Disco Elysium is a 2019 role-playing video game by . The game was written and designed by a team led by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz and executive producer Kaur Kender, featuring a painterly art style and music by the English band Sea Power. It was released for Windows in October 2019 and macOS in April 2020. An expanded version of the game featuring full voice acting and new content, subtitled The Final Cut, was released for consoles in 2021 alongside a free update for the PC versions. In August 2025, the game was adapted for Android.
Disco Elysium follows a troubled detective with no memory of his identity or the world around him. As he investigates a murder with a detective from another precinct, the player can piece together the protagonist's identity and discover what led him to his state. Disco Elysium is a non-traditional role-playing game featuring little combat. Instead, events are resolved through skill checks and dialogue trees using a system of 24 skills representing the protagonist's different aspects and personalities, each of which can speak directly to the player to influence their decisions. The game is based on a tabletop role-playing game setting that Kurvitz had created before forming in 2016 to adapt it into a video game. This is the second time the Elysium setting is explored, following the 2013 novel Sacred and Terrible Air.
Disco Elysium received critical acclaim upon its release, winning numerous awards, notably at the Game Awards 2019 (Best Independent Game, Best Narrative, Best Role Playing Game, Fresh Indie Game). It has sold more than five million copies, and is regarded by some critics as one of the greatest video games of all time, and a strong example of video games as an art form. Though a success, conflicts at around 2021 led several of the lead developers and writers, including Kurvitz and Kender, to leave and form their own studios. released Zero Parades: For Dead Spies in May 2026, a game in the same style as Disco Elysium, while as of October 2024, at least four different studios employing former staff had announced projects to develop spiritual successors to Disco Elysium.
Gameplay
Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game that features an open world and dialogue-heavy gameplay mechanics. The game is presented in an isometric perspective in which the player character is controlled. The player takes the role of a detective, who suffers from alcohol and drug-induced amnesia, on a murder case. The player can move the detective about the screen to interact with non-player characters (NPC) and highlighted objects or move onto other screens. Early in the game, the player gains a partner, Kim Kitsuragi, another detective who acts as the protagonist's voice of professionalism and who offers advice or support in certain dialogue options.
The gameplay features no combat in the traditional sense; instead, combat is handled through skill checks and dialogue trees. There are four primary attributes in the game: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Each attribute has six distinct secondary skills for a total of 24, which the player can improve through skill points earned from levelling up. Upgrading these skills helps the player character pass skill checks, which are based on a random roll of two six-sided dice, but potentially result in negative effects and character quirks, discouraging minmaxing. For instance, a player character with high Drama may be able to detect and fabricate lies effectively, but may also become prone to hysterics and paranoia. Likewise, high Electrochemistry shields the player character from the negative effects of drugs and provides knowledge on them, but may also lead to substance abuse and other self-destructive, self-gratifying behaviours. The choice of clothing that the player equips on the player-character can also impart both positive and negative effects on certain skills.
Disco Elysium features a secondary skill system known as the "Thought Cabinet". Thoughts are unlocked through conversations with other characters and internal dialogues within the protagonist's mind. The player is then able to "internalize" a thought through a certain amount of in-game hours, which, once completed, grants the player character benefits but also occasionally negative effects, a concept that compared to the trait system used in the Fallout series. A limited number of slots are available in the Thought Cabinet at the start, though more can be gained with experience levels. For example, an early possible option for the Thought Cabinet is the "Hobocop" thought, in which the character ponders the option of living on the streets to save money, which reduces the character's composure with other NPCs while the thought is being internalized. When the character has completed the Hobocop thought, it allows the player to receive twice as much money from collecting and recycling trash. Later, the player may opt to spend a skill point to "forget" completed thoughts to make space for different ones. This removes it from the Thought Cabinet for the rest of the playthrough, along with any bonuses gained from its completion.
The 24 skills also play into the dialogue trees, creating a situation where the player-character may have internal debates with one or more aspects of either mind or body, creating the idea that the player is communicating with a fragmented persona. These internal conversations may provide suggestions or additional insight that can guide the player into actions or dialogue with the game's non-playable characters, depending on the skill points invested into the skill. For example, Inland Empire, a subskill of Psyche, is described by as a representation of the intensity of the soul, and may come into situations where the player-character may need to pass themselves off under a fake identity with the conviction behind that stance, should the player accept this suggestion when debating with Inland Empire.
