#now somebody has to do a disco elysium one

[sygneth]

Echoes of Elysium | Disco Elysium AU ...something?

Warnings

General warnings for my blog's content applies. Check here.

This AU is (rather) not very alternative. I am just trying to develop further events and some background for the characters, but even though I'm making research and I try to stay canon-compliant, only to fill in the gaps, I cannot guarantee it will never happen. Especially in this fandom, where many interpretations and paths are equally canon, we may not agree on some things, I hope you'll enjoy my point of view nevertheless. Some episodical OCs will appear too.

INDEX

EOE on ComicFury!

EOE on Tumblr:

Chapter 1: New Beggings -> START

EOE on AO3:

Main plot (uhh still in the process of uploading!)

Ficlet series (additional content)

LORE:

Precinct 41 plans and explanation

Plot outline

After Martinaise things are slowly getting back to normal, but the general atmosphere in the city gets thickens every day, La Retour is hanging in the air. Despite this, Harry is trying to stay sober and make amends. It's hard to say if Kim's appearance on the 41st is making things easier or harder between Harry and his old friends.

The Return happens. In the after-revolutionary mess, everybody tries to move on, but things are changing in almost every aspect of life. And on top of this, a particularly hard case drops and somebody has to take care of it.

The start of the project is directly after Martinaise, so forgive me this vague description, but I would hate to spoil the plot haha.

Okay, from now on additional info, still important but not crushial.

I want to focus on the relationship between the people of Precinct 41 and their internal experiences. Impactful events and thicker action will happen too, but mostly in the later chapters of this.

There are also some important premises of this AU I would like to highlight:

Kim was raised in an orphanage, presumably held by some Dolorian organisation (order?). Some of his old-fashioned manners and vocabulary are remainings after growing up in a religious environment (even if he's not very religious himself).

Eyes died around 9 months before the events from the game. Since then, Kim has been willingly working alone. His superiors were not very fond of that but somehow he managed not to get partnered with anyone.

Harry has no known family members left. At least as far as he and his friends know.

Jean and Harry's partnership started four, maybe five years ago. According to the game, it was "two years minimum" but personally I think those losers were stuck with each other for much longer.

Jean's years-long, unexplained depression has roots in some sort of personality disorder. Also, he is codependent on Harry, probably co-addicted too. He had problem with speed himself, however it's not nearly as serious as Harry's. I see him as more of a weekend/party drug user, as for now.

I assume that since the communist revolution gay relationships were technically legal in Revachol. Technically, because there are still no rights for same-sex couples and the social recognition is poor and rather negative (I got inspired by my own country in that matter)

That's all I can think of now. I will probably just add new information in the description of he pages.

Okay, cool, one last thing. What do you mean by "...something?"? Is this a comic? A fanfiction series? What am I looking at?

The answer is: I don't yet know. I am planning this to be mostly a comic, but I cannot say there won't be some written as fanfics parts or some kind of in-between media. I don't really want to limit myself to one medium only, but at this point, I have no idea what this will evolve into. I honestly just want to have fun lol

[o-wyrmlight]

A Toast to the Pigs: A Disco Elysium fanfiction that explores the concept of Harry Du Bois having not lost his memory in Martinaise and having to deal with the consequences of his actions. Featuring in Chapter 14: A couple of dressing downs over the radio, figuring out the sleeping situation, and brief insight about the pipeline of falling into fascistic beliefs.

Lieutenant Jean-Heron Vicquemare is anxious, and you are a mirror. He isn't here with you right now, but he's pacing with the sort of restless energy that only caged and starving animals in overstimulated and crowded enclosures ought to have. One could argue that an overstimulated and crowded enclosure is what the RCM is to begin with, and you would be one of those people leading that argument. You're already a laughingstock. You don't care. Lieutenant Kitsuragi is being sharp with him, trying to help Jean see his own reason. You understand why Jean is angry. It's always him who cleans up your messes. You'd be frustrated if you had to deal with yourself as much as he has to deal with you, too. And you are a mirror, so across 8/81 and a moor and a river, you mirror your partner because that's one of the things you do best. Aggravation met by aggravation. Fists met by fists. Cigarette by cigarette. Jean Vicquemare sighs heavily and collapses. The fighting spirit has left him. He gives up on being angry--for now, at least--and he's just tired. You are a mirror. You stop, too. You already know that Jean will cover you again. You were lucky to have him. You can't believe you've let yourself lose him.

Harry went quiet for a while, bracing himself against his arms, staring down toward the water. “…I wanted to talk to you,” he said suddenly, pivoting himself to face Kim, “because I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize?” Kim raised a brow, nursing his cigarette. He was very careful not to blow the smoke directly into Harry’s face. “For what?”

“For what I said.” He knotted his fingers together, squeezing tightly, keeping them very still. His body weight was being supported by the efforts of his elbow. His voice was sharp and his eyes were keen. “In the gym.”

Kim huffed, shaking his head. “You already apologized. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine, Kim. That was barely even an apology, and you know it.”

Kim considered him for a long, long moment, a little surprised, a little intrigued. This was new—he couldn’t remember the last time that somebody did this, throwing down an attempt to make a more genuine apology beyond the typical, socially accepted one. Kim was always expected to just take those half-baked ‘sorries’ and deal with it. They apologized, after all. What else did he want?

Kim turned his body to face him, sliding his cigarette out of his mouth and letting it dangle from his fingers. He curled his arm over the railing but didn’t lean. He ignored the uncertain fluttering in his lungs, sucking in an anxious gasp. He didn’t expect this and he didn’t know what to expect going forward.

All right. Let’s hear it.

