r/DiscoElysium

I finished Disco Elysium for the first time about a month ago, and I have never seen alcoholism depicted so graphically "real" in a game.

I (27) am a currently recovering alcoholic after 7 years of addiction. I've had my current liver transplanted to me, and dealt with the horrors of both active recovery and the pit that is addiction to alcohol, as well as homelessness & abuse, and Disco Elysium captures the essence of the depraved details in a shockingly accurate way.

From the dull pain in your right abdomen, to the flush face and yellowing of the eyes, to the tantalizing descriptions of what alcohol smells and tastes like to Harry, it honestly brought back many bad memories, and even some current truths. I've never been slapped in the face with such harsh yet understanding stances on addiction from a video game before.

So many other games seem to just make alcoholism a joke or a simple character trait, so it's amazing that a game I slept on for so long could actually end up helping me with my own journey of discovering who I really am without the alcohol, as I did with Harry on my first and only playthrough so far (sober).

Any current or former addicts have had this game make an impact on them?

Love Jean Vicquemare as a character, did some art of him.

My socials are below if interested in supporting me :3

My Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/kangmeidoesart.bsky.social
My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kangmeidoesart/

She is so amazing and i love it so much❤️. I will frame this in my dorm. I really wanted the sad harry but she refused to make it for me and was hella concerned so i didn't push it 🥀🥀. Next thing imma ask her is the joy hologram from blade runner 2049 (a sexier inland empire in my eyes)

But genuinely doug doug and parkzer really have a very similar dynamic

this took so long it’s not even funny bro

Major spoilers for Disco Elysium

I've been thinking about Harry Du Bois through John Locke's distinction between the man and the person: the man as a continuous living body, and the person as the consciousness.

Harry seems to create an interesting, and particularly strange problem got Locke. The body remains continuous. The memories of the previous life, however, is gone. Harry inherits the consequences of a life he cannot remember living, and he has to decide what to do with it.

I ended up writing this essay exploring Harry and Kim through that lens, particularly, the relationship between memory, identity, and agency.

If Harry cannot remember being the person who made his past choices, what responsibility does the person who woke up in Martinaise have for them?

I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Especially on whether you think Locke's framework actually works for Harry, or whether Disco Elysium ultimately points toward a different conception of identity altogether.

I also deliberately avoided getting too deep into the political aspects. A lot of Harry's political identity is shaped by player choice, and I wanted to focus more on the identity aspect.

Read the full essay on Substack

Encountered this text while buying and reading random books in my play through (screenshot from Fayde). It comes as no surprise that both of these guys are plagued by emotional repression and shame, but I had never seen the game spell it out so clearly until now.

Here are some extra details: The surface is made of hundreds of small, square-headed metal pins or studs driven into a wooden core. It feels completely solid and well-made. Anyone recognizes what this is? Thanks in advance!