, and Zero Punctuation chose it as their game of the year, while Time included it as one of their top 10 games of the 2010s. The game was also nominated for the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Game Writing.
| Year | Award | Category | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Golden Joystick Awards | Ultimate Game of the Year | Nominated | [101] |
| The Game Awards 2019 | Best Narrative | Won | [94] | |
| Best Independent Game | Won | |||
| Best Role-Playing Game | Won | |||
| Fresh Indie Game (ZA/UM) | Won | |||
| 2020 | 23rd Annual D.I.C.E. Awards | Game of the Year | Nominated | [102] |
| Role-Playing Game of the Year | Nominated | |||
| Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game | Nominated | |||
| Outstanding Achievement in Game Design | Nominated | |||
| Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction | Nominated | |||
| Outstanding Achievement in Story | Won | |||
| Nebula Awards | Best Game Writing | Nominated | [100] | |
| 20th Game Developers Choice Awards | Best Narrative | Won | [103] | |
| Best Visual Art | Nominated | |||
| Best Debut (ZA/UM) | Won | |||
| Innovation Award | Nominated | |||
| SXSW Gaming Awards | Video Game of the Year | Nominated | [104] | |
| Matthew Crump Cultural Innovation Award | Won | |||
| Excellence in Art | Nominated | |||
| Excellence in Design | Nominated | |||
| Excellence in Musical Score | Nominated | |||
| Excellence in Narrative | Won | |||
| 16th British Academy Games Awards | Best Game | Nominated | [105] | |
| Artistic Achievement | Nominated | |||
| Debut Game | Won | |||
| Game Design | Nominated | |||
| Music | Won | |||
| Narrative | Won | |||
| Original Property | Nominated | |||
| 2022 | 18th British Academy Games Awards | Evolving Game | Nominated | [106] |
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