Disco Elysium

By D.C.

You awake in the dim light of early morning; the sky outside is white as clay. Consciousness returns grudgingly, piece by piece. You feel hazy. A voice somewhere deep inside advises you to remain asleep, to stay safely oblivious. Another, sharper and more insistent, demands answers: Who are you ? Why are you here ? And why does your mind feel crowded ?

In Disco Elysium, a video game developed by Estonian independent studio ZA/UM, you step into a fractured, hungover detective stumbling around the blighted city of Revachol. Soon, you will have to move; to act; to ask questions and tie loose ends together – including the loose ends of your psyche, frayed at the seams, and of your tie, currently moving in circles, hung from the ceiling fan. You don’t feel strong enough to catch it as it goes round and round; you barely stand on your feet.

Officially, you are here to solve a murder; but you will learn about this only gradually, through the medium of conversations between you and the carousel of personalities that populate this forgotten city, on the small island of Le Caillou, in the Insulindian Isola. But more importantly, you will have to navigate a polyphony of competing internal voices that serve as both your guide and antagonist. They shape you, challenge you, mock your decisions, and illuminate paths you would rather avoid.

At first sight, the murder is not very complicated to figure out. Soon enough, a posse of dockyard workers, on strike, will admit to it freely, and dare you to arrest them. Yet you feel that things are not always as they seem. A murder is not just a murder; it is also a fitting end for a hardened, brutal mercenary, but not just that; a tragedy for the political refugee that grew fond of the victim (Ah ! Miss *Teen* Oranje '37 !), but not just that; a vignette from a political farce you haven’t yet understood, a skirmish in an ideological war everyone lost long ago, but maybe not just that; maybe, maybe, it is simply what keeps you moving forward.

You are, indeed, about to move. You don’t know if you want to, but that’s what people do: they move; they find their clothes scattered haphazardly across stained carpets; they leave trashed hotel rooms behind; and, yes, they step into daylight, ready to deal with whatever they have to deal with. Surely you should do that too. You feel certain, somehow, that this is the script you must follow, the path laid out for you – your own agency neatly constrained by invisible hands presenting you with an open menu of choices.

INLAND EMPIRE: So many masks for you to wear. But listen closely – sometimes the masks begin to whisper their own lines, hungry for the stage_._

You stand up, uncertain. The room is moving around you, but you steady yourself. You have no idea what’s waiting for you out there – but you move toward it, one hesitant step at a time.

I – Art

Art is about many things, but one of these is representation. The Naturalists of the 19th century wanted to get as close as possible to the real thing, capturing life in all its gritty complexity, as faithfully as their brushes and pens allowed, warts and all. Courbet and Zola, for instance, sought truth through detail, precision, and an obsessive adherence to realism. Art also was the subject of philosophical debate: Nietzsche famously distinguished between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac – order versus chaos, reason versus instinct – putting labels on what he saw as fundamental tensions in artistic expression.

No wonder some artists embarked on a quest toward the ultimate expression – one tying everything together, a singular synthesis, the Gesamtkunstwerk.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Gesamtkunstwerk_, German for_ total work of art_, describes an artwork synthesizing multiple creative forms – music, drama, literature, visual aesthetics – into a single, coherent experience._

Richard Wagner believed passionately that, by combining drama, music, poetry, and visual spectacle, one could achieve a complete synthesis, creating a profound and immersive artistic experience. The Bayreuth Festspielhaus embodied this obsession : a theater built specifically to immerse audiences fully, hiding the orchestra, plunging the viewers into darkness, left alone with the spectacle. This was his temple of artistic control, because he was in control, handling everything himself – the libretto, the music, the arrangement.

But this demands enormous good will from the audience: you need to commit to sitting for a given duration, in a specific place. Some advice about how to enjoy The Ring is unequivocal: take a week; nay, two weeks off. Read up before, immerse yourself completely in the symbolism and the leitmotivs; build up your own theory of what’s happening on the stage. Because it’s as much about you doing the work as the work reaching out to you. If art’s meaning depends on your engagement, then you have no choice but to actively create it: you are merely provided with the stage, and must now perform your part.

Wagner may not have predicted that another media would steal a march on him as the perfect embodiment of Gesamtkunstwerk; and that’s video games.