[bigsnzstanacct]

Fanfic Writing Ideas / Goals

Fandoms I want to write for that you should ask me about or talk to me about or give me ideas for or pester me about writing for (and I’m not putting the slashes and stuff in so if you stumble across this post while not being a part of my niche fetish community, no you didn’t):

Fellow Travelers: thinking in a context where Hawk has the fetish and Tim indulges him with some of the topping from the bottom/role reversal dynamics from the show. And Hawk sneezes really loud. Bc I want him to. Tim meanwhile just has the woooooooorst allergies and get some satisfaction out of someone being turned on rather than turned off by them for once.

Red White and Royal Blue: kinda thinking it would be fun to do a mutual fetish thing, probably changing some details about how they met and their interactions prior to the Cake Incident, but also I can’t work out the timing. I want one or the other (probably Alex bc how would Henry even do this) to have Very Secretly put some sneeze fetish content out into the internet and the other has been getting off to it since that very day, without realizing who it was. Also really trying to decide how much I can convince myself that Henry has a mental block and/or *always* stifles but actually if you get him to let it out he has a surprisingly big/loud/harsh sneeze. I know Alex sneezes loud and proud and uncovered and with a high-pitched upturn at the end, and is the kind of guy who sneezes just kinda randomly all the time, but it isn’t like intense fits unless he encounters one of his few allergies and then it is Intense Fits, you know what I mean?

Check Please: which I have a whole setup for, definitely a mutual fetish situation for Nursey and Dex where like Dex has The Perfect Big Loud Sneeze for Nurse but he always stifles so Nurse has the hots for a Mystery Loud Sneeze Guy who is later revealed to be Dex. Also something involving Holster also having Big Loud Uncovered Epic Dad Sneezes that echo through the Haus and Nursey and Dex both are like SO into, bc that guy just seems like he’d absolutely holler out his sneezes for real. And that he’d get like Epic Man Flu with Epic Dad Sneezes, etc.

Ted Lasso: specifically giant!sneeze Roy, and more specifically: “sex-linked giant sneezes are common and considered hot and Roy’s are EXTRA BIG and therefore considered Extra Hot but he is grumpy about this as he always is about everything” also he’s in some sort of romantic entanglement with Keeley and/or Jamie. And I still haven’t decided what Jamie’s sneezes should be like but he’s definitely going to have some degree of jealousy-of-Roy-and-the-jealousy-is-also-horny situation going on.

9-1-1: Somebody on here suggested Buck as a possible Big Sneezer character and I was like eh maybe that actor’s hot but THEN they made him Canonically Bi on the show and now I’m like fuck yeah make it happen need it yesterday. And I’m trying to decide if I want to go with the whole Buddie thing and have Eddie be a fetishist and maybe they can do a like “well like I’m Not Into Dudes like you are (yes he is stop lying) but I have this weird like… Thing for Sneezes and your sneezes are I dunno they’re like really big and hot and maybe we should make out about that and definitely not about Feelings” or if I want Buck to have the kink, but actually I think I’m leaning towards the former bc I want Buck’s big loud sneezes to be like A Problem somehow bc he’s such a cute golden retriever guy that I kinda want to whump him a little. Gentle whump. And then comfort bc like “I don’t have a problem with your sneezes and actually I kinda think they’re… hot?” Yeah, that sounds fun. I am deciding this now as I’m writing lmao.

Also possibly interested in Disco Elysium, like y’all make that fandom sound really hot and again one of those characters having the fetish could be suuuuuper hot also Harry definitely has the Dad Sneezes of all Dad Sneezes.

Also also I have the whole Dream Daddy setup that I’ve written about before on here. Really want to do the Hugo and Brian dates that I have plotted out especially, but always feel like once I get out of the Dream Daddy world I lose the voice for that fandom and it really requires a very specific voice. Although maybe I’ll just base it on the fics I’ve already written. Like if I just emulate that voice it’ll be close enough and at least it will be internally consistent.

Also also also I have the King’s New Allergy story that I feel I have basically revealed as a BBC Merlin fanfic, for which I want to write a steamy epilogue involving The King and The Mage huddled up in the King’s chambers while he sneezes out the last of the Big Magic Sneezes and they talk about the fetish and they fuck lmao.

I think that’s all I have on my list fanfic wise but if I’ve mentioned something else or you think something else would be a good idea for me to look into hit me up! In particular I think Ted Lasso and the sorta-kinda-Merlin-ish fic are the only ones that include real giant!sneeze (as opposed to my usual ridiculously loud and borderline unrealistically so sneeze) and perhaps I should also think of more fanfiction contexts that could accommodate that too.

[generation1point5]

Having wrote nearly 40k words on a fanfic between Chase and Leo, which is highly unusual for me both for the subject matter and the genre (romance and horror), the question of why I bothered is certainly worth asking, considering my own personal approach to both topics. For now, I'll limit these thoughts to the former subject.

Love as a theme and as a force, whether in the romantic or even in the familial or fraternal forms, is a compelling one; it is as human emotions go it is universally understood at an intuitive level and yet infinitely complex such that it is never a topic that becomes stale. Whether the romance succeeds or fails, romance strikes at the heart of who we are as people, as human beings. It is passionate, wild but discriminate; it chooses partners on an individual basis. It is easy to be mistaken for infatuation, but true romance is not in the power of the initial highs but in the enduring of one's lifespan, enjoying the peaks but lasting through all the darkest valleys. There is also something to be said about the material conditions that allows a romance to succeed also, an oft-neglected fact that it is easier for a relationship to succeed when there are no aggravating factors that force a couple to compromise on goals they share together. These are integral to the human experience.

