against my better judgement (and without supporting za/um in any way) i decided to pick up their newly released piece of work. i wanted to see with my own eyes, as a child holding their hand above a lit candle, if it's really that bad. in short - yes, it was.
i don't want to repeat other people's points about the writing itself, the game's soullessness and its sociopolitical naiveté. a lot of you have already worded it better than i every could, so for the time being i'll leave this aspect out of the analysis.
let's talk about something else, shall we? there's something else at the core of this story that was bothering me from the start, feeling like a regular stream of sewage - courtesy of za/um's writers and designers. it's misogyny. yes, the misogyny, the kind that would leave your weird uncles and their friends blushing. i'll break it down into bullet points, because it's not just a matter of a weak joke or two.
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rape culture isn't dead
i hate to be that kind of person who brings up this often worn-out argument, but there are some scenes that just scream for someone to ask: what if the roles were reversed? think for a second about a game where a male protagonist wakes up, finds his possible coworker - a woman in her 40s - and while trying to resuscitate her, one of the options to pick is to literally rub her crotch. later in the game you meet a wacky doctor who advises you to essentially give him some viagra - and if it doesn't wake him up, then you can at least enjoy such things as *riding him*. how would the audience react to such suggestions and jokes if there was an unconscious woman lying on that chair?
are words just words?
the amount of bitches, whores, cunts, sluts and other pleasantries that flow from cascade's mouth made me feel like i was listening to a bunch of drunken frat bros, not a woman in her mid 30s, who's been pointing out the misogynistic remarks of an old man just a minute ago. i know that this topic might be controversial, but i consider these words to be nothing more than gendered slurs. disco elysium essentially makes fun of harry, if he hurls these words at anyone, usually in acts of drunken rage or frustration. they are not treated as a comma, as something you just have to say in an argument with another woman.
if it doesn't seem like a big deal to you, then how would you feel about a game where racial slurs are thrown right and left, written by a bloke who's white as snow and never left his WASP-y neighbourhood? it's just a pathetic, sometimes offensive attempt at... what exactly? being edgy? giving the protagonist some flaws? if so, then at least make her consistent with her views, without performing flashy, showoff-y feminism when men are displaying this kind of behaviour towards her. even better, don't make her a misogynist at all, if you attempt to reach younger, politically conscious audience, interested in a lesbian detective story.
retro-vintage-fetishism
what would be a game with a female protagonist if you wouldn't be able to dress her up a bit? chest harnesses, hot pink miniskirts, see through tops and other equally comfortable and suitable for spywork articles of clothing are waiting for you! oh, maybe you'd like to engage in some dirty talk through a sex-phone line? well, if that's not your thing, maybe you'll enjoy some dommy-mommy bullshit tropes with other characters, sexualising them at every moment?
the mind palace
finally, let's talk about thoughts. cascade daydreams about her former colleague's breast size and underwear, recalling a memory when she was only 16. she sexualises anything and everything, because in an embarrassing attempt at writing a lesbian character, the best thing they could do was a female version of this one sleazy uncle, the one that you avoided at any cost at family celebrations.
sure, whine about the lack of tits while browsing a softcore adult magazine, perform sexual gestures in front of minors to humiliate them, while accusing them of lesbianism. go off, girl, in the world filled with aforementioned bitches and cunts, you can at least objectify them a little! #girlboss
i wanted to finish it with at least a small paragraph about what i was able to enjoy there so far, but after typing all of it i'm just tired. but i should like this thing, right? there's a strong lesbian spy, finally a representation of androgynous women who love other women! yeah, sure, it could be great, but instead i was served a cold dish of quasi-pornographic fantasies, laying there with multiple side courses of vapid, pseudo profound bullshit, racism and this weird aestheticised, naïve and ignorant to the core, hint of communist-era eastern europe.
it's honestly astonishing that a team of grown ass adults with their time and funds could publish this thing and be even remotely proud of it. it's a draft-level story, that should be left in the dark, waiting for its authors and editors to finally read something that wasn't written by a straight, white man from the global west.
zero parades would be forgivable for a freshman's first attempt at writing and worldbuilding, but for za/um it's just offensively cheap, lazy and pathetic.
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Disco Elysium is one of those things where it's masterpiece of it's genre/medium and a huge influence on me as a writer but also I have a lot of very intense criticisms of it. And the big core one I keep coming back to is that the game ultimately runs into a brick wall where one of it's major themes (the toxicity of letting ideology and such replace your personality and dehumanize other people) crashes into the creators having their own favored ideology that they don't want getting caught in the line of fire of that theme.
The creators of DE and it's setting are ardent communists, openly describing themselves as Marxists. And that bleeds through into the game, where of the various factions and ideologies, communism is clearly the one the narrative is most sympathetic too. And that's... not inherently a problem, for the game to present different views before settling on one in particular over the others. That's fine.
But the game is blatantly SCARED of actually confronting the real history of communism, the criticisms of it, and especially of acknowledging how the critiques it throws at ideologies that the creators don't like or are neutral towards could be applied to their own team. Communism isn't just treated as "the group we believe to have the best idea of how to fix these problems"; it's outright handled with kids gloves, coddled and cooed over, shielded from the brutality of the story and setting, romanticized as some sort of tragic underdog.
There are tepid acknowledgements of both the disastrous, horrifying nature of all real world communist regimes so far and criticisms towards the philosophy itself. Passing mentions of the in-story communist revolution killing many people and committing war crimes, discussion of the People's Pile and the ecological disaster it was, jokes about the oft-impotent nature of many modern communist movements, stuff like that. But they're minor things mostly relegated to easily avoided conversations or played off as simple human flaws. Virtues are played up and failings are carefully shuttled away or downplayed. The story goes as far as to unironically proclaim communism can save the world from the Pale just through it's sheer amazingness despite having no indication of what makes it different from any other group in that regard.
Meanwhile everything else gets hit full-blast with absolutely no punches pulled. Compare the limp-dicked "oh yeah, communists aren't perfect they have some problems" segments to the long, oft-furious, unrestrained speeches about all the intricate and frequently fatal flaws of the in-universe centrists and capitalists and anarchists and so on. The game isn't coming to a conclusion through natural discussion. It's playing favorites and stacking the deck for said favorites' because it knows that the favorites will crumble the same as anyone else if subjected to the same treatment other groups get.
And that's a big problem BECAUSE condemnation of dehumanizing yourself and others through obsessions with politics and ideology is such a major part of the game's wider themes and characterization. Particularly with Harry himself, the ultimate conclusion of his character being that whatever wacky ideal you've had him espouse was nothing more than another drug, a destructive toxin he was using to hide away from his regrets and failings. That beneath it all, he's not a mighty revolutionary or ultraliberal or mad prophet or super-cop or whatever; he's just a man, a particularly pathetic one at that, and his attempts to pretend otherwise are making him even more of a wreckage. And you're shown again and again what the ending for people like Harry is through people like the Deserter and Rene; so consumed by their hollow philosophies that they at best become broken soulless shells, at worst become outright monsters that contribute nothing to their communities but more suffering, death and misery.
And thus the game is caught at this intersection. It's trying to say communism is good actually and if you disagree you just don't get it, but also a major part of it's narrative is that blind ideological zealotry is inherently destructive. And that leaves it feeling increasingly confused and undermined on both those fronts, struggling to maintain the complexities and nuances it excels at conveying and exploring. It writes itself into a corner where it says something, realizes that it may have just told on itself, and promptly backpedals in a very pitiful way.