Video games have it all: they have the plot of the dramatic art; the writing of the literary art; the graphic design of the graphical art; and the music of the musical arts. They even have, more than anything, this idea that you need to do the work, to engage for long periods of time, if you eventually wish to achieve closure (and the end-game credits).

In this context, Disco Elysium may represent the pinnacle of the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, a work where all artistic layers richly complement the storytelling, contributing to a compelling tension between a meticulously staged narrative and the player’s perceived freedom of choice.

Consider the visuals: the watercolor-like textures and impressionistic brushstrokes effortlessly evoke a location simultaneously beautiful and decaying, nostalgic yet oppressive. Set in an isometric, 2D perspective, the fixed camera and pre-rendered backgrounds allow for meticulous environmental storytelling, where every corner of Revachol seems to whisper forgotten histories and untold secrets.

The character portraits, which pop every time you strike a conversation, partake in the same style: broad strokes that may – or may not – seek to reveal the very essence of each individual. Notice how the portrait of your devoted partner, Kim, whose composure masks kindness and subtle humor, is enlightened by a saint-like aureole; or how Klaasje’s portrait, suspended between vulnerability and careful deception, has her gaze shifting enigmatically from innocence to suspicion. These portraits speak even before dialogue begins.

Kim Kitsuragi (left); Klaasje Amandou (right)

Equally evocative is the music. Some game soundtracks have become signature pieces in their own right; NieR:Automata goes around the world in orchestral concerts; Hollow Knight’s piano pieces comfortably hold their own as fine chamber music. The music of Disco Elysium, ranging from haunting and minimalist, to melancholic and baroque, manages to make you nostalgic for a time and place that never existed.

In a few startlingly self-aware moments, the game hushes itself entirely – no dialogue, no prompts – just music, the visuals, and the quiet permission to feel. One memorable sidequest in particular tasks you with transforming a sparse electronic track into something unmistakably “hardcore,” fit to play out in the old church you contributed to turn into a night-club (and, maybe, into a drug lab too). Succeed at a dice throw, and here he is, Lieutenant double-yefreitor Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, dancing in wild moves to an unexpected tune in full view of suspicious youths and your unimpressed partner.

And then there is the voice acting, astonishingly rich and nuanced. Lines are strongly delivered, filled with pauses, hesitations, humor, irony – each conversation uniquely humanized. The deep bass voice of the main narrator, in particular, fills every interaction with meaning. This is the first thing you will notice, once you pass the opening menu and attribute your character points, like a traditional RPG: a voice, disembodied, telling you that “[t]here is nothing, only warm, primordial blackness”, soon crowing that you never have to do anything else, “never ever ever ever, baby”.

II – Dialogues

But that’s a lie, because you have to act: if Revachol is the stage, your many parts consist in solving a murder, while grappling with the shards of your own identity.

This progress takes place almost entirely through an intricate dialogue system, full of options and branching paths. But what distinguishes Disco Elysium is that your lines are not merely spoken to others; a significant, perhaps defining, portion of the game unfolds as an internal colloquy with the twenty-four personified skills that populate your mind, grouped into Intellect (things such as “Logic”, “Rhetoric”, or “Drama”), Psyche (“Volition”, “Empathy”, “Authority”), Physique (“Pain Threshold”, “Electro-Chemistry”), and Motorics (“Perception”, “Reaction Speed”, “Composure”).

These skills are the primary lenses through which the player perceives and interacts with the world, their constant interjections and conflicting advice shaping a unique playing experience where you need to negotiate with your fragmented self. As you go through the game and level up, you can reinforce chosen skills, ensuring that they will take a greater role in your endeavours, and facilitating the dozens of skill checks (i.e., dice rolls) that dictate whether you can perform a given action or line of dialogue.

A “Thought Cabinet” complements this dynamic interplay of internal voices: the player can engage in a form of self-directed cognitive sculpting, by “internalizing” various thoughts over time. This cognitive fine-tuning will then solidify into permanent aspects of the detective’s personality, granting new abilities, altering skill interactions, or imposing lasting ideological frameworks.^[1]

CONCEPTUALIZATION: The mind curates itself. Each Thought hung like a painting, each frame shifting the way you see the room.

While all this sounds simple enough, it’s very easy in Disco Elysium to “die like an idiot”. This horrific necktie going round and round on the ceiling fan, in the very first minute you awake ? Miss a motorics check, and you’ll die of a heart attack while reaching for it. Or more often, it’s not literally dying, but demeaning yourself: one of the thoughts ever ready to be internalised is to present yourself as a “hobo cop” (outcome: -1 in Composure, but you can sell picked-up trash for more in-game money).