I think the thing that compelled me the most about that particular example of romance was more than just the relationship. It was also an examination of the past, about growing up and losing parts of yourself, becoming somebody that you aren't necessarily happy with being, and wanting to become somebody that is. Sometimes that is understood as being with someone you believe to be perfect for you, and then coming to the understanding that notion be false, idealized and impossible.

Part of my compulsion to write on the subject (and the Echo pair) has to do with the material conditions as well; understanding that Chase and Leo's own place in life made their romance difficult, even ill-fated from the beginning, and that even in choosing it again there are (if not even moreso) greater risks to what had been attempted before. This is of course not limited to Chase and Leo, but to just about all of the Echo cast in some way or form.

But beyond Echo and going back to romance as a whole, I've been struck by a line in Disco Elysium that I've been wrestling with for many months now, one that Echo illustrated perfectly:

True Love is possible Only in the next world - for new people It is too late for us

Wreak havoc on the middle class

That last line is of course extremely politically charged, and seemingly irrelevant to the subject, but in fact provides the lynchpin of the context behind all my thoughts on the topic of romance. It demonstrates how material conditions impact our social lives, our very existence as human beings and where we derive so much happiness and suffering from.

It is an argument for dialectical materialism made into poetry, the rawest, most concise argument for all leftist thought distilled into one compelling, prescient line of words. It contextualizes romance, and indeed the human experience, within a broader, existential reality. We are what we make of ourselves and the world, but we have made a world where some people are better positioned to shape it to their own satisfaction than others.

[tractsecretion9]

2023 Podfic Roundup!

(2022 here; 2021 here)

Ghost Town, by DustDragon39 The Magnus Archives original characters teen and up 18m 42s

I came home one day and it wasn’t home anymore. During a particularly bad storm, two archival assistants from the San Francisco Institute for the Unusual and Paranormal pick up a hitchhiker.

the less-than-careful years, by tigrrmilk Disco Elysium Kim Kitsuragi, Kim Kitsuragi’s parents teen and up 22m 5s

For his seventeenth birthday, Kim bought the first jacket as a gift to himself. It was the real thing — twenty years old, with a slash at the neck, and a stain inside that could have been blood, or mud, or even oil. “Did somebody die in that thing?” his aunt asked. A life, and memories of other lives. Hidden inside objects and matter and waves.

Reboot, by TheQuietWings Five Nights at Freddy’s Glamrock Freddy & Gregory, Michael Afton & The Crying Child general 15m 54s

Are you sure it is necessary to boot in [Safe Mode]? Y/N

Icicles (don’t soften when they die), by Taliax Deltarune Noelle Holiday/Susie teen and up 8m 47s

Sweat beaded on Susie's forehead as she brought the tip of her axe to Noelle’s finger. The ring dug in its thorns. Noelle and Susie's unseen conversation in the Weird Route.

Rot, by dearfriendicanfly Disco Elysium Kim Kitsuragi mature 15m 4s

INLAND EMPIRE — They opened him up and found nothing but the rot that ate up everything he was. And then they left the empty shell of him behind. VOLTA DO MAR [Challenging: Success] — Don’t think about that. Think of music shaking your ribcage. Think of a steering wheel under your palms. HALF LIGHT — Your red, red palms. Night one. Kim Kitsuragi has a nightmare.

Kitsuragi shuffle, by laughingpineapple Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi general 30m 8s

A Saturday in Jamrock. See the sights. Blend in with the locals. Just a pleasant day out ahead of the transfer, with no hidden hopes, none whatsoever. Kim Kitsuragi doesn’t do hope.

let’s spend the future talking about the past, by godsontheradio Disco Elysium Klaasje Amandou/Ruby mature 11m 4s

Ruby helps an on-the-run Klaasje dye her hair. What happens next is frustrating and inconclusive.

La Muerte Pálida (The Pale Death), by Lepak Disco Elysium Paledriver, background Klaasje/Ruby teen and up 14m 52s

The world hides you in her fog skirts. You row until you can no longer see land, til even its shadow has been swallowed and you’re drifting alone, the last person left alive in Elysium. Or perhaps the first ever made, floating in a wooden womb, amniotic fluid dewing on your thin coat. The Paledriver reminisces.

Even Disco, Baby (12 one-shots), by dearfriendicanfly Disco Elysium Harry & Smoker on the Balcony, Harry/Kim Kitsuragi, Harry & Judit Minot, Cindy the Skull & Harry, Annette & Harry, Harry & Dora Ingerlund, Harry & Tommy Le Homme, Harry & La Revacholière teen and up 2hr 8m 15s in total

A collection of dialogue excerpts that needed a home. Originally posted to even-disco-baby on tumblr, archived here.

He’s A Goldmine, Baby, by Red Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi explicit 41m 19s

Ok, so getting pissed on wasn't always a kink of yours. Now, however, it has definitely become a thing. Problem is, you don't know your mega-cool boyfriend will be down for it. No need to ruin a good thing. Best keep this to yourself, champ. On sex paperwork, ordinary life, love... and, well. Piss, of course.

Poems for my head’s country, by laughingpineapple Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois & Skills teen and up 6m 50s

Far away, the pale – le territoire, the great adversary, the western plain – roars into nothingness. Here and now, Harry finds a book in his apartment, a trace of his old life. Here and now, Harry finds a book in his apartment, a trace of his old life. Here and now, Harry finds a book-

Blood Like Wine, by Aria The Mechanisms Jonny d’Ville/Gunpowder Tim explicit 16m 35s

When Jonny said it, he didn't even really mean anything by it. He was running his mouth, paying more attention to the way it made Tim thrash under him than the words he was saying. Jonny leant forward, digging his fingernails into Tim's shoulder blades, and said, low and vicious, "I want to eat your heart."

