Disco Elysium, Roleplaying Heaven | Sophie From Mars

[Music] i would often go there joe the tiny church there the smallest church in san san though it once was larger neo-reactionary basilisk by elizabeth sandofa begins with the line let us assume that we are [ __ ] the esco elysium takes more or less the same approach to politics there aren't easy answers and if there are answers easy or not we just don't really have them right now so sometimes the best thing you can do is just really accurately represent the current dumpster-fire state of things sometimes the best thing you can do is just take stock of what's going on around you in disco elysium you can have your character play as a self-identified communist actively championing the working class and telling people about class warfare and the oppression by the bourgeoisie but the game doesn't pretend that you as an individual can seriously do anything to change the politics of the world you're in in fact you don't meet another self-identified communist for the whole entire game until right at the end when you find an old man alone on an island you haven't seen another communist the whole game and he hasn't seen one for 40 years and when you tell him you're one does he welcome you into comradeship and solidarity with open arms of course not he calls you a liberal [Music] pedophile there are some big problems with rpgs as a genre right now i'm spinning my big prices right wheel of serious problems that need attention and wow would you look at that it's landed on developers don't know what makes rpgs good so they keep making action games instead this is a many-faceted issue and it's about video game genres which is a messy topic at the best of times so strap into your gamer harness my dudes it's time for some serious discussion in rpgs like fallout 4 vampire masquerade bloodlines cyberpunk 2077 or the witcher there can be a bit of an odd problem with genre and tone in fact there's tonal whiplash so common we don't even notice it anymore where games will just be rpgs right up until combat starts and then become first person shooters and pretend like nothing changed or in which a first person stabbers and vampire masquerade first persons suck even more than that games like fallout 3 or 4 are first-person shooters first and foremost and the actual plot of the game let alone interesting engaging role playing is something you encounter from time to time if you're lucky in between vault dweller 69's murder mayhem extravaganza here's a way to think about it consider the statement cyberpunk 2077 is a hacking game feels intuitively wrong right that's because in 2077 hacking is not something you spend most of your time doing and the narrative is not communicated to you in and around the hacking mechanic okay try cyberpunk 2077 is a driving game makes a lot more sense you spend an enormous amount of the game driving or buying cars to do more driving and a lot of the story happens in cars actually this statement also just makes cyberpunk's utter inability to put up even basic driving mechanics a lot funnier if you're getting the gist here consider a slightly wonky example red dead redemption is a horse riding game this one is a little odd not just because of the branding disparity but also because of a dissonance between where the story happens and what you spend your time doing let's look at a positive example pokemon is an animal catching and battling game this is laughably true you spend all your time in pokemon catching and battling pokemon where you go and how you get there and what happens when you arrive is all dictated by pokemon catching and pokemon battling practically everybody in the world only wants to talk to you about one thing pokemon pokemon is a pokemon game sounds really silly but in this exercise it's actually the best way to say it they designed a pokemon who canonically created the universe which is such a walking existential crisis of a piece of game lore through special nintendo events you can catch him god is dead and we taught him solar beams so here's a place where there's a fantastic synergy between gameplay narrative and genre disco elysium is a detective rpg everything you do is in service of solving mysteries right from the start but you're wondering sophie if this game is so communist how do they resolve the fact that you play as a cop and actually they resolve it quite elegantly by making harry a massive piece of [ __ ] the first mystery is who you are and as a sub mystery what you spent the last few days doing and the short answer is harry you worthless goddamn piece of [ __ ] the second mystery as you slowly come to terms with the damage you've done to the hotel the money you owe how badly you're failing to perform your duties as a police officer is the body hanging from the tree behind the hotel harry's been drinking and partying and [ __ ] around instead of dealing with this dead body right outside his room for a full week that's the back foot you start up the game on that feeling of anxiety a failing at something you had no control over and weren't even there for right at the start of the game wow holy [ __ ] we should talk about how to start rpgs and generally tell those stories and why disco elysium does it so well but first i just want to fawn over the absolute genius of this character the player's experience struggling against the decisions harry has made and wants to make is actually absolutely identical to the