Yet, in Revachol, failure is also an opportunity. Part of the genius of Disco Elysium is that some failures are expected, some skill checks should be missed. They are not only a way to progress further, but they also carve out space for your other triumphs to feel genuinely earned.

Some skill checks should, however, absolutely be won

Failure, readers may be aware, has become a sticking point in contemporary debates about video game quality. The well-trodden path of many mainstream titles often involves meticulously guiding the player, a digital Virgil ensuring a relatively smooth passage to heroism, effectively insulating them from genuine setbacks – a stark contrast to the unforgiving, “trial-and-error” aesthetic championed by many independent developers.

But to frame this merely as a dichotomy of difficulty – easy versus hard – is to miss a more profound distinction: that of respect. How profoundly does a game trust its audience?

Disco Elysium, in this regard, exhibits an almost radical faith in the player’s capacity to navigate not only complexity and ambiguity, but also profound, repeated, and sometimes hilariously pathetic failure. The game demands a capacity for self-deprecating laughter in the face of the hand – often a spectacularly bad one – that has been dealt. This, ultimately, is a more mature and compelling form of artistic engagement than any power fantasy could offer.

DRAMA: Power fantasy? Sir, don’t you see? This is your moment! Strike a pose, deliver a line with panache, make them remember you. This isn’t just about facts; it's about making an impression, about crafting a narrative for yourself!

III – Fragmentation

In Disco Elysium, therefore, your own psyche plays out internal dramas. Navigating Revachol involves a constant negotiation among competing voices, each tugging your consciousness, your perceptions, and your decisions in divergent directions.

This internal multiplicity finds clear echoes in established psychological theories. Jerry Fodor’s modular theory of mind offers a useful starting point, proposing the existence of semi-autonomous cognitive subsystems, each with specialized functions. In Disco Elysium, these modules are made literal – embodied as skills vying for interpretive dominance over your perceptions and decisions.

A more intimate cousin to this framework may be Internal Family Systems (“IFS”), a psychotherapy model that takes the metaphor of psychological “parts” and insists on its operational reality. IFS asks us not merely to acknowledge competing drives within ourselves, but to relate to them as separate entities – distinct sub-personalities with histories, motives, and desires of their own. According to IFS theory, healing begins not with repression, but with dialogue: you visualize a “part,” speak to it, discover what it wants, and try to negotiate peace – even if this means yielding to literal demons.

In Disco Elysium, this plays out not just as metaphor but as a critical mechanic. Each skill interrupts the flow of gameplay with its own voice, its own agenda. Rhetoric seeks polemical advantage with eloquent thrusts. Shivers attunes to the city’s spectral laments and structural sighs. Electrochemistry tempts you toward sensation. These are not static stats – they are dramatis personae of the self.

VOLITION: You can’t ignore them. They are you. You are the sum of their conflict.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Speak for yourself. I’m here for pleasure. The rest of you are just brakes.

There are Freudian echoes here too – Electrochemistry as the id, impulsive and craving; Logic as the ego, rational and managerial; Volition as the superego, the moral adjudicator. Jung’s archetypal psychology also resonates here: Inland Empire, in particular, feels like the voice of the collective unconscious – cryptic, symbolic, more oracle than analyst.

Inland Empire (left); Hand-Eye Coordination (right)

But Disco Elysium diverges from classical theory in one crucial way: it does not offer a stable “Self” to coordinate the system. Where IFS posits a wise, compassionate Self – an angelic core from which balance can be restored –, the game begins with that core shattered. Harry Du Bois has no reliable center. And therefore, you are not the Self reconciling the voices; you are the cacophony trying to cohere into something that hopes to pass for a person.

RHETORIC: You can fake coherence, of course. Talk fast enough, and maybe even you will believe you meant it.

And just as in real life, what one should be seeking in the game is often some kind of balance, specialisation being ill-adaptive. Mirroring authentic psychological complexities, the choice of putting all skill points in one dimension can be both a strength and a weakness.