Splat, by nevermindgrantaire Disco Elysium Cindy the Skull & Cunoesse teen and up 25m 43s

There’s a face, though, peering over the fence with eyes like scuttling black beetles. Topped with a matted thatch of red hair and a green knitted beanie hat. Red eyes and red nose, lines under the eyes that just don’t look right on a kid so young. It’s that girl- Cindy doesn’t know her name. The skinny little thing, all hunched and defensive, hackles raised. She clings to her friend like he’s a shield and normally she’s screaming slurs at anything that moves. It’s unnerving, seeing her quiet like this. Cindy casts an eye around the yard, towards the shed, looking for the girl’s persistent shadow. Cuno joins the RCM. Cunoesse gets left behind. Cindy wants to help.

A wreath of reeds, by laughingpineapple Disco Elysium Steban the Student Communist & Insulindian Phasmid teen and up 9m 27s

Steban, touch grass. Grass, touch Steban.

trial run, by Red Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi explicit 34m 59s

Your mouth keeps moving. "You're so desperate, Kim. Trying to ride my fucked-up dick..." Kim coughs, and shoots you a look. "I thought my opinion on your dick was clear by now."

Possession, by Red Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi explicit 14m 19s

"Disgusting," Kim breathes, smearing his thumb through his spit, rubbing it into your skin. Mine, that touch says. You close your eyes, dizzy, faint from his love.

A beast in the fog, by laughingpineapple Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi teen and up 13m 23s

The lieutenant knows how to fend off the loneliness of the empty road. But the air is empty, too, and the coast is gone.

Delirium, by randomisedmongoose Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois mature 4m 50s

After the tribunal. Harry dreams.

Poem 53, by dearfriendicanfly Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois & Harry Du Bois general 5m 57s

From the collection “Poems For My Head’s Country.” Annotations by Harry Du Bois. (For/Inspired by laughingpineapple)

flight paths of migratory birds, by Ptolemia Disco Elysium Klaasje Amandou/Ruby mature 29m 45s

Ruby and Klaasje do take that road trip, after all.

The Orchard, by liesmyth Good Omens Aziraphale/Crowley mature 19m 22s

Crowley eats an apple, tempts an angel, and gets more than he bargained for.

Something Bigger Than The Sky (3/6 chapters), by Taliax Deltarune Spamton/Swatch teen and up 1hr 13m 46s

Swatch's purpose is to serve the Queen. Spamton's purpose is to make deals. By nature, any other passions between them are disposable. (Betrayal still hurts.)

do you have to call it a relationship?, by yewlojee The Murderbot Diaries Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi general 13m 51s

Ratthi stops at the closed door, and sends a message. I would like to talk about relationships. There is a pronounced pause. Is this some kind of reverse psychology shit where you are trying to get me to not talk to you actually?

an experiment in trust, by MercurialFeet The Murderbot Diaries ART & Three teen and up 22m 53s

Three decides it wants to try something. The Perihelion has a slightly more than scientific interest in the results.

[mugiwaerouma]

Hαrrч Du Boıs: Innocence?

Disco Elysium is a video game created by the small indie studie ZA/UM. It is a detective, mystery solving game where you follow around a man who (initially does not know his name) is named Harrier Du Bois.

From this point on, there will be EXTREME SPOILERS for this game. I will be doing a read more, but if you’re curious about this theory and why I stumbled across it in one of my insomnia-fueled, sleepless nights -- I tried to provide as much canon context as I could to support the idea.

Now... continue on! ·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ 　　.·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ 　　.·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ 　　.·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .

Where to start? I think I will define what Disco Elysium describes an Innocence as:

An innocence is the highest category of historical personage in the world, a literal personification of History. Traditionally, an innocence, when anointed, assumes supreme rule over the Occident, or the known world in general. An innocence is elected to office by the Founding Party, a precedent that has taken place a mere six times in the entirety of History. The legal system of the Reál Belt is built from ground up to accommodate innoccentic rule. According to the Party, an innocence is infallible. The decisions made by one are not decisions. They are inevitabilities -- what would have happened anyway, only accelerated, packed into decades instead of centuries. An Innocence is a continuous, compressed event, a sacred human being. They say it is an honour and a glory to live when one is in office. Commonly an innocence does not enforce his or her power through military power. This is seen as unnecessary. The innocence wins because an innocence can't help but win.

So, to put it in Laymen’s Terms, an Innocence is somebody who typically has a lot of influence over historical events. They are almost supernatural in the fact that they, themselves, force what would be long, historic events to happen in short, condensed times -- and they are generally infallable.

How the hell does this relate to Harry?

Harrier Du Bois is a man who, even during his best efforts, seems to struggle with the worst of the worst. He argues with himself as he had different parts of his psyche hounding him down. He gets berated by himself and his coworkers who used to view him as friends.

He is a broken man who we have been made to believe through the power of narrative storytelling has done nothing but fuck up completely throughout his life. However, using the small details about Lieutenant Du Bois and his life prior to his giant amnesiatic episode --

That does not necessarily seem to be true.

At some point he met his future fiancée, Dora Ingerlund, who inspired him to join the Revachol Citizens Militia at the age of 26. Over 18 years of service, he solved 216 cases and racked up 3 kills, an extremely low number for a member of Precinct 41. His statistics put him at the top of the RCM's ranks both in terms of effectiveness (simply clearing 10 cases a year is enough to put a policeman in the 90th percentile) and humanism (too many RCM officers enjoy shooting people). His exploits earned him the title of lieutenant double-yefreitor and the position as head of the Major Crimes Unit at Precinct 41.

