Disco Elysium

• 1. Introduction

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  A man wakes in a trashed hostel room in the district of Martinaise, with a savage hangover and no memory of who he is. He does not know his name, his profession, or anything about the world beyond the door. This is how Disco Elysium begins, a 2019 role-playing game made by the studio ZA/UM. A murder is waiting to be solved, and the stranger holding the case is the one person who cannot remember why he is qualified. Yet the game has almost no combat, and the detective's own mind keeps arguing with him. How does a role-playing game work without fights? Who is the broken man at its center? How did a novelist whose first book sold poorly end up writing something that critics treat as art? And why did so many of its makers walk away from the studio afterwards?

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• 2. Twenty-Four Voices

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  Twenty-four skills make up the detective's personality, and they sit under four attributes: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Each attribute governs six skills. The player raises them with points earned by levelling up. Whether an action succeeds is settled by a skill check, a random roll of two six-sided dice set against the skill. Fighting as most games know it does not exist here. Conflict is resolved through these checks and through branching conversations.

  Strong skills come with costs, which discourages minmaxing. A detective with high Drama can spot lies and invent his own, but he also grows prone to hysterics and paranoia. High Electrochemistry protects him from the harm of drugs and fills his head with knowledge about them. It can also push him toward substance abuse and other self-destructive pleasures. Even the clothes he wears can lift one skill while dragging another down.

  The skills do not stay silent. Each can speak to the player directly, so a conversation may turn into an internal debate among aspects of mind and body. The effect is of talking with a fragmented persona. Inland Empire, a subskill of Psyche, is described by ZA/UM as the intensity of the soul. It may urge the detective to pose under a false identity with total conviction, if the player accepts the suggestion.

  A second system called the Thought Cabinet works alongside the skills. Thoughts arrive through conversations with other characters and through the protagonist's inner dialogues. The player can internalize a thought, which takes a set number of in-game hours. A finished thought brings benefits and occasionally penalties, a design ZA/UM compared to the trait system in the Fallout series. Slots are few at the start and grow with experience levels.

  The early thought called Hobocop shows how it works. The character ponders living on the streets to save money, and his composure with other characters suffers while the idea settles in. Once it is complete, he receives twice as much money for collecting and recycling trash. Later, a skill point lets him forget a finished thought to free a slot. That removes the thought and its bonuses for the rest of the playthrough.

  The game's lead writer, Robert Kurvitz, described another goal as "microreactivity." The team could not cover every possible choice, so they tracked small acts, such as an embarrassing comment, and how they ripple through events. The skill voices comment on those choices, which makes the player more aware of them next time. The main case is nearly unworkable, much like the city around it. To reflect that, the writers made the partner Kim Kitsuragi, a detective from another precinct, a no-nonsense presence who keeps the player on track and admits that some threads cannot be fixed.

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• 3. Elysium and the Pale

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  The year is '51 of the Current Century, and the world is called Elysium. It is made of isolas, masses of land and sea separated by the Pale. The game describes the Pale as an inscrutable, mist-like connective tissue in which the laws of reality break down. Long exposure causes mental instability and eventually death. Crossing it is usually done by aerostatics and is tightly regulated because of the danger.

  Kurvitz and his team had developed Elysium in the years before the game, and it carries over six thousand years of history. The narrative was shaped with attention to the theory of history put forward by Karl Marx. That theory holds that the way a society produces its material life shapes its politics, art, religion, and philosophy.

  The story unfolds in Martinaise, an impoverished district of the city of Revachol, on the isola of Insulinde, nicknamed the New New World. Forty-nine years earlier, a wave of communist revolutions swept several countries. The Suzerainty of Revachol, a monarchy that had been Elysium's pre-eminent superpower, was overthrown and replaced by a commune. Six years later, an invading alliance of moralist-capitalist nations called the Coalition toppled that commune. Revachol became a Special Administrative Region and remains under Coalition control decades afterwards.

  Policing is among the few duties the Coalition leaves in local hands. It falls to the Revachol Citizens Militia, a voluntary brigade of citizens that grew into a semi-professional police force. Its officers include the amnesiac at the center of the story.