character's own experience everything he's done every part of him is an obstacle in the way of his mission and his personal growth you might not sympathize with him harry you worthless goddamn but you do understand him implicitly it's powerful stuff the first voice you hear in the game is harry's ancient reptilian brain and then his limbic system there is nothing only warm primordial blackness your conscious for mancini no larger than a single grain of malt you don't have to do anything anymore harry is clearly unwell he drinks a lot and he has to put it mildly impulse control issues he has really upsetting and oftentimes offensive intrusive thoughts like if you've made harry racist and fail a check to convince kim to dance harry calls him a yellow monkey [ __ ] and it's just harry you worthless goddamn piece of [ __ ] harry is a compelling character portrayed in a compelling way and i'll try to separate them out the way i'm trying to separate out what this game is saying from the ingenious ways it says it disco elysium is in one way like bojack horseman it centers around this personal struggle we can all understand bojack is a hollywood celebrity someone who has everything and no excuse to be the way he is as todd puts it to bojack devastatingly you can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay you need to be better all the dialogue that comes close to harry actually trying to improve in disco elysium is actually him just feeling sorry for himself this is how they let you define the character but still keep a strong sense of who he is conversely to bojack harry has a million excuses i mean even if you make him a communist he can repeatedly blame everything wrong with him on society on like the system man and it's not that he's wrong but also he's not gonna change the system so he should just kind of get his [ __ ] together it's a really novel experience and unlike any other video game experience i've had like when harry finds out that the other resident of the hotel has been raped because harry feels guilty for existing and has lost his memory he tells kim i didn't rape her to which kim says did you rape her no then don't ever say that again harry's intrusive thoughts are just breathtakingly awful like man why the [ __ ] would you ever say that the first rpg i've played where exhausting all the dialogue options is actively bad because some of the options are just just harry you worthless goddamn piece it's in this way that disco elysium has the courage to do the things it actually exists to do to tell the story it's there to tell rather than just pursuing the abstract notion of choice which more than anything else is what's ruined the modern rpg if you exhaust all the dialogue options and choose to both tell the postbox it's a good postbox and give it a little pat and kick the post box you've just made your own experience meaningless in a really tangible way the game even puts in a door you can't open that you can try and try and try until kim tells you yeah there are just some doors you can't open let's think about how to start an rpg then often rpgs start with a character creator or else they introduce the player to a pre-written character as whom they're going to play on first blush one of these the latter might seem inherently better for telling a story whereas the former technically gives the player more freedom but will result in a more shallow character and story but i think this is a misconception and i think it comes from a failure to grasp what makes rpgs fun let's look at some examples fallout 3 starts with a character creator but then the player is shoehorned into a boring story trailing from location to location in search of a more interesting character you don't meet until later fallout 4 starts with a character creator but then the player is shoehorned into a boring story trailing from ok but for new vegas doesn't start with a character creator it starts with your character being murdered this means you're going into the character creation process with an idea of who you're going to be playing as and while you have the same technical freedom you now have all these interesting decisions to make should you follow the guy who murdered you for revenge or perhaps more narratively boldly do you not even care about that even answering this first basic question is defining you as a character in cdpr's witcher series you play as geraldo riviera and while you have some control over his choices they always reflect a strong core character in witcher 1 you open up the game having lost your memory in witcher 2 you start in a jail cell and have to explain through flashbacks how you got there witcher 3 even though it's the best game has the least engaging opening because it just plonks you into the world assuming you already understand the lore and the character and then gives you five hours of tutorials it's probably a testament to how fun the gameplay is and how well written the main story and characters are that people usually forget about the really really really boring start and talk about witcher 3 with such zealous positivity so my point here is that pre-written versus character creator does not inherently shape how interesting an rpg is there are boring and interesting ways to do both to put it another way your character is not created in the character creator disco elysium is engaging because of the story and the questions the story asks you to answer about your character