Harry was extremely successful in his choice to work for the RCM. His statistics, as shown above, would have given him one of the highest ranking roles in all of the precinct. Harry is double-yefeitor, which suggests that he had been offered two promotions, but rejected the offers as he preferred the work he was already doing.

Harry would get two to three extremely heavy cases done a week, which is virtually unheard of by just about any officer. Even Kim was impressed by this, and we all know that is an integral part of the game (we cannot make Kim disappointed, it is blasphemous).

Not to mention he had grown up in what would be considered the “The New” which was a time where everything was generally prosperous and optimistic.

So what? Harry’s successful. How does that make him an Innocence?

Throughout the events of the game, we are made to play as Harry solving the crime of a man hanged behind the Whirling-In-Rags. The man had turned out to be somebody hired by Wild Pines -- a place where a good majority of its workers were on strike due to poor working conditions -- to keep the infighting and rebellion down.

Throughout the seven days one is meant to undergo the investigation (with some side missions here and there, of course), and there seems to consistently feel like there is a sense of urgency throughout the week as tensions between the protestors and the company rise.

The game ultimately ends up with a tribunal, the event where it all comes to a head. People are killed, and although the rioting and protesting technically does not finish and is likely just starting (thus potentially leading to revolution in regards to working conditions), it does seem to be kickstarted fairly suddenly.

Innocences are known to be embodiments of historical events, causing them to almost double in speed at how quickly these events occur. Harry simply being present likely influenced a good portion of the behaviors of the rioters, the rebels, the protestors -- and he certainly had a hand in influencing the company and Evrart -- all of which had a hand in the corporate side of the conflict.

Harry simply being there kickstarted an act of rebellion. True, it had been going on for a short while before Harry got there, but it is possible that him showing up to solve this case thrust the protests into an all out act of rebellion. It is suggested that this will be something that they will be facing going forward as a continuous theme in their work.

Innocences also seem to have supernatural abilities.

Due to the fact that they can never be wrong, and are widely considered infallible, some of the more meta aspects of the game could play into this theory alone. Harry has countless opportunities to circumvent failed checks. Perhaps he can level up and improve his skills that then allow him to have another go at something he may have ultimately “Failed at” before. This means he can try something he failed at multiple times until you, the player, get it right. But in universe, this appears as though Harry is incapable of failing.

He has ways of knowing things that he really has no business knowing. This is generally thanks to Encyclopedia, Shivers, or Electrochemistry. Harry has both reasons canonically and in the metaverse that he could possibly be an Innocence.

Okay, now what?

I hope this is what they do with future games. Harry is recruited as an Innocence, and brings Kim (and possibly Cuno -- his ward??????) to rule over the Occident. Perhaps, due to both of them being detectives, they could be almost like Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, solving crimes all over the globe with almost guaranteed success.

It sounds like it would be a great idea for a sequel, in my opinion. It gives an excuse to still use the same characters that made Disco Elysium so charming, and to bring them into a new realm/country that the players could explore. Plus, that means more world building, and with a game like this, you really can’t get enough of it.

[egelantier]

disco elysium

i fall into a proper gaming binge every half a year or so, and then forget that computers games exist altogether. my last bout of addiction was hades, a gorgeous roguelite about trying to get out of the underworld and dealing with family, bigger on the inside than it seemed outside. now i've spent a week headfirst into the beautiful madness of disco elysium, and i'm nowhere close to done. middle of the second playthrough, at least a couple more ahead, maybe three, maybe five - this kind of not closer to be done. finally, almost a decade later, there's a spiritual successor to planescape: torment, perfect, unique and compelling like nothing else. i'm head over heels in love.

(and a note: it's very much a game that can and should be played by non-gamers. it's a true click-and-pointer; the entirety of its action happens through dialogue. give it a try.)

in disco elysium, your character wakes up in an absolutely trashed hotel room, coming off a bender of epic proportions, fucked up beyond recognition, and fully amnesiac. it turns out you're visiting a (very much not) sunny town of revachol, a slowly decaying remnant of revolution and consequent war, and, well. you're a cop, and you're here to investigate a murder. namely, a murder of somebody whose dead body is still hanged in the backyard…

this is a horrendous mess, and you are a horrendous mess - bloated, amnesiac, confused, weird, pathetic, with a host of warring impulses and demands fighting for space in your head - but thankfully there's a pillar of stability and light in your dark world, waiting just downstairs: lieutenant kim katsuragi, your assigned partner from another station, a man with godlike sense of dignity and practically endless amount of quiet patience for your bullshit. together with him, you can investigate a crime, try to stop a small civil war, solve a couple of questions of the universe, and maybe, if you play your cards just once, dance a truly epic dance together in a shot-up church. there are also cryptids, karaoke, board games, collecting bottles for money, a mystery of a crashed police car, discovering your own feelings about the homo-sexual underground, and many, many other things.

(the gameplay: you have four sets of stats (intellect, sensitivity, physicality, interacting with objects) and, depending on how you distribute them, you play a wildly different character every time. there's no way to fail: your detective can be dumb as a bag of rocks but able to get by on intuition and muscle memory, or smart and horrible with people, or empathetic and weak, or - the combinations are endless. the game is conducted via a combination of red stat checks that you can do only once, and white checks that you can try, fail, up your stats and retry again. aside from a handful of cases, a lot of time it's easier - and funnier - to accept failures rather than try for a perfect go every time. you are a hot mess, after all. there are ten game days, a variety of sidequests and tasks, and almost endless variability in how you approach them. everything is connected, except for that one door.)

