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 about the screen to interact with non-player characters (NPC) 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 who 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 levelling up. Upgrading these skills helps the player character pass skill checks, which are based on a random roll of two six-sided dice, but potentially 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, self-gratifying behaviours. 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 skill system known as the "Thought Cabinet". Thoughts are unlocked through conversations with other characters and internal dialogues within the protagonist's mind. The player is then able to "internalize" a thought through a certain amount of in-game hours, which, once completed, grants the player character benefits but also occasionally negative effects, a concept that ZA/UM compared to the trait system used in the Fallout series. 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 possible option for the Thought Cabinet is the "Hobocop" thought, in which the character ponders the option of living on the streets to save money, which reduces the character's composure with other NPCs while the thought is being internalized. When the character has completed the Hobocop thought, it allows the player to receive twice as much money from collecting and recycling trash. Later, the player may opt to spend a skill point to "forget" completed thoughts to make space for different ones. This removes it 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 fictional world of Elysium, developed by Kurvitz and his team in the years prior, which includes over six thousand years of history; the genre is described as "fantastic realism". The narrative was constructed with attention to Karl Marx's theory of history, which posits that the material production of life directly conditions the political, artistic, religious, and philosophical superstructure of society in itself.

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 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 ostensible 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 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 rape a hostel guest named Klaasje. When questioned, Klaasje reveals that Lely was shot in the mouth while the two were having 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

Disco 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. In 2005, Kurvitz was playing in a band called Ultramelanhool and conceived of a fictional world during a drunken evening while listening to Tiësto's "Adagio for Strings". The group then created a collective of artists and musicians, which included oil painter Aleksander Rostov, the lead artist of Disco Elysium, 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 commercial failure. This failure, along with Kurvitz and Rostov's teenage experience with Dungeons and Dragons, would inspire the design philosophy of embracing failure. This can be seen both in the "failure of a cop" main character: Harrier Dubois, the many tragedies surrounding the characters and world, and the rpg pass-fail dice system. This would also go on to inspire one of their scrapped taglines "A Roleplaying Game About Being a Total Failure".

Kurvitz eventually managed to overcome his alcoholism and helped Kender in his own recovery. As a sign of gratitude, Kender suggested to Kurvitz that instead of pursuing a novel, he could try capturing his world as a video game to draw a larger interest. Kurvitz had no experience in video games, but once he saw the artwork of the game's setting 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 and invested 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. Although the name was changed, the poem would later find its own place in the game as an excerpt of the poem appears in the opening:"The Furies are at home in the mirror, it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown.

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". "Fire Escape in the Sea" 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.

The voice-acting cast includes metal musicians Mikee Goodman of SikTh and Mark Holcomb of Periphery. The original release also had voice-acting by Dasha Nekrasova of the cultural commentary podcast Red Scare and four of the hosts from the left-wing political satire podcast, Chapo Trap House; these would later be replaced in The Final Cut.

In a Steam post published in January 2020, ZA/UM cited several works that influenced the writing and style of Disco Elysium. One major influence is the 1999 video game Planescape: Torment, which, like Disco Elysium, features an amnesiac player character, heavily emphasises dialogue, and is rendered isometrically. The television show The Wire was also used as an influence for the game's working class setting, while Émile Zola's writings shared stories on the misery of human life that narrative writer Helen Hindpere said she felt resonated within the game. Other works that influenced Disco Elysium included the video game Kentucky Route Zero; television shows True Detective and The Shield; literary references include Émile Zola's Germinal, Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, China Miéville's The City & The City (although this influence was denied by Kurvitz in an interview), and the Soviet sci-fi authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. For visual references, the developers mentioned painters Rembrandt, Ilya Repin, Jenny Saville, Alex Kanevsky, and Wassily Kandinsky.

Re-release

An expanded and reworked edition of the game, subtitled The Final Cut, was announced in December 2020. According to lead writer Helen Hindpere, The Final Cut was directed based on input from players of the original game. It included complete voicework for the nearly 100 characters including the game's narration and the player-character skills, encompassing over 1.2 million words according to Hindpere. Because of the importance of the characters to the game, ZA/UM kept voice directing in-house rather than outsourcing the task as typically done with RPG games of this nature. It took about fourteen months to complete the global casting and recording processing for the additional voice overs. While they brought back some of the prior voice actors who had read introductory dialogue lines in conversation trees for their respective characters, ZA/UM sought out new voice actors they felt were a better fit for many roles, especially for minor characters. They came upon jazz musician Lenval Brown for the voice of the narrator and of the player skills, representing nearly half of the game's dialogue, and considered him essential to The Final Cut. Brown spent about eight months with the vocal directors in recording his lines, keeping his voice otherwise constant, slow and meticulous for all of the different characters skills since these were explaining things to the player, but including small nuances to try to distinguish the various facets of each skill's personality. The voice-acting by Nekrasova and the Chapo Trap House hosts was completely replaced. The Final Cut allows players the option to use a selection of voice acting for the game, such as only having the narrator's voiceover while the other characters presented as text.

