🎺 Disco Elysium Poster UK — The Detective on Your Wall

ZA/UM · Robert Kurvitz · 2019 · Harry Du Bois · Revachol — confirmed at 98types from £3

Disco Elysium is the most critically acclaimed role-playing game of 2019 and one of the most genuinely literary video games ever made. Developed by ZA/UM under lead writer and creative director Robert Kurvitz, the game is set in Revachol — a fictional post-revolutionary city on the fictional Pale-surrounded world of Elysium — and follows a detective with total amnesia attempting to solve a murder while discovering who he was and who he might choose to become. It received 97/100 on Metacritic, won every major Game of the Year award for 2019, and was described by critics as the most sophisticated narrative RPG ever created. The Disco Elysium poster at 98types is a confirmed individual product. From £3, buy 3 get 1 free, same-day dispatch from Market Hall, Camden Lock Place, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8AL.

🎺 The Game — Who Is Harry Du Bois?

Disco Elysium begins with Harry Du Bois lying on the floor of a trashed hostel room in Martinaise, a decaying harbour district of Revachol. He does not know his name, his rank, his past or his reason for being there. A dead body hangs from a tree outside the window. He is the detective assigned to the case. Over the course of the game — which takes place across approximately five in-game days — Harry recovers his identity, investigates the murder, forms a relationship with his partner Kim Kitsuragi, and makes choices about who he wants to be going forward. The recovery of memory becomes a metaphor for the recovery of self — and the game asks whether a person can be more than their worst choices.

The skill system is Disco Elysium's most distinctive mechanical achievement. Harry has 24 skills representing different aspects of his personality and cognition: Inland Empire (imagination and intuition), Electrochemistry (stimulant use and physical pleasure), Rhetoric (argumentation), Drama (performance and deception), Half Light (threat and fear), Shivers (the city as felt experience), Psyche (empathy and self-knowledge). These skills speak to Harry as internal voices, interjecting with observations, suggestions and demands. Putting points into Inland Empire means it interrupts conversations more frequently with surreal interpretations. Neglecting Authority means it fails when Harry tries to intimidate witnesses. The skills are Harry's personality, externalised.

Robert Kurvitz — The Writer as Game Designer

Robert Kurvitz is the Estonian novelist who co-founded ZA/UM and wrote Disco Elysium with Argo Tuulik and Helen Hindpere. His background is as a writer rather than a game designer, and Disco Elysium reflects this: the prose is as carefully written as any literary novel, the political worldbuilding (Moralism, Communism, Ultraliberalism, Fascism — the four main ideological alignments available to Harry) is as sophisticated as political fiction, and the game's treatment of failure, regret, addiction and the possibility of change is as emotionally intelligent as any literary work of the past decade.

Disco Elysium's critical standing — 97/100 Metacritic, GOTY from every major organisation in 2019 — represents a specific kind of recognition: the game industry and its critics acknowledging that a game had arrived that did not need to be compared to other games to be evaluated. It could be placed alongside serious literary fiction and not be diminished by the comparison.

🎬 Revachol — The City as Political Character

Revachol Internationale is the capital city of Revachol, a fictional island nation in the Disco Elysium world. The city has been occupied by an international coalition following a communist revolution fifty years before the game's events — the Revachol Commune was suppressed, the revolutionary leaders killed, and the city placed under the administrative control of the Moralintern, the world's governing body. The consequences of this occupation — the specific texture of post-revolutionary grief, the conflicted loyalties of people who were children during the revolution, the physical decay of a city whose residents know it has been abandoned by history — give Revachol the quality of a literary setting rather than a game environment.

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