The Many Mondays of Harry DuBois

Disco Elysium is complex enough, narratively speaking, that no two playthroughs of the game are exactly alike. A great deal of the decisions and possible narrative paths are decided by dice rolls and skill checks, to the point where it’s actually possible to die in the first few minutes of the game, whether by failing to grab a tie off a ceiling fan and suffering a heart attack or turning on a light (and suffering a heart attack).

That said, the general story, at least on the first day, is that you play Harry DuBois, a trainwreck of a Revachol Citizen’s Militia (RCM) detective who has suffered a complete neurological breakdown after several nights of heavy drinking; you have to piece your life back together while dealing with the lynching of a private military contractor in the backyard of the hostel-cafeteria you’re staying at. While you grapple with the electrochemical fallout of your bender, you have to canvass the neighborhood of Martinaise, asking people for information about the crime.

You talk to picketing unionists and menacing strikebreakers, old communards and Royalists, bookstore owners, lorry-drivers and graffiti artists on your ramble through town, all the while passing or failing small skill checks that shape your – Harry’s – personal experiences. And while the game’s complex skill points system plays a major role in the passage or failure of these checks, sometimes a conversation or an interaction with your inner dialogue is always meant to happen in a certain fashion.

I have not finished Disco Elysium. So far I’ve only managed to make it to the evening of the second day. But I’ve played that Monday so often at this point it’s become rote to me, and now I’m simply fascinated with what changes and what stays the same across all the different permutations of Harry DuBois there could be. What I’ve found is that no matter how I configure Harry in the moments before his id and ego speak to him in the inky blackness of alcoholic coma, the game still accounts for me. That is, it makes a bet that certain underlying aspects of Harry’s behavior – things like his “copotype,” for example, or his political ideology – depend largely on the player and how we react to things. No matter what I do on the character creator page, I am still going to avoid making Harry a shitty person intentionally. I inevitably am going to force him to be like me.

In every playthrough I’ve done since the “final cut” of the game came out just a few weeks ago, I have been unable to swallow indulgences in Harry’s violent potentiality. Even on my most recent build – a very strong, very smart (but weak psychologically and in “motorics”) communist cop – I have tried to turn down specific actions that would turn me back into a raging alcoholic drug user who points guns at kids and threatens to punch holes in disco dancers’ hostel doors.

In another play through, my esprit de corps was so high it popped me out of the interaction I was about to walk into and into earshot of a conversation between Harry’s partner, Jean Vicquemare, and another RCM cop, following the two for several minutes as the game lavished me in new tiny details about the 41st precinct; but I still got the “sorriest cop of them all” achievement for saying “I’m sorry” ten or more times.

In still another playthrough I caught the Semenese racist Measurehead off guard with a sock to the jaw and then roundhouse kicked him in the head, knocking him out without a single missed skill check; four minutes later a Revacholian newspaper was telling the sad story of Harry DuBois, former RCM detective whose life and career slid out of control after a particularly gruesome murder in the GRIH (Greater Revachol Industrial Harbor) district – all because Cuno, a foul-mouthed 12-year-old, caught me and my single point of morale off-guard with a particularly nasty insult.

All of these possibilities happened; all of them took place on that fateful, terrible Monday after the worst bender of Harry DuBois’s life.

Playing Disco Elysium fills me with a strange dissatisfaction. I don’t think this is the game’s fault at all; the unrest resides within me entirely. But I feel physically uncomfortable playing it, like I’m waiting for or expecting something that hasn’t arrived yet. I suspect that what it is I’m waiting for is the “perfect playthrough.” If only I could max out my stats! Raise each skill tree to genius levels! Be the perfect combination of brains, sensitivity, brawn and agility! Know what to say at every opportunity! Bring communism back to Revachol without any consequences!

This desire is in conflict with what the game itself wants to do, narratively speaking. Disco Elysium wants to tell the story of a fallen human in a fallen place trying to make the best out of the worst possible situation for them. Harry DuBois is a character, but he isn’t a tabula rasa. His amnesia subsides; he remembers more and more of the life he led, the person he was, before the bender. One of the first thoughts you can marinate in the Thought Cabinet is “Lonesome Long Way Home,” which seeks to remember where Harry lives. Other instances in the game, like finding Harry’s soggy, trashed ledger, tell the players what kind of cop he was – 18 years on the force, over 200 cases solved, only three civilian murders in that entire time; and still other scenarios shed light on what kind of person he was, even as we attempt our forceful personality overwrite.

I’ve had this same desire with other games, like Signs of the Sojourner, where The Object of the Game is not to get perfect scores anywhere but rather to be as “true to life” as possible. Sometimes conversations go bad. Sometimes a “skill check” doesn’t end in your favor. You can pretend otherwise, or you can move on from that moment, gather up what was useful from the exchange, and see what happens next.

Harry DuBois could live through as many quantum-entangled lives as I want him to lead, but there are only ever going to be a few outcomes to his terrible fourth day in Revachol. His story unfolds as the days pass; the only thing I’m getting now as I replay the same 24-48 hours in a row is little strings of context here and there. There are delightful moments and horrific ones; heartfelt stories and hard truths; all of them both matter and do not matter at all, if all I’m going to do is scrap the save and start over again.