they even implemented a mechanic to reflect the way your decisions shape your character as the story progresses it's called your copotype if you keep trying to apologize for the bad things harry did you're a sorry cop if you keep seeking out the party wherever you can find it you're a superstar cop etc most people get sorry cop right away because of how badly harry has [ __ ] up and how much they want to apologize for it a lot of rpgs are based on ttrpgs that's tabletop role-playing games like dungeons and dragons except d d is the example everyone uses but most people prefer playing more interesting ttrpgs with less racism and rules human beings can follow for example i play a game called monster of the week with some friends the basic premise being that your characters are in a monster of the week style show like buffy or x-files ttrpgs generally but not always involve a group of people collectively telling a story bound by certain game mechanics and rules skill checks like you experience in video game rpgs are decided by rolling dice games like monster of the week cyberpunk or yes dungeons and dragons have one member of the group act as the game master the person who's essentially telling all the rest of the story that the player characters don't decide the title sounds really grandiose but it's more like you're putting on a play and one person has to play all the bit parts i bring this up because vtmb and cyberpunk are adaptations of specific ttrpgs but disco elysium feels like an adaptation of the concept of the dtrpg the game is really self-conscious about this too not just in the dice roll skill checks but there's an abandoned office in the doomed industrial block that used to house a game company if you grew up with pokemon you're probably familiar with devs putting themselves in the game but zaom's developer office in the game is a ttrpg designer that went bust because they were too ambitious which is both charming and darkly funny where it really shows obviously is the gameplay itself disco elysium feels like playing a game gm'd by a very smart and funny friend who knows what you like let's look at an example one of the first big obstacles in the game is the harbour gate which is locked and guarded by a huge muscular racist nobody betrays your degeneracy yeah measure head his body totally betrays his degeneracy measure head is quite a character and we'll get back to him this is really funny to me because a big heavy locked door is possibly the most textbook trap gm's will set for players it's a classic it asks players to examine how they approach problems is there a riddle to solve can you batter the door down can you figure out where the key is have you tried pulling instead of pushing the same reflection of the player is going on here only measurehead can give or deny you access to the harbour measurehead is a bodybuilder hyper racist with tattoos all over his face and body to show off his superior phrenology and anatomy i love that this game opens like this just mocking racists and fascists right to their faces in another game you would be this huge muscle punch man and your deep moral choices would be whether you become a fascist or try and help people instead you're this sad alcoholic trying to scrape his life back together after a meltdown and this racist calls you a degenerate and a gay measure head isn't a white supremacist by the way he isn't even white his whole shtick is how the white race is degenerating and his race is going to gain supremacy there's a check here where you can make harry subscribe to measure head's superior race theory and good lord luigi is this funny scene if you ask to learn about racism from measurehead he teaches you all about the races of the world from his perspective this is probably one of the early times in the game you realize disco elysium takes place in a world like ours but with totally alternate history measure head will tell you about how the occidental western races are generally superior except for the mourn and if you ask for an explanation a receding genetic pool has led the moon on reprehensible street parades in mourn cities like stardscanal and redafort wearing wooden clogs on their feet and little green tassels on their hats they ask you how you are you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine but you just can't get into it because they would never understand measurehead is a bodybuilder because in his own words most racists are not good examples of their race which is also in the game demonstrably true the white racists you meet are pretty disgusting and if you choose to make harry a racist he's not exactly peak male performance the way is to get past measure head are both measures ha of the character you're forming harry into one is to subscribe to his race theory which considering you're a white man with an asian partner in a racially integrated world it won't hold you back personally but it is gonna sabotage your relationships and make harry an even more worthless piece of [ __ ] also it costs a skill point to forget internalized thoughts like this so a lot of players will probably just carry on not realizing they've made harry permanently racist the other way to get past measure head is to successfully beat him in a fight which is a really hard check to pass i mean look at him look at you it doesn't make any sense but that's what's so great about it and this is what i mean about disco elysium being rpgs done right