There are four quests that were cut from the original game but reworked to explore some of the political implications of the game's story, now called Political Vision Quests. These quests were designed to encourage the player to consider how they have developed their player-character and where their decisions have taken the character, and how committed they are to seeing that out, according to Hindpere. Additionally, the expansion includes new art and animations, including two additional tracks by British Sea Power.

Release

Disco Elysium was first released for Windows on 15 October 2019. The macOS version was released on 27 April 2020. One of the first translations that ZA/UM published was the Chinese version, which was released in March 2020. Its release had to bypass the typical approval process needed to release games in China, since Disco Elysium's content did not meet the Chinese governmental standards due to its violence, sexual content and critique of ideologies. After its release, reviews left by Chinese players indicated that they were drawn to the game, as they appreciated many of its political aspects. In May 2020, ZA/UM released an update that improved some of the game's performance on lower-end hardware, as well as adding support for additional language translations, which are being developed by the community and by the localisation firm Testronic Labs.

After its original release, Kurvitz announced plans for an expansion for the game as well as a full sequel. In addition, a tabletop RPG based on the systems the game used, tentatively titled You Are Vapor, was also announced, with Kurvitz also announcing plans to translate his novel Sacred and Terrible Air into English, which narratively takes place 20 years after the events of Disco Elysium. In June 2020, it was announced that ZA/UM had partnered with production company dj2 Entertainment to develop a television series based on the game. ZA/UM launched a limited edition clothing and artwork line, Atelier, in March 2021, featuring pieces based on the game.

The Final Cut

The Final Cut was released on 30 March 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Stadia as a free update for existing copies of the game on PC and macOS. Versions for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S were released on 12 October 2021. While the original game was not submitted for rating for the Australian Classification Board as it was only released digitally for personal computers, the planned console release of The Final Cut required a Board review. The game was refused classification by the Board, making it illegal to sell in the country, due to its depiction of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, and violence, as well as showing "revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults." The ban was appealed by ZA/UM then subsequently dropped, with the game reclassified to an adults-only R18+ rating and allowed to be sold, as the Board acknowledged that the game provided disincentives related to drug-taking behavior where "regular drug use leads to negative consequences for the player's progression in the game." The game was released by Spike Chunsoft in Japan on 25 August 2022.

Reception

Disco Elysium received "universal acclaim" according to review aggregator website Metacritic, with it being praised for its narrative and conversational systems. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received "mighty" approval, being recommended by 96% of critics.

PC Gamer praised the game for its depth, freedom, customisation, and storytelling and called it one of the best RPGs on the PC. IGN praised the game's open world and compared it favourably to The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2, despite being much smaller. The Washington Post said that the game is "conspicuously well written". GameSpot awarded it a 10 out of 10, their first perfect score since 2017.

PCGamesN wrote that the game set new genre standards for exploration and conversation systems. Conversely, Eurogamer criticised the game for not offering enough choice in role-playing and for a distinct lack of focus.

In a review of Disco Elysium in Black Gate, Joshua Dinges said "The nihilistic world is remarkably well fleshed out, the non-player characters earnestly realized, and the myriad plot threads extremely engaging. You may have no idea what to do fifty percent of the time, but will still find yourself spending every available minute of the day carrying out nebulous tasks and exploring your fascinating surroundings. Surroundings which, I will add, are all gorgeously represented in the style of expressionist watercolors."

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut was reviewed by IGN and Game Informer, both of which praised the addition of voice lines and new quests. The PlayStation releases were initially found to have game-breaking bugs that made some of the quests impossible to finish.

As of September 2025, Disco Elysium sold more than five million copies.

In June 2020, ZA/UM and dj2 Entertainment announced that a television series based on the game was under development.

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.