(there's also a political system, where you eventually pick up your political affiliation: a communist, a libertarian, a fascist, and a wishy-washy uncommitted liberal. the game has a lot of things to tell you about all your choices, most of them funny, some of them horrendous. there's no innocence here, and no way to weasel out of the consequences of your worldview; and you could also see that it was done by eastern europe people.)

and the thing is. the thing is, it's very much the kind of a game where you perform a field autopsy on a three days old corpse while a couple of preteen kids are watching avidly and offering their color commentary, and at some point you have to rummage in the corpse's mouth and feel its brain stem. a lot of very, very bad things happen or happened - to you, to the people around you, to the town around you, to the world around you. where in fallout you rolled into town with your stats jacked high and your blaster in hand, and solved ancient disputes and established peace, here the weight of the history is very, very heavy, and you're very, very small. you can't solve the decades of violence and war and trauma and colonization and poverty with the power of your save-scumming and pithy one liners, alas; but you can solve a murder. you can help a sweet and worried old woman. you can put your cheek to a kid's fuzzy plush toy, when offered. you can tell a person, gently, that their loved one is dead, and lie about how drunk they were when they did that. you can replace a taxidermied bird you broke. you can sit on the swing with your partner, waiting for the low tide, and whistle together - two birds on the wire…

it's the gentlest, kindest, sweetest, most hopeful game i've seen in the last decade. it's a goddamn manifesto to human spirit, and to how only - well, love - holds the world, always falling apart, together. a huge part of it is your relationship with kim, because believe me, whoever you are, most of your playthrough would be dedicated to chasing kim's approval and to winning his trust. but it also sneaks into all the cases, all the dialogues, all the little throwaway details. everybody is human; everybody is awful; everybody is holy, even you. oh, even you.

(there are storylines you can or can not discover. about why harry is such a mess - and it's awful and i loved how it was done, with empathy and grace and no judgement; about the state of the world, a bit of eldritch horror so throwaway and beautiful i would read entire volumes just about that; about the city of locusts; about a small girls' memory of playing in the reeds; about the scar of the revolution. suliram, ram, ram…)

(it's also brilliantly, awfully, absurdly, hysterically funny. Art Cop run alone makes me just about die. every failure is funnier than the other. you can be as weird as you want to - in fact, the game encourages you to be as weird as you want to be - and the world around will react accordingly, outperforming you in sheer absurdity. there's a war-and-peace sized amount of dialogue and description in the game, and it's written by some damn genius of pratchettian caliber.)

and, and and. honestly, the best way to get sucked into this game is not reviews, it's random quotes and screenshots, out -of-context spoilers - it's more or less impossible to resist. but please, oh please, give it a try.

>Someone's been walking around in your dreams lately, looking for something. Tidying up, rearranging. Storing away all the unrealized dreams, putting old pains in boxes. The worst nightmares have settled down for a while. A spot of light on the bedroom door after the dark. The fluttering of eyelids in the spring sun. A thought that arises, only to disappear again. And yet there's a pattern emerging…

>What if you didn’t lose your memory? What if something in Martinaise came and stored it all away. For you to slowly open one box at a time. So you can choose which parts to keep. Keep almost none of it. Only the flowers on the windowsill. Only the distant sound of a radio. Lose all the actors, the dark shadows, leave only the still lifes, the blissful distant wash of waves. If everybody knew -- you never did. She’ll be coming soon. That is all.

[yr-bed]

Three quotes about time/progress/development, from three things I read in the bath just now

From “A Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Disco Elysium on the Past and Present” by Alastair Hadden

Like every CRPG before it, Disco Elysium contends that its player-character can improve with experience. Games are inherently optimistic this way: by accepting tasks and completing them, we steadily become more capable. There’s room to reshape ourselves, too; we can build ourselves better than the next cop, given time and effort and deliberation. That said, one of the game’s few middle fingers to the lineage of Dungeons & Dragons is its notion that a skill can be too developed; a detective can be too smart for their own good, too sensitive, too tough. And it’s noteworthy that almost all of the game’s Thought Cabinet projects and clothing bonuses come with debuffs and drawbacks, too. Progress requires trade-offs, the game wants to say. Everything in this world is compromised.

From “Béla Tarr Reflects on Making Seven-Hour ‘Sátántangó’ 25 Years Ago and Life as an ‘Ugly, Poor Filmmaker’”

Most films just tell the story,” he said, “action, fact, action, fact, I don’t fucking know what. For me, this is poisoning the cinema because the art form is pictures written in time.” He coughed hard between breaths, as if expel that sickness. “It’s not only a question of length,” he said, “it’s a question of heaviness. It’s a question of can you shake the people or not?”

So far as Tarr is concerned, Marvel movies aren’t the problem as much as they are the clearest symptom of a broader disease that has spread between genres. “Most shit today… they aren’t films, they’re just comics,” he said. “It’s just blub-blub-blub, a bubble of a sentence and then we go to the next section.” Forget about Netflix: “I’m just deeply sorry for somebody who is watching movies on this shit because they miss everything.”

Our problem, Tarr argued, is that most cinema leaves us stuck on the surface. “People just tell a fucking story and we believe that something is happening with us,” he said. “But nothing is happening with us. We are not really part of the story. We are just doing our time, and nobody gives a shit about what time is doing to us. It’s a huge mistake. I just did it a different way.”

From Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips

Darwin showed us that everything in life is vulnerable, ephemeral and without design or God-given purpose. For disillusioned non-believers -- who, of course, pre-dated Darwin and created the conditions for his work and its reception -- belief in God (and providential design) was replaced by belief in the infinite untapped talents and ambitions of human beings (and in the limitless resources of the earth). It became the enduring project of our modern cultures of redemption -- cultures committed above all to science and progress -- to create societies in which people can realise their potential, in which “growth” and “productivity” and “opportunity” are the watchwords (it is essential to the myth of potential that scarcity is scarcely mentioned: and growth is always possible and expected).