it's not likely it doesn't make any sense so if you do it you have to do it spectacularly they're really giving you the thrill of rolling a nat 20 here when you luck out and manage to punch this seminy's giant and even better it only works if you follow up by 360 spin kicking him in the face harry's partner kim is one of those characters who's obviously going to be a fan favorite as soon as you meet him i'd appreciate it if you didn't force us into situations where i may have to shoot random civilians because that won't get us anywhere of the too pure for this world variety it kind of has to be for the design of the game to be fair harry can be a lot of things and a lot of them are very offensive and troubling so the character of his partner has to have the patience of a saint to counter it but it also makes sense for him in order to just live in the world when you meet a racist trucker in ravishol who tells kim welcome to ravishol in that way you've heard from a million tedious boomers who think they're being so [ __ ] clever when they say they identify as an attack helicopter or they ask someone where they're really from or but kim's attitude in dealing with him is just jog on [ __ ] it's great don't you welcome to reverse me and after you deal with measure head you can talk to kim and compare him to the trucker whether you say i like this racist better or i think the last racist was better kim tells you i think the next racist will be the really good one how do you know there'll be another racist there's always another racist and you know what he's [ __ ] right gary the crypto fascist yes gary the crypto fascist really is the pinnacle so to backtrack if you meet the cryptozoologist a person who hunts for cryptids out in the western half of the map you can accept a long quest where you have to check all the traps he's set to catch the insulindian phasmid the insulin indian phasma you learn according to this man who hunts bigfoot and mothmans is a huge invisible stick insect that lives in reversal spending a bunch of time running around on the beach looking for nets that may or may not be full of locusts finding out one was empty figuring out what happened to it investigating and disappointingly finding out it was sabotaged by kuno the gobshite junkie kid you meet throwing rocks at a corpse kono's like who knows that komo doesn't give a [ __ ] about anything it's a great quest because it just drives this feeling of absurdity and futility so hard it's the imagine sisyphus happy of the game you're looking for this stupid giant stick insect you surely must know doesn't exist everyone tells you it doesn't exist and no matter how many times you choose the contrary dialogue option you slowly have to realize it doesn't exist and what are you rewarded with after all of this gary the [ __ ] crypto fascist the cryptozoologist's friend gary is labeled gary the crypto fascist and he's an openly racist little turd the moment he meets kim if you salvaged a mug with a racist caricature in it from the dumpster earlier you can ask him if it's his and he finds this just [ __ ] hilarious [ __ ] gary i hope his parlor account gets hacked i've just spent an hour hunting down these traps looking for the phasma and dealing with that little ginger [ __ ] weasel kuno and persevering on for the dream of seeing this crypted and what do i get instead gary perfect gary is the punchline at the end of this long joke you chose to believe there was something more in the world something magical and exciting and special and what you get instead is this racist the most tedious and banal kind of evil you finally have to accept that the phasmid doesn't exist because the cryptozoologist wife is tired of being dragged out to these far-flung places and left behind in the hotel while he goes out in the cold setting traps for a [ __ ] stick insect it's brutal and it's really [ __ ] good and then at the end of the game if you've completed this side quest disco elysium's approach to rpgs is so refreshing and excellent it's changed both the way i want to make video games myself and the way i play ttrpgs i've gone back to ttrpgs differently because of it i've been playing solo scenes with the players in my monster of the week group to understand their characters better because what disco elysium is doing is exactly the same thing with you the design of the story the quests and side quests is this fantastically symmetrical storytelling where whatever you choose determines what will be meaningful to you in the late game which they then exploit to bring home their messaging if you play the phasma quest you see the phasmid at the end and that's meaningful because of the cryptozoologist and the crypto fascist and kim it's a far cry from letting you choose to be a fascist neo-roman cosplayer and see uh if you choose to be the fascist then uh it's bad because uh wait did we forget to put any consequences in for being a fascist oh god oh [ __ ] is that game actually about anything disco elysium on the other hand mocks you for being a racist or a fascist it makes fun of you for those bad choices and punishes you by harming your character relationships it's openly hostile to you the commenter typing right now that i don't understand caesar disco elysium has an achievement for defending the political center seven times called the world's most laughable centrist [ __ ] i love this game when you meet the phasmid if you've done the right things to