Post-release

Breakup of ZA/UM

Following the critical and commercial success of Disco Elysium, work immediately began on a direct sequel to the game as well as several spin-off projects. The direct sequel, code-named Y12, was led by Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere. Another project, P1, was led by Kender. In October 2022, ZA/UM member Martin Luiga announced that he, Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere of ZA/UM had "involuntarily left the company" in late 2021, stating that ZA/UM "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on." Luiga also affirmed that the ZA/UM cultural association had also been dissolved. In an interview, Luiga stated that the other three members had been fired under false pretenses. A spokesperson for ZA/UM denied the allegations.

In early November 2022, conflicting reports of the events were announced. According to Kurvitz, Zaum Studio OÜ, the development studio, was originally owned in majority shares by Margus Linnamäe, and was then acquired by Tütreke OÜ, a holding company owned by studio CEO Ilmar Kompus through a share purchase in 2021. Kurvitz and Rostov claimed that the funds used for that purchase were pulled from the studio itself, making it a fraudulent purchase, upon which they started to challenge the purchase and recover their IP from the studio. Among Kurvitz' and Rostov's complaints is that Kompus purchased four sketches from Zaum that were establishing the basis for a Disco Elysium sequel for £1, then resold these to Zaum for €4.8 million, effectively helping Kompus regain part of the money spent to acquire Zaum through Tütreke. Kurvitz and Rostov discovered the change in how the company was organised, including their demotion, and were fired when they began raising questions. Kurvitz and Rostov argued that they still have some control of the Disco Elysium intellectual property rights, and thus should have had a say in blocking the sale. Zaum Studio denied the charges in a statement, and alleged that the former employees had been let go for creating a disruptive environment at the studio, claiming that the two had "limited to no engagement in their responsibility and work", as well as verbally abused and discriminated against other employees. Other employees of Zaum Studio, speaking anonymously with GamesIndustry.biz, claimed the situation was "not black and white".

Legal proceedings in the matter were started by Kaur Kender, the executive producer of Disco Elysium. Kender had asked similar questions of the change in Zaum's management, leading to his firing. He filed suit asserting that Kompus owed him €1 million. Kender further asserted that Kompus was aided by Tõnis Haavel, an Estonian investor and Kompus' brother-in-law who had been convicted of fraud and was already €11.5 million in debt. Haavel has a majority share in Yessirnosir Ltd., a United Kingdom subsidiary of Zaum where the Disco Elysium rights are held. An initial hearing in Kender's case, which included statements from Kurvitz, was held in October 2022. By December 2022, Kender had dropped his lawsuit, as Kompus had paid back €4.8 million from Tütreke back to ZA/UM. Kurvitz and Rostov still assert that there were illegal actions to take over the development studio leading to their ouster.

Spiritual sequels and related games

ZA/UM's C4 project was later revealed to be Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, an RPG with the same narrative and art style as Disco Elysium, involving a female spy convincing her former collaborators to regroup for a mission. Previews for the game identified Zero Parades as having numerous similar visual elements as Disco Elysium, including its art style and user interface. The game was released in May 2026. Two months after its release, ZA/UM said Zero Parades did not sell as well as expected to maintain their current employee count, and were laying off up to 32 staff.

The conflicts around the ZA/UM studio and breakup of the team led to four different projects from different members each seeking to be a successor to Disco Elysium, in addition to Zero Parades. After leaving ZA/UM, Kurvitz and Rostov launched Red Info in June 2022, a development studio to work on a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium. Red Info has been backed by at least $10 million in funding by NetEase and has brought writer Chris Avellone to help.

The other three spiritual successor projects were announced nearly simultaneously in October 2024 by three separate studios, each with some former members of ZA/UM.

Longdue includes Martin Luiga—formerly of Red Info—plus Disco Elysium narrator Lenval Brown and other developers from Bungie and Rockstar Games. Longdue announced their game Hopetown was funded via a Kickstarter campaign in April 2025.

Dark Math Games was founded by investor Linnamae, and includes Kender and other ZA/UM developers. Dark Math is developing Tangerine Antarctic (previously named XXX Nightshift). Tangerine Antarctic is set in a fictional ski resort located at Mount Hope in Antarctica, with "Tangerine Antarctic" the name of the hotel for the resort, and where the characters must solve a murder mystery among the guests that are stuck at the hotel due to a snowstorm. Unlike Disco Elysium's isometric view, the game will be played by a third-person camera.

Summer Eternal was founded by writers Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindžić. Both had worked previously with Dark Math and Longdue, but left these studios due to internal conflicts. Summer Eternal later brought on Olga Moskvina and other senior developers from ZA/UM.