Disco Elysium: Existential Reflection within Crisis

This paper examines Disco Elysium, the Estonian role-playing game developed by ZA/UM and released in 2019, as a case study in how digital games can facilitate existential reflection on crisis, agency, failure, and identity. Its central argument is that the game, through its surrealist aesthetics, dialogue-driven narrative, and chance-based skill mechanics, invites players to construct meaning amid moral and socio-political disorder, and that this design intention is substantively realized in player engagement. The author positions the game within an Anthropocene context shaped by climate collapse, inequality, and neoliberal pressures, framing games as tools for understanding these anxieties.

The methodology combines a critical playthrough with textual analysis of aesthetics, narrative, and mechanics, alongside inductive thematic analysis of six developer interview transcripts and 100 posts and 904 comments from the r/DiscoElysium subreddit. Developer interviews yielded four core design priorities: social and political context, emotions, freedom, and mistakes and ownership. Among player discussions, the most prominent themes were world context (60 mentions), skills progression (41), finding yourself (37), and emotions (24), with players frequently debating ideologically distinct playthroughs and the game's treatment of racism, fascism, and capitalism.

The study concludes that developers and players converged in their understanding of failure and freedom of choice, suggesting the game's intended morally ambiguous, existentially charged experience was largely conveyed to its audience. The author argues that the work contributes to scholarship connecting narrative, ontology, and ethics, and proposes further research into how intersectional identities are procedurally and aesthetically mediated within value-laden games.