prepare you and pass the right checks you can talk to it like properly hang out and philosophize with this big magic bug about what it's like being a big bug and how it feels about the world and how it feels about you i know this seems kind of odd but i think part of the reason i keep thinking about pokemon around this game was the core message here with the phasmid that human struggle in all its futility is always foregrounded while in the background our existence on this planet is destroying our vibrant beautiful and diverse ecosystem there's so much to this game even with how much i'm going into in this video i haven't even had time to process my thoughts about the scientist who's exploring a tiny hole in the universe or the tragic depictions of addicts and alcoholics and the mentally ill and i really haven't given my powerful king kuno the time he deserves [ __ ] this i'm still excited to play more and dive into the mysteries this game has and i haven't even touched a bunch of them and in march they're bringing out even more the final cut is going to have fully voiced lines and more political choices and just more god i'm going to be playing this game forever aren't i even safe scumming my first playthrough didn't ruin anything let me explain a bit more save scumming the practice of reloading your save to try something over and over in a game until you win at it is generally ridiculed in the gaming community hence the scum in the name but what if you treated save scummers like normal people okay no i mean it's it's pretty universally looked down on because well it's cheating right you're cheating the game and when you cheat the game you're not just cheating yourself but cheat what your country can do for wait how does it go but confession time i save scum a lot like a lot a lot like there are only so many hours in a day and i talk about games for a living and i want to get through games to see what they're about and i know that most of the time if i fail at something i just don't get to progress generally speaking games will leverage more content against no content and i'm a big stupid gamer baby i want the content give me the content i'm a big baby wow in most games when you win you get something and when you lose you get nothing but disco elysium has something it wants to say so it doesn't need to incentivize you to win like that when you win you get content and when you lose you get content probably the first game i've gotten to the end of a play through save scumming to get all the best outcomes and gone [ __ ] yeah i really want to know what happens when i [ __ ] up because all the failures are so entertaining and meaningful it also makes it more meaningful when the game tells you no like the door that doesn't open or when you read a postcard from harry's ex-girlfriend and harry just [ __ ] dies if you try to keep reading that's [ __ ] good as hell you could be killed by a postcard you can also be killed by a [ __ ] chair okay hang on let me explain that one health in disco elysium isn't like in other games in other games your hp isn't diegetically explained it's just a generic health bar which can be diminished as you are shot repeatedly or diminished entirely because you thought about a casador one time but this general system can swing between as plausible a possibility as you've been shot multiple times you probably bled out and as ridiculous as you've been shot in the head multiple times but don't worry buddy it's all chill you're fine you rule in disco elysium health is directly tied to harry's feeble heart when you hit zero health for any reason harry has a heart attack and dies which means if you have one health when you go to meet everett he insists you sit on an absurdly uncomfortable chair so uncomfortable you take one health damage and the chair can [ __ ] kill you ah geez i haven't even mentioned everett claire okay we're getting into the real serious spoilers territory this is a mystery solving game so i mean this part i'm about to give a lot away everett is the dabages union boss who is leading the strike which has the harbor closed his union guys hanged but didn't kill the hanged man you're here to investigate everett is a fascinating character and not just because he's secretly two people oh yeah everett and his twin brother edgar pretend to be the same person and they even switch out between meetings and there's only a small tell for which is which the person you meet at the dame of the mystery explains how edgar is the real brains behind the operation he went to university and he's a social democrat with a big plan for how to evict the wild pines corporation from ravishol and if you talk to edgar or it's probably edgar anyway if you talk to him he tells you his plan how he engineered the strike and used the murder to stoke up tensions because he's going to liberate martinez to create an autonomous workers state which is pretty [ __ ] cool except everett and or edgar is the most untrustworthy person you've ever met so i just love how inscrutable he is he's always one step ahead and always up to something and you just have the feeling you never quite know what he wants or what he's planning the game gives you an option to ask everett why he's so fat which harry you worthless goddamn actually this is a really clever line because people read fat people as greedy selfish often dishonest or lacking in integrity and self-control and no fat people are just fat everett has diabetes