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• 4. The Hanged Man

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  Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi greets the amnesiac detective with a case: a hanged man in an empty lot behind the hostel. The victim's identity is unclear, and the scene suggests a group of people lynched him. As the pair work the district and help residents with tasks, the detective learns that he is Lieutenant Harrier "Harry" Du Bois, a decorated Militia detective. Years earlier, an event began a midlife crisis. On the night the case was assigned, he snapped and began a self-destructive three-day drinking spree. After the first night in the game, Harry dreams that he is the hanged man, lying beneath a disco ball. His own corpse tells him that everything is hopeless and that he will fail to solve the case or rebuild his life.

  The trail leads to a strike by the Martinaise dockworkers' union against the Wild Pines Group, a major logistics corporation. The detectives interview union boss Evrart Claire and Wild Pines negotiator Joyce Messier. Joyce names the victim as Colonel Ellis "Lely" Kortenaer, who commanded mercenaries sent to break the strike. She warns that the rest of the squad has gone rogue and will likely seek revenge.

  The truth proves layered. Lely was killed before he was hanged. The Hardie Boys, dockworker vigilantes who act as the district's de facto peacekeepers, claim the killing. They say he tried to rape a hostel guest named Klaasje. Klaasje tells a different story. She says Lely was shot in the mouth while the two were having consensual sex. Afraid of the authorities because of her past as a corporate spy, she turned to a union sympathiser named Ruby, who staged the hanging with the Hardie Boys.

  The detectives find Ruby hiding in an abandoned building. She disables them with a radio-wave device normally used to help people cross the Pale, but Harry overcomes it. Ruby believes he is a corrupt cop, and her fate depends on the player's skills and choices. Back at the hostel, the rogue mercenaries and the Hardie Boys meet in a standoff that erupts into a firefight. Harry is wounded and lies unconscious for several days. None, some, or all of the mercenaries may die. If Kim is hospitalized, a street urchin named Cuno offers to take his place.

  The last leads point to an old fortress on an islet just off the shore. There the detectives find the shooter, Iosef Lilianovich Dros, a former commissar of the Revachol communist army. He survived the commune's collapse by deserting his post. Iosef shot Lely with a sniper rifle in a fit of anger and jealousy, bitter toward the capitalist system Lely represented and envious of Klaasje. The detectives arrest him.

  Then an insectoid cryptid called the Insulindian Phasmid steps out of the reeds. The player can investigate its existence throughout the game. The story implies that psychoactive chemicals it exudes quietly bent Iosef's mind for years, feeding his fanaticism and resentment. Harry may hold a psychic conversation with it. The creature fears his unstable mind yet is awed that he keeps existing. It hints that the Pale is a result of human perception and self-reflection, which threatens to swallow the world. Before leaving, it tells him to move on from the wreck of his life.

  Back in Martinaise, Harry's old squad confronts him and Kim, and they weigh whether he solved the case and how he handled the mercenaries. Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare, Harry's usual partner, confirms that the breakdown began when his fiancée left him years ago. In the best outcome, the squad hopes his state will improve and invites him, with either Kim or Cuno, to join a special Militia unit.

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• 5. Born From Failure

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  In 2005, Robert Kurvitz was playing in a band called Ultramelanhool when he conceived a fictional world during a drunken evening, listening to Tiësto's "Adagio for Strings." The group grew into a collective of artists and musicians that included the oil painter Aleksander Rostov, later the game's lead artist. Together they built a steampunk-like tabletop role-playing game modelled on Dungeons & Dragons. Along the way Kurvitz met the Estonian author Kaur Kender, who helped him write a novel set in that world, Sacred and Terrible Air.

  The novel appeared in 2013 and sold only about one thousand copies. Kurvitz then spent roughly three years in depression and alcoholism. That failure, together with his and Rostov's teenage experiences of Dungeons & Dragons, shaped a design philosophy of embracing failure. It shows in the flawed cop at the center of the game, in the tragedies around him, and in the pass-fail dice. One scrapped tagline read "A Roleplaying Game About Being a Total Failure."

  Kurvitz recovered and helped Kender through his own recovery. In gratitude, Kender suggested that Kurvitz stop chasing another novel and capture his world as a video game, which might draw wider interest. Kurvitz had never worked on a game. Then he saw that the setting's artwork fit an isometric view, and Rostov agreed they might as well risk failing together once more. Kurvitz wrote a short pitch: "D&D meets '70s cop-show, in an original 'fantastic realist' setting, with swords, guns and motor-cars." Kender was impressed and invested, and friends and family added more.