Synopsis
Setting
Disco Elysium takes place in the fictional world of Elysium, developed by Kurvitz and his team in the years prior, which includes over six thousand years of history; the genre is described as "fantastic realism". The narrative was constructed with attention to Karl Marx's theory of history, which posits that the material production of life directly conditions the political, artistic, religious, and philosophical superstructure of society in itself.
The game takes place in the year '51 of the Current Century. Elysium is made of "isolas", masses of land and sea that are separated from each other by the Pale, an inscrutable, mist-like "connective tissue" in which the laws of reality break down. Prolonged exposure to the Pale can cause mental instability and eventually death, and traversing the Pale, which is typically done with aerostatics, is heavily regulated due to the danger.
Events in the game take place in the impoverished district of Martinaise within the city of Revachol on the isola of Insulinde, the "New New World". Forty-nine years before the events of the game, a wave of communist revolutions swept multiple countries; the Suzerainty of Revachol, a monarchy that up to that point had been Elysium's pre-eminent superpower, was overthrown and replaced by a commune. Six years later, the Commune of Revachol was toppled by an invading alliance of moralist-capitalist nations called "the Coalition". Revachol was designated a Special Administrative Region and remains firmly under Coalition control decades later. One of the few governmental responsibilities that the Coalition concedes to the people of Revachol is policing, which is carried out by the Revachol Citizens Militia (RCM), a voluntary citizens' brigade turned semi-professional police force.
Plot The player character wakes up in a trashed hostel room in Martinaise with a severe hangover and no memory of his own identity due to an ostensible extreme case of drug-induced amnesia. He meets Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, who informs him that they have been assigned to investigate the death of a hanged man in an empty lot behind the hostel. The victim's identity is unclear and initial analysis of the scene indicates that he was lynched by a group of people. The detectives explore the rest of the district, following up on leads while helping residents with a variety of tasks. In the course of the investigation, the player character learns that he is a decorated RCM detective, Lieutenant Harrier "Harry" Du Bois. Harry experienced an event several years ago that began a midlife crisis, and on the night he was assigned to the hanged man case, he snapped and embarked on a self-destructive three-day drinking spree around Martinaise. When the player goes to bed on the first night in-game, Harry has a nightmare where he discovers himself as the hanged man underneath a disco ball. When he talks to his own dead body, it tells him that everything is hopeless and he will inevitably fail to solve the case or put his life back together.
Harry and Kim discover the hanged man killing is connected to an ongoing strike by the Martinaise dockworkers' union against the Wild Pines Group, a major logistics corporation. They interview union boss Evrart Claire and Wild Pines negotiator Joyce Messier. Joyce reveals that the hanged man was Colonel Ellis "Lely" Kortenaer, the commander of a squad of mercenaries sent by Wild Pines to break the strike. She warns that the rest of the mercenaries have gone rogue and will likely seek retribution for Lely's death.
Harry and Kim discover that Lely was killed before the hanging, and the Hardie Boys, a group of dockworker vigilantes who act as the de facto peacekeepers of Martinaise, claim responsibility for the murder. They assert that Lely attempted to rape a hostel guest named Klaasje. When questioned, Klaasje reveals that Lely was shot in the mouth while the two were having consensual sex. Unable to figure out the origin of the bullet and fearful of the authorities due to her past as a corporate spy, Klaasje enlisted the help of a union sympathiser named Ruby, who staged Lely's hanging with the rest of the Hardie Boys. The detectives find Ruby hiding in an abandoned building, where she incapacitates them with a radio wave-based device normally used to aid in traversing the Pale. She claims that the cover-up was Klaasje's idea and has no idea who shot Lely. Harry manages to overcome the Pale device and contemplates arresting Ruby, but she believes Harry to be a corrupt cop and either escapes or kills herself, depending on the player's skills and choices.
Returning to their hostel, the detectives intercede in a standoff between the rogue mercenaries and the Hardie Boys. A firefight breaks out and Harry is wounded, leaving him unconscious for several days. Depending on the player's actions, none, some, or all of the Hardie Boys and mercenaries may die, and Kim may also be hospitalized, in which case street urchin Cuno offers to take his place as Harry's partner. The detectives chase down their remaining leads and determine that the shot that killed Lely came from an old fortress on an islet just off of Martinaise's shoreline.