which is what he'll tell you if you ask which is kind of great because it really makes you realize how much you fell for this aesthetic prejudice but you still can't trust him at all everett's one of the most fun characters to talk to because you simply never know where you stand with him when he acts like he's brazenly using you as a pawn you feel like you might be cooperating with this and when he treats you like an equal he's probably just using you as a pawn but you can't tell speaking of speaking rpgs have a speech problem i.e if you don't put all your points into speech you're a [ __ ] idiot no seriously this is another really strong place disco elysium excels compared to other rpgs the real issue here is obviously a design one while it seems obvious enough you should have a variety of stats for various things including speech really it's like if your car had seven different stats and one of them was wheels wait number of wheels size grip no wheels disco elysium just fully embraces this and acknowledges that most role playing is going to be through speech of harry's 24 stats 13 of them directly relate to how you interact with other characters and what dialogue options you get 10 are about your physical abilities but can still affect speech and then there's shivers which is just a [ __ ] fantastic mechanic for an rpg if you listen to one of harry's shivers thoughts you get a long interaction giving you detailed flavor text about the world about harry's surroundings or something that happened in the past or something really far away that he's thinking about or just something he doesn't have a rightful way of knowing or understanding in my monster of the week game actually wait you know what just [ __ ] play ttrpgs they're good as hell you get together with some friends or you make a new group of friends and you create these characters and then through the wonderful story that you're telling together you become fans of those characters and that's an incredible feeling it's great and if that isn't enough remember if you're the gm you can use those stories to push communist propaganda on your friends because friends don't let friends be scabs okay if we pass the spoiler warning rapid fire moments i loved in the game you can roll to teleport up a ladder and if you succeed there's a cool sound effect but then kim tells you that you just climbed the ladder with your eyes closed you can roll to whistle and if you fail it you just blow spit everywhere ruby's sci-fi radio noise weapon the dice maker obviously because gtrpgs but also because shiny tasty pebbles make goblin brain happy why did i think dropping all my dice on the floor would be a good shot this is a terrible idea whole dream sequence this [ __ ] this bit [Music] oh meeting the skulls gang members who are trying to steal kim's fuel and they have custom jackets that say [ __ ] the world and piss fat and with the right dialogue you can convince the punks to give you their jackets but even though kim humored you earlier in the conversation he won't wear one because of course he won't that would be [ __ ] ridiculous this is what i mean they choose to limit the player in some ways that make the characters and story stronger it's really cool anyway that's why harry is wearing this jacket that says piss back in a lot of my footage at the end of the mystery after the strikers and the company pinkertons have had their shootout and you know that the union boys didn't kill the victim they just staged the hanging you only finally get to actually solve the murder after everything else has already played out and it brings you to the island and to the deserter this is the old communist who hasn't seen another communist in decades he's been living on an island watching everyone through his sniper scope and seething with bitterness he was part of the communist revolution that took place in ravishol a long time ago and he was the only surviving member of his force still at war with the world he never gave up he just stayed and rotted it feels so perfect in this game defined by struggle personal and psychological and social and systemic it turns out the guy who did it was this old man totally seized by his inability to change anything because he's utterly overwhelmed by how wrong the world is and overwhelmed by neurotoxin secreted by a giant stick insect i guess he was watching the woman in the hotel and he became obsessed with her and when he saw her with a man he murdered him in a jealous rage it was stoked on by edgar of course as the deserter puts it never trust a social democrat who quotes mas of okay it's it's marx in in the real world never trust a social democrat who quotes marx and yeah you shouldn't trust edgar or everett they're both just astonishingly untrustworthy dudes it's pretty much the only single thing you can be certain about with them but the deserter did the murder for his own reasons just like every time you talked to edgar or everett he's been manipulated but he also did things of his own accord which is the worst way you can get manipulated you haven't seen another communist the whole game and he hasn't seen one in 40 years and when you tell him you're a communist does he welcome you into comradeship and solidarity with open arms of course not he calls you a liberal pedophile you can also appeal to him by picking the most misogynistic dialogue options this old man poisoned by bug farts and sexism is probably the funniest and