[cactusseeds]

i'm just continuously infuriated by the ZA/UM situation in new and exciting ways.

as i understand it, this is a world that has been in development since its creators were teenagers. a world that let their minds distance from the casual cruelty of the outside world, that let them process their thoughts and turn them into brilliant works of fiction, a world that had grown and been iterated upon for some 20 years, that has now been forcibly removed from said creator's possession to be turned into something truly beyond parody of itself while the corpse of the studio they founded attempts to extort just a little bit of extra cash out of something truly one of a kind, as the forces of capitalism are wont to do.

and now, i'm already seeing many people say "oh well, that sucks, game was really good, guess i'll wait for the next IP from these guys."

and i can't speak for somebody else, but if it were me, i would never make anything for anybody ever again. this wasn't just another piece of media to drop and replace, this was a piece of someone's mind. more than just a story, it was an in-depth look at someone's brain through decades of iteration and tuning.

it infuriates me, as an artist, to think about someone warping a tremendous chunk of my life into a shitty pachinko, but moreso, it deeply, deeply saddens me that someone's life's work can be reduced to something one might thumb their nose at as a discarded IP that isn't even worth considering, just moments after praising it as life changing.

we should've never gotten Disco Elysium, we weren't good enough for it.

[derkastellan]

Review: The Outer Worlds (amended)

Well, color me surprised. 

After having watched Jim Sterling’s praise for “The Outer Worlds” (TOW) I went and read the full tvtropes.org page on the game, something which I like to do to learn more about a game or franchise after having experienced it myself (because it will be full of spoilers) or after having decided that I never will. Because you will get a pretty good walk-through of all major themes and ideas present in a given media product and also quite a bit of background trivia.

So here’s a few amendments to what I wrote earlier.

Spoilers will follow...

Invisible starvation?

“The "plague" in Edgewater is caused by nutrient deficiency from a diet consisting entirely of beer and canned fish. There are many such diseases in real life, including pellagra, which was practically an epidemic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dr. Joseph Goldberger proved it was caused by niacin (Vitamin B3) deficiency in a series of experiments beginning in 1915, but his results were ignored by the scientific community (who insisted it must be caused by a pathogen, much like the inhabitants of Edgewater) until 1937.“ (tvtropes.org)

There is historical precedent. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that a quality development team like Obsidian’s will actually research quite a bit and put that in their games. But I have a bit of a problem with it - you see, these deficiencies were bad but they weren’t exactly on the verge of eradicating humanity. It essentially remains a plot hole but one made more shallow.

Besides obviously still being here as a species humanity not only survived without this knowledge for more than half a century, we also pulled of a major World War while doing it. So, people got sick, people may have experienced “plague,” but we did not face an extinction event no matter how bad it got. (And I bet worker diet on the turn of century was pretty atrocious, this being the Gilded Age the game tries to project forward into the future.)

So, kudos to doing their research on that one. It invalidates my point certainly that people would notice starvation - they just call it plague.

Are marauders suicidal?

“The most commonly used kind on the planet, Adrenal-thine, results in homicidal rage, paranoia, and depression. It is implied to be responsible for both suicides and the rampant Marauder problem.“ (tvtropes.org)

I should have actually spotted that one in game. In fact I saw it, but it didn’t sink in. Maybe also because the player has no way to do anything about it (as far as I know, could have missed it) and also the player sure does snort the damn stuff in the dozens, so how bad could it be? Admittedly, if you opt for combat you are basically slaughtering your way through hundreds of beings, so maybe “adreno” is indeed bad for you?

What it really explains is why marauders chose to stand around in the most stupid places, attacking on sight. What it doesn’t explain is why these guys gang up? It seems that “adreno” has some vicious way of getting at you, increasing certain emotions but not completely disabling your faculties. Just like the marauders tolerate Zoe (IIRC) as long as she can supply sweet, sweet adreno (another clue), they might just find no other way to deal with their increasingly violent thoughts. We probably should see, however, marauders shoot each other instead of acting like armed gangs and efficient combat teams.

I guess one of the biggest missed opportunities here is giving marauders no cut scenes, no things we can observe them do in-game. They will try to seek us out, do the usual enemy chatter, but they never appear human or conflicted in any way. Maybe so that the player doesn’t mind treating them as cannon fodder? 

I wouldn’t bet on it. If adreno abuse was meant to tell us something about the world beyond mere “Look how fucked up it all is”, it would be front and center in some ways, like observing marauders (or “regular” people) having freakouts, episodes, anything to humanize the whole thing. As they stand, marauders are cheap cannon fodder with a flimsy backstory, their placing in levels doesn’t make much sense once you progress to Monarch, etc. That they effectively outnumber settlers is one of these necessary things games do that I find hard to excuse, but TOW is no worse on this than “Fallout 4″. Hardly any game could be...

There is a better way?

I figured that you had to chose between Adelaide and her Botany Lab followers and the inhabitants of Edgewater. Turns out you can achieve a compromise ending here too, making her the mayor of Edgewater. I really tried finding this option originally but I sure didn’t.

I admit being disappointed by the poor ending I got for Edgewater. So it may seem hypocritical if I say I like this less. But in some way I do like it less - not in all but bear with me...

You see, I actually felt conflicted about this choice. It seemed like a forced choice, but it was a moral dilemma because somebody would suffer. If you add in an option where practically no one (but the shitty town mayor and his incompetent cronies) have to suffer, there is no more dilemma. I can have it all. Eat my cake and have it too. All is great.