  The game was first announced for 2017 as No Truce With the Furies, a title borrowed from a poem by R.S. Thomas. The poem later found a home in the game's opening, with these lines: "The Furies are at home in the mirror, it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown." Kurvitz had always seen that title as provisional. He wanted to save it for a bundle with a second planned game.

  The studio name came from Zaum, a constructed language created by Russian avant-garde poets in the early 1900s. Read in Russian, it also echoes an idiom, vzyat'sya za um, similar to the English idea of bootstrapping. The capitals and slash were meant to present the team as something that definitely exists and weighs eight tonnes. Work began around 2016, with the local team living in a squat in a former gallery in Tallinn. Venture capital arrived within the first year.

  That funding let Kurvitz approach the English band British Sea Power about the soundtrack. During his trip to Birmingham, he realised England was the better home for the main team, with more local resources for development and voice work. Some staff moved from Estonia to London and Brighton, while other designers worked from Poland, Romania, and China. By release the studio counted about 20 outside consultants, 35 in-house developers, and eight writers assisting Kurvitz with dialogue. Most funding came from the Estonian businessman Margus Linnamäe, and the game ran on the Unity engine.

  The original plan was one city location, enough for a 2017 release. But ZA/UM had promised investors a game that spanned a larger world, so the scope grew and the release slipped. The name changed to Disco Elysium. "Disco" can mean a fad that burns bright and fades, echoed in the protagonist's clothes. It is also Latin for "I learn," a nod to his relearning of the world. ZA/UM had considered publishing through Humble Bundle but chose to publish the game itself.

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• 6. Sound and Influences

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  "Smallest Church in Sussex," from the 2003 debut album The Decline of British Sea Power, became "The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns" in the game. Members of ZA/UM were longtime fans of the band, which was then called British Sea Power and is now Sea Power. They asked the group directly, and the band delivered original compositions plus instrumental remixes of earlier songs. "Fire Escape in the Sea" from the 2012 EP2 turned into "Whirling-In-Rags, 8 AM." "Red Rock Riviera" became "Instrument of Surrender." From the 2017 album Let the Dancers Inherit the Party, "Wants to Be Free" and "Praise for Whatever" became "Burn, Baby, Burn" and "The Insulindian Miracle." The hostel-cafeteria's name, Whirling-in-Rags, comes from a lyric in "Hail Holy Queen" from the 2013 album Machineries of Joy.

  The cast included metal musicians Mikee Goodman of SikTh and Mark Holcomb of Periphery. In January 2020, ZA/UM published a Steam post naming works that shaped the game's writing and style. Planescape: Torment, from 1999, shares its amnesiac hero, heavy emphasis on dialogue, and isometric view. The television show The Wire informed the working-class setting. Other influences included the video game Kentucky Route Zero, the shows True Detective and The Shield, and novels by Émile Zola, Dashiell Hammett, China Miéville, and the Strugatsky brothers. For visuals, the developers named the painters Rembrandt, Ilya Repin, Jenny Saville, Alex Kanevsky, and Wassily Kandinsky.

  Zola may be the deepest literary influence. Lead writer Helen Hindpere has often said that she and several colleagues are longtime fans of his work. Speaking at a conference in France, Kurvitz said he does not consider himself a writer, because "You are not going to be a better writer than Émile Zola." The creators also credit the Estonian urbanist poet Arvi Siig. Accepting the Estonian President's Young Cultural Figure award for 2020, Kurvitz said that "Without his modernism, Elysium - the world the game is placed in - would not be half of what it is."

  The protagonist was modelled directly on Kaur Kender's father, who served as a detective in the Soviet police. The scene where the hero vomits at the stench of a decaying corpse came from a real incident in that career. During a livestream, Kurvitz placed the game in the "Fallout school of RPG." He said the original Fallout and Fallout 2 were among the first games to show that "video games can be forms of art."

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• 7. The Final Cut

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  Disco Elysium reached Windows on the 15th of October 2019, and macOS followed on the 27th of April 2020. One of the first translations was Chinese, in March 2020. It bypassed the usual approval process in China, since its violence, sexual material, and critique of ideologies fell short of government standards. Reviews from Chinese players showed they were drawn to it, partly for its political side. A May 2020 update improved performance on lower-end hardware and added support for community translations, with the localisation firm Testronic Labs also contributing. Kurvitz announced an expansion, a full sequel, a tabletop game tentatively titled You Are Vapor, and a television series with the production company dj2 Entertainment.