best depiction i've ever seen of the full revolution or nothing types on the left who think they're better than anyone else's answers or ideas for all that he understands he also understands nothing you just want to scream at him not everyone's a [ __ ] liberal pedophile get a grip god damn in short the deserter isn't wrong it [ __ ] whips that he's just brazenly like the bourgeoisie human or capital has to take off its mask of humanity to kill everyone it's not that he's wrong it's just that he's a useless old in-cell on an island huffing insect fumes and losing his mind most of all he's a perfect oxymoron he's cut himself off from everyone because he thinks he has the answers society needs that no one else does he's literally a communist on an island it's great that instead of positioning him as ideologically wrong or useless it's really clear what he's doing wrong it's not his radical beliefs that are wrong it's being an old insult on island watching women through a telescope and thinking you're smarter than everyone throughout the game there's this theme of suicidal ideation it literally opens with harry's id tempting him to just give up and not exist anymore there is nothing only warm primordial blackness your conscious for mencini no larger than a single grain of malt you don't have to do anything anymore ever never ever the city of ravishol had a communist revolution and it was crushed and now it feels going around the city like it's in a waking dream it feels like the afterlife the whole world around harry reflects this feeling and on the first night after you see the dead body harry has this dream where he is the hanged man do you remember the scent of your childhood you're not kidding anyone harry you don't remember [ __ ] tell me do you remember your wife's hand on your face he's [ __ ] up so badly and so much that he just doesn't want to exist anymore i think that's something we can all relate to like when i watch the first draft of this video haha kill me this is why the game is called disco elysium a direct juxtaposition to disco inferno elysium is the ancient greek equivalent of heaven the afterlife noble and deserving heroes get to go to that's the suicidal ideation it's wishing your life could just be over so you don't have any more chances to [ __ ] it up this is where i compared it to bojack horseman earlier that's what the morbid tone of things like bojack horsemen or mad men or disco elysium are trying to tell us this kind of apparent catastrophizing imagining what should be the worst possible thing is actually an escapist fantasy because what's really scary is putting the work in wait no this video can't just have the same message as the pickle rick episode [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] but what the game tells us with harry with the whole of reversal with the old communist on the island is that you've got to stop losing yourself in a depressive fantasy and actually put in that work you can't be a communist on an island you can't drink yourself into oblivion because you don't want to be a cop anymore you can't just delete your youtube channel because you feel like your script doesn't have a clear ending point and if you don't get this video you won't have released anything for january and it feels easier to just give up you have to put in the work and improve things the old communist on the island is harry and harry is all of us sure man never trust a sock dem who quotes marx it's all the system it's the counter revolutionary's fault it's the liberal pederast army fine fine fine but you're just an old incel on an island watching people through a telescope and huffing bug farts at least everett is building a free revish hole there's no excuse or there's a million excuses or whatever it doesn't matter the only thing that matters is that we've just got to get our [ __ ] together harry you worthless goddamn piece of [Music] [ __ ] [Music] i'd like to thank molly noyes who makes the incredible music for my videos my patrons who make this all possible and you the viewer for watching all the way to the end if you'd like to support the channel you can become a patron at patreon.comcuriovids and get both bonus content and early access to videos for two dollars or more than two dollars this video was an experience to make the game is incredibly complicated and just making the script took playing and replaying and playing again and then when the video was finally done i was super unhappy with it and had to cut bits out and write a whole new section and still there are loads of things i'd love to talk about with disco elysium i can see this game being a game i can come back to a lot and write more videos about though so that's okay i hope everyone's doing good and i'm looking forward to doing a lot of upcoming projects this year right after this i'm doing a video about pokemon i've got loads of episodes of monster men planned i'm doing something about cyberpunk and also natalie and i just started planning our first game which is really exciting anyway happy new year everyone let's get our [ __ ] together see you next time bye for now [Music] oh [Music] want to be free [Music] oh you

Channel: Sophie from Mars

Views: 117,496

Keywords: disco elysum, goty, zaum, rpg, ttrpg, d&d, monster of the week, motw, cyberpunk, fallout, new vegas, vtmb, vampire the masquerade

Id: zY8nfRjTGUQ

Length: 39min 24sec (2364 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021