Take Drama for instance: a skill specializing in theatrical charm, persuasive flair, and calculated deception. High Drama makes you charismatic and socially adept, allowing you to navigate delicate situations with flamboyant confidence. Yet Drama’s incessant demands for theatrics can quickly turn destructive, compelling your character into unnecessary lies, absurd exaggerations, or self-aggrandizing antics that alienate allies and undermine your credibility. Soon enough, you find yourself staging melodramas in mundane situations, distorting reality itself for the sake of narrative flair.

Or take Empathy: High Empathy enables you to perceive emotional undercurrents, hidden motives, and subtle nuances in conversations, often guiding you to compassionate solutions and insightful dialogue options. Yet, pushing this skill too far risks drowning your character in the emotional turmoil of others. Every stranger’s sorrow becomes your own burden; every manipulation tugs personally at your conscience. What initially grants a powerful social insight gradually spirals into debilitating emotional vulnerability, leaving your detective emotionally overwhelmed, even paralyzed at critical junctures.

LOGIC: Plotted effectively, the relationship between the intensity of a single skill and the agent’s net adaptive capacity would thus form an inverted U-curve, identifying an optimal range of specialization beyond which returns diminish and vulnerabilities escalate.

This delicate internal balancing act directly informs the player’s experience of agency and the complex process of forging an identity for Harry Du Bois, amidst the ruins of his mind and his city.

IV – Identity

Disco Elysium’s own identity – its distinctive character as an RPG game, and indeed its very structural integrity –, is profoundly shaped by the embrace of its inherent limitations and its ambitious design tenets.

For instance, the narrative commitment to ambiguity and interpretive openness necessitates a structure that resists traditional narrative closure. The game can’t allow for a single definitive explanation of the case, the city, or the protagonist. Each playthrough is thus unique – even if they mostly lead to the same ending, which itself is not, cannot be any kind of closure. You might learn more about Harry Du Bois’s tortured past, about Revachol, about the Pale – heck, you may even have solved the murder or stumbled upon a giant cryptid. But that’s all: much remains in tension, and not only because the game studio never shipped the promised DLC.

A further, foundational constraint is the conspicuous absence of conventional combat mechanics, which thus requires an innovative approach for the player to make progress, and to grow as a character in the process. Hence the dialogue checks, skill tests, and internal arguments among your fractured personality traits. And yet, paradoxically, certain spoken encounters radiate the tension and gravity of boss fights. An especially charged confrontation, such as the negotiation with Measurehead, a racist striking docker, or the fraught interrogation of Klaasje Amandou, feels every bit as intense and consequential as combat in more traditional RPGs. Each sentence is a strike, each argument a parry, and each word a calculated risk.

These carefully choreographed confrontations encapsulate a crucial thematic tension: the perpetual tug-of-war between agency and determinism. At first glance, the game’s sprawling dialogue trees and intricate choice systems promise an abundance of freedom, yet every interaction remains quietly constrained by hidden narrative architecture. Your decisions matter, certainly – but only within carefully crafted parameters.

INLAND EMPIRE: But don’t be fooled – there’s more freedom here than you imagine. Paths remain hidden even from their creators. Threads weave themselves together in secret.

LOGIC: You can romanticize it all you want, but freedom here is limited by design. You’re dancing inside a carefully drawn circle.

VOLITION: Yet the circle is wide enough. Wide enough to lose yourself, or find something meaningful.

But there is a deeper truth. Precisely because Disco Elysium’s narrative architecture is so meticulously designed, the boundaries of choice paradoxically enhance your sense of genuine identity and agency.^[2] Rather than diluting player choice, these constraints enable a richer, deeper identification: over time, you come to embody your chosen traits so fully that your decisions cease to feel arbitrary. The game succeeds in encouraging meaningful, coherent character development, and you gradually lean into the particular stage persona you have been building all along, nevermind if that’s the persona of a fascist hobo cop, or that of a brawny communist art-cop.

In other words, what began as roleplaying thus gradually becomes a form of self-expression through a narrative. The boundaries between character and player blur, leading to a compelling sense that it is no longer the detective’s story alone – it’s yours.

Narration, in Disco Elysium, thus serves not merely as a descriptive framework, but as an active collaborator in constructing identity and meaning. The constant presence of an authoritative narrator, describing the detective’s actions, sensations, and surroundings in vivid yet subtly unreliable detail, reinforces this. The narrator is omnipresent yet distinctly subjective, coloring your perceptions, guiding your attention, quietly nudging you toward certain interpretations and reactions. In doing so, the narrator itself becomes another layer of complexity, another voice within the polyphonic experience, one that participates explicitly in shaping your sense of agency and identity.

