Disco Elysium has an incongruity that, for me, is nearly impossible to ignore: Martinaise’s story is not Harry’s story. At all. There’s a small handful of points where the two almost collide, but you’re largely left to make loose connections between the corrupt state of society and government and Harry’s fall from humanity. That would be fine, if Harry’s story was about that fall, but it kind of isn’t. And while the team behind Zero Parades: For Dead Spies might have wanted to differentiate their game from Disco as much as possible, it also very consciously corrects the latter’s biggest misstep.
In Disco Elysium, the series of catastrophes that lead Harry to wake up half-dead in a rancid hotel room is the last time his past intersects with the story of Martinaise and Revachol. His path from there takes wildly different directions, depending on your choices and how you mould his stunted personality. Whether he’s a racist, a filthy drunk, a terrible cop, a budding social worker, redeemed detective, libertarian, diehard communist — none of it matters. The forces that culminated in the murder that drags Harry to the city have absolutely nothing to do with him.
So you’re left with what feels like two distinct stories: Harry’s psycho-drama and the socio-political tragedy of everything else in Martinaise. They’re good stories! But it’s an odd divide that makes for an abrupt ending when you realize they don’t really connect. The divide is even stranger when you consider how the writing team frequently cited French novelist and diplomat Émile Zola as one of the inspirations behind Disco Elysium. Zola was kind of like a French Charles Dickens, someone who wanted to show how social, political, and economic conditions affected people’s daily lives. Disco is blatantly not that, not where Harry’s concerned anyway. He might as well be part of a different world.
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