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Disco Elysium’s Revachol is a place that is unlike ours in many, tantalizing ways, both historically and geographically. However, it is politically similar enough. The same kinds of people rule with their heavy thumb pressed on the backs of the majority. Internationally connected by the power of capital and corruption to get what they want at cost to communities, the human soul and even the fabric of reality. Out of it spawns a perpetual stew of insecurities of people protecting their own interest living under that thumb.

Emotions boil over and change their communities in ways big and small. Injustices on top trickle down into growing communal injustices that are personally far more devastating than the larger machinations for each person living under the thumb.

So, putting yourself in the role of Harry DuBois, a man untethered to this particular place and only visiting it with one thing in mind, to solve a case, is not an unthinkable act for a player with a controller in hand. You just wake up, deal with whatever absurd, embarrassing problem you have caused for yourself and put one foot in front of the other. Though as Harry you are not unlikely to fall down the stairs doing so, with the voices in your head giving you a chance to fall face first or to take a chance on trying to say something cool on the way down to save (metaphorical) face.

The thumb of this world is a bit more bearable when paired with the many, many absurdities that define the life and limbic system of Harry DuBois. His failures and comical limits bring the levity that help shepherd us through this bleak, bleak world of his. Personally, I busted a gut more than once over the various hits he takes to his person and ego. Those absurdities the game drapes the world and play in also contrast well with the murder case at hand, bringing a greater focus to following the case wherever it goes. It is, after all, the meat of the matter that Harry the salt is sprinkled over.

The gameplay doesn’t let you walk away from clues and leads for too long, as your only only move is forwards. All you can do is keep sniffing out the next connection and thread to pull on or follow to progress, with no shortage of chances to make an ass out of yourself and your buttoned up partner Kim Kitsuragi. It’s a game world of many choices, characters and rich locations, but you as Harry have enough limits to dispel any illusions that this is a sandbox. You have one job and one job only. While you may pursue secondary questions and leads that seem to go nowhere but into the reeds, you ultimately have to keep tying those leads together to shove the case along if you want to find a smidge of self-respect or salvation in a world that doesn’t care about you or your hangups and fascinations.

As Harry you are living by a thread both physically and spiritually. You can literally have a heart attack in the first scene trying to fetch your tie from your room’s ceiling fan (as I did once). The case you solve is all you have in life now and your dignity and worth depends on it. Your looks have been corrupted, your mind is punching holes into itself and despite your dogged pursuit of leads, you are an absolute wreck at your job. You have little to no filter from keeping your worst persona and personal failures from bleeding into any and all interactions at inopportune moments in your search for truth and justice. You are going to stumble and fumble forward and you’d end up in a dumpster by the end of one of the nights (as I did) if not for the aptitudes you lean on, in the form of literal mental dice rolls and contradicting voices in your head. You are a lot of things as Harry, but one thing you are not is someone who has their life together, so you better embrace that scattered mind and chance to fail.

I chose to play Harry as an amnesiac all the way through, having Lynchian tendencies, fairly good saving throws on most acts that involved quick wits or physical responses. Despite that I let him often just make an absolute fool of himself when the skill check was far out of reach of my stats.

My Harry (and gosh is it humbling to carry a Harry in your heart after the game) truly crawled his way forward in every possible, jagged sense, pursuing every lead no matter how relevant or not, to Kim’s chagrin and astonishment in equal measures. Failing the checks was almost as fun as succeeding in most cases, except for a select few progress blocking ones, but they were few and far between. One particular check leading into the third act gave me repeated trouble, but failing it also gave me space and time to purse setting up a rave in a church which I would otherwise have saved for a second full playthrough.

It took me a while to truly get my head wrapped around what kind of Harry I was playing for the first part of the game, as I didn’t want to lock myself into one kind. However, this is a role playing game, after all. Roleplaying REQUIRES commitment to the bit! You can’t find truth and character in that which has no form. You have to be someone! So once I locked in to what kind of Harry this was, the weight of the important decisions felt all the heavier and the unimportant chances became all the more exhilarating in their possible outcomes, good or bad, as they’d be specifically THIS Harry’s failures or successes.

There are a lot of threads in Disco Elysium, but I never lost track of them. I was hoping to see resolutions to as many of them as possible so I did my best to follow each and every one. However, I had to learn to make peace with the game thematically overpowering my desire for tying up those threads by the end.

Disco Elysium doesn’t satisfy in the classic way a murder mystery would, not even in the way that mysteries like Chinatown can when ending on the injustices of the world still turning the world round and round. You hope to see a revolution if you lean into the communistic play and history of this world, you hope to see power structures change toward the betterment of the communities since you get invested in it all and the grander themes. You want to see if there is a chance to overcome the overbearing nihilism threatening all life in this world and possibly find keys to solve that same philosophical entropy of what is good and just in our own. You hope that this case will be the one to crack open the world so it can be fixed and patched for good.

But it doesn’t work like that.

At the end of the day, this is just one case and you are but one man. A man who does change that much if at all. Just like Harry, you are a visitor. You are here for one purpose for a brief time. All you change is the perspective of the people around Harry for better or worse, but you are ultimately not the hero of this world who will break open the shackles. You can, at most, only be the hero of this particular case and make a few good choices along the way if you’re luckier in dice than love.

I probably got the most positive ending you can get, but it feels anticlimactic by design. I had to make peace with Kurvitz’s realistic and historical point of view on both the world of the game and our own with how these things go. The forces at play can only be held back but they cannot be beaten in one fell swoop. The structures that you serve under have not been bent or broken when all is said and done.

Hell, even the game itself and its studio were swallowed whole by the same forces the game critiques. It seems like the very fate of all art, action and thought that live within the systems of capital.

The voices in your head stay, the holes in your mind grow and the nothingness that has started engulfing the hearts, minds and geographies of this plain are still in effect. But you live on. You keep going. At the end of the day, your only affect is local and hard to define how far it reaches. You might never see the better future you MIGHT be sowing, but you get to take a few steps more toward the next tomorrow towards it and look back at what good you could do in today and the yesterdays.

The only failure is not moving forward despite it all.

Just be prepared to fall on your face.