  In December 2020, ZA/UM announced an expanded edition, The Final Cut. According to Hindpere, it was directed by feedback from players of the original. Nearly 100 characters received full voice acting, including the narration and the skills, across more than 1.2 million words. Because the characters matter so much, ZA/UM kept voice direction in-house. Global casting and recording took about fourteen months. The new cast replaced the original recordings by Dasha Nekrasova and the Chapo Trap House hosts.

  The studio found the jazz musician Lenval Brown for the narrator and the player skills, which make up nearly half the dialogue. He spent about eight months recording. His voice stayed slow, constant, and meticulous, with small nuances to separate each skill's personality. Players can even choose partial voicing, such as narration only, with other characters shown as text. Four quests cut from the original were reworked as the Political Vision Quests. They push the player to consider how they have developed their character and how committed they remain to that path. Two more tracks by British Sea Power joined the soundtrack.

  The Final Cut launched on the 30th of March 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Stadia, and arrived as a free update on PC and macOS. Versions for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S followed on the 12th of October 2021. The PlayStation releases first shipped with game-breaking bugs that made some quests impossible to finish. Australia's classification board refused the game a rating over its depictions of sex, drug misuse, crime, cruelty, and violence. ZA/UM appealed. The board later granted an adults-only R18+ rating, noting that regular drug use in the game harms the player's progress. Spike Chunsoft released the game in Japan on the 25th of August 2022. An Android version, a visual novel, reached Google Play on the 5th of August 2025.

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• 8. Acclaim and Aftermath

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  Metacritic recorded "universal acclaim" for Disco Elysium, and OpenCritic found 96% of critics recommended it. PC Gamer praised its depth, freedom, customisation, and storytelling. IGN compared it favourably to The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2, despite its smaller size. The Washington Post called it "conspicuously well written." GameSpot gave it 10 out of 10, its first perfect score since 2017. Eurogamer dissented, criticising the lack of role-playing choice and focus. At The Game Awards 2019 it won all four awards it was nominated for, more than any other game that night. Time listed it among the top 10 games of the 2010s, and it earned a 2020 Nebula Award nomination for Best Game Writing. By September 2025 it had sold more than five million copies.

  Success did not hold the team together. Work began on a direct sequel, code-named Y12, led by Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere, while Kender led another project, P1. In October 2022, ZA/UM member Martin Luiga announced that he, Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere had "involuntarily left the company" in late 2021. He said ZA/UM "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on," and claimed the others were fired under false pretenses. A ZA/UM spokesperson denied the allegations.

  Kurvitz's account held that Margus Linnamäe had owned the studio's majority shares until 2021. Then a holding company owned by CEO Ilmar Kompus bought them with money allegedly drawn from the studio itself. Kurvitz and Rostov said they were demoted and then fired for asking questions. The studio denied the charges and alleged they had created a disruptive environment. Kender sued but dropped his case by December 2022 after money was repaid to ZA/UM. On the 14th of March 2023, the studio declared all legal actions concluded. On the 17th of March, Kurvitz and Rostov called that statement "wrong and misleading in several respects."

  Y12 continued for months under writers Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindžić before management cancelled it in mid-2022. They then pitched Locust City: A Disco Elysium Story, a standalone expansion centered on Cuno and Cunoesse. In February 2024, ZA/UM laid off about 25% of its staff, including both writers, and cancelled it. Tuulik noted that the layoffs primarily targeted women and team members who had raised complaints about working conditions. ZA/UM's remaining projects were a mobile game and C4, which became Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, released in May 2026 in a similar style.

  Former team members have pursued their own successors. Kurvitz and Rostov founded Red Info in June 2022, backed by at least $10 million from NetEase, with Chris Avellone helping. In October 2024, three more studios announced projects. Longdue, with Martin Luiga and narrator Lenval Brown, funded Hopetown through Kickstarter in April 2025. Dark Math Games, founded by Linnamäe, is making Tangerine Antarctic, a murder mystery at an Antarctic ski resort. Summer Eternal was founded by Tuulik and Klindžić. Beyond these, Esoteric Ebb takes inspiration from Disco Elysium and Planescape: Torment. It sets a combat-free game in a traditional fantasy world, where skill checks are made against the hero's inner voices.

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