Now, you see I was disappointed by the poor ending I got for Edgewater but the choice I made I actually thought about. And sometimes you are forced into a bad choice - just like the game does force you, or seemed to do - and have to live with the consequences. (Just like Phineas regretted the deaths he caused.) As long as you have any choice, however, it’s your choice, and if it was carefully weighed, it matters and says something about you.

In real life - a long shot from video games, I admit - there are no guaranteed happy ends, no painless options. Even navigating your life to the absolute optimum will probably cause pain and suffering in others, probably due to their own choices as well, but it will happen. So even if the choice seemed forced - or rather contrived - it had a certain validity to it. I had to overcome some resistance to make either choice which tells me it was an actual dilemma.

Getting another, easy choice defuses this. I mean, it totally makes sense that you don’t have to make life hell for half the colony, believe me. Because, as I’ve  repeatedly said, the choice was contrived. It just allows you to cop out from a dilemma because if costs are taken away, there is no dilemma. If there is an optimal solution the others are simply... wrong.

You can get the Iconoclasts and MSI to work together. You are not forced into a choice. And besides confronting a sucky leader about it, no matter how lofty his goals are, is not a big dilemma. Graham is such an idiot in-game, it’s hard to feel morally conflicted about getting rid of him. The easily achievable “third option” is really the only option, proven by the fact that if you facilitate it, you will get twice the support in the endgame. This is the optimal choice and it is only minimally gated behind a few speech checks and doing a little sidequesting. 

Combat

Even if your dialogue skill help you in combat that doesn’t validate combat as game element to me. Take “Disco Elysium” (DE). It’s a game about roleplaying a detective, and it’s heavily about the kind of character you build, chose to be, and the choices you make. (Well, which ultimately do not matter, but hey, there had to be a sour grape.) You get tons of great dialogue, intriguing little mysteries to solve, and world detail more than you can really absorb.

And it doesn’t have a combat engine. In a move emulating “Dungeon World” (the tabletop) it fits its combat into the narrative mode. (Then the dev praises himself for this being the new shit on their blog and I feel a bit dirty...) And it is good. I mean, combat is still dominated by skill checks - and DE’s skill engine is brillant! - but it becomes a thing of cleverly crafted choices.

If I compare “Divinity: Original Sin” (D:OS) and its “puzzle combat” mini game then DE wins hands down even though both do essentially turn-based combat and D:OS is hugely popular. Because in D:OS it is simply about a combat balance tilted against you which you try to level by or tilt the other way by finding weak spots, focusing on the right things, making the right combinations. It is indeed a puzzle. And frankly, a boring one.

But DE makes even a regular combat seem like a series of dramatic choices - which it should be! Similarly, TOW makes it so that the choice of weapon and the way you tackle your opponents (somewhat) matter. But there is no true depth to it. That’s what happens when RPGs become shooters. Combat is a nuisance that I usually hope to minimize by optimal gear, sniping from afar, etc. Combat pads games. Combat is either a turn-based mini-game or an exercise in more or less clever and twitchy shooting. Combats engages many players because of the adrenaline rush. But if you look at a clever game like TOW, combat doesn’t really add to it.

Ironically it’s very easy to see the invisible game side of things in TOW. You can rely on enemies not opening doors, you can rely on them not patrolling. You are in a room without enemies, you can assume you can loot it in peace. Even stupid spawny quests like the Boston Library in “Fallout 4″ felt more risky because enemies would spawn and seek you out, feeling more dynamic than the whole of TOW even with the cheapest bag of tricks.

It certainly benefited my plodding game style where I resolve a combat, than start to look around, heal wounds, etc. I probably would have finished the game in 30 hours including sidequests if I hadn’t played it so safe. And the game enables you. Because its sense of risk is quickly exposed as limited.

Conclusion

TOW is doing better on many counts than I have admitted earlier. It is a good game. But with such a good, polished title by such a competent studio it hurts if it misses out on true greatness. It is not that the game is bad, it is that it could have been even better.

About midgame my engagement with the whole thing was flagging. And as the Jimquisition pointed out, TOW does not, not in the least, try to get between you and your fun. It’s easy to control, easy to master, it adds a lot of flashy stuff like companion special abilities (which I never used) and science weapons (which I never really ended up using after getting them all) to enhance its already somewhat diverse gunplay.

Still, I’m not in it for the shooting. And though it is a competently done shooter, much better than “Fallout 4″ or predecessors for example, I somehow feel like my 41 hours of gameplay were padded out with way too much combat. The actual fun in the game was in its dialogue and when it was clever, not when you shoot stuff. And Monarch was so chockful of stuff to shoot, it got annoying. 

Is there a clever quest in this game I will really, really remember? I’m not sure. None comes to mind right now. The grindy “I have to loot or buy some gear and model it, then loot some stuff off of monster” comes to mind immediately, only not as a positive example. The fact that you can bypass combat, sometimes make robots murder each other or the opposition... that doesn’t change the fact that the game is often heavily about stretches of combat or combat evasion. 

I wish there had been more actual world-stuff to justify this. More places with living residents. More small stuff. Less shoot-to-kill stuff. I think once you’ve made the monsters and the shooting engine, it’s easy to repeat that. But each new line of dialogue needs voice-acting now. Fair enough. But that’s what role-playing to me is all about. The endless walls of text of DE were fine by me, and also the choice to voice-act only key passages and key people. I dig this stuff. I was heavily impressed with the absence of meaningless combat.

TOW is a good game. And I hope there will be better games to follow, that they will evolve it. They’re off to a good, solid start. Better than Bethesda for sure. No keep reaching, don’t get complacent.