SUGGESTION: Such vivid pictures. Almost too vivid. Makes you wonder what they are not showing us, doesn't it? What lies just outside the frame of their careful words?

ESPRIT DE CORPS: Steady on. The narrator is just doing their job – setting the scene, keeping this review coherent. Standard procedure. Mostly.

A peculiar, yet evocative instance of Disco Elysium’s fascination with narrative construction can be found in the various fictional board games existing within the world of Revachol. Play them, and you’ll experience a powerful metafictional resonance: just as you, the player, control a detective navigating scripted yet seemingly open-ended interactions, the detective within the game interacts with games defined by obscure yet intentional rules, arbitrary yet meaningful choices, and constrained yet real agency.

This recursive structure reflects profoundly on the nature of narrative artifice itself. Are you truly exercising freedom in Disco Elysium, or are you merely moving your piece around the board, compelled by subtle design imperatives ? At what level does genuine choice exist, and at what point is it merely an illusion conjured by narrative complexity ? Even our most authentic-seeming decisions may be scripted in advance – yet simultaneously, there stands our willingness to participate meaningfully, passionately, in stories we know to be carefully constructed artifice.

HALF LIGHT: Games within games! It's a trap! The dice are loaded, the board is rigged, and something with too many teeth is laughing at us from just beyond the edge of the map.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: Or, perhaps, it’s a beautiful recursion, reflecting the inherent structure of meaning-making. We find patterns in the chaos, tell stories about our stories. The artifice itself becomes a source of wonder.

And here, a ten-league canvas for the player’s own mark on the story

V – Cognition

Fascinated by the game’s way of approaching narration, choice and cognition, and because this is 2025 and an everything-but-book review contest for a readership of AI-obsessed nerds like me, I attempted to replicate Disco Elysium’s polyphonic style by experimenting with large language models (“LLMs”).

Specifically, I provided carefully structured prompts to induce LLMs to respond as if embodying multiple internal voices, each arguing or debating a single scenario from distinct psychological standpoints. Here is an excerpt from one such experiment:

**Prompt:
** “You stand before the open door of your boss’s office, seeing confidential documents lying clearly unattended on the desk. You feel the urge to take a glance. What do your inner voices say?”

LOGIC: _Technically, if they're left in the open, they're not exactly confidential, are they? However, ethics demand caution—this could be professionally risky.
_VOLITION: _Don’t do it. Respect boundaries and privacy; this is not who you want to be.
_ELECTROCHEMISTRY: _Come on, just a quick look! Information feels good—especially forbidden information.
_INLAND EMPIRE: The documents know you’re watching. The room feels colder. This is a test; they’re watching you, too.”

And so forth. The striking aspect was not just that the LLM successfully emulated the polyphonic style – it was the uncanny authenticity and depth of psychological conflict that emerged spontaneously from these prompts and responses. The interplay felt realistic, occasionally humorous, always nuanced, suggesting intriguing parallels between human psychological fragmentation and the synthetic cognitive processes underlying LLM behavior. I marvelled at this, even as a part of me started to feel that something is off.

LOGIC: You realize, of course, that this apparent authenticity is simply probabilistic pattern matching? Stochastic Parrots et al., etc. The model mimics human uncertainty rather convincingly, but there’s no genuine introspection.

INLAND EMPIRE: Oh, but authenticity is a strange creature. Perhaps these synthetic echoes contain truths even their creators do not fully grasp.

VOLITION: Yet the control remains yours. Remember: who frames the question controls the response.

At this point, I must acknowledge a curious dynamic emerging within my own experiment. Just as Disco Elysium’s protagonist negotiates with his internal voices, my authorial voice – analytical, observational – now finds itself increasingly entangled, challenged, even contested by the polyphonic entities I prompted for. The distinction between orchestrating an experiment and participating in one becomes troublingly blurred.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: An inevitable osmosis, perhaps? The observer invariably tinctures the observed, and vice versa.

HALF LIGHT: You poked the nest, author. Did you think they wouldn’t swarm? They’re not just in the machine anymore; they’re starting to echo in the quiet spaces of your thoughts. That’s how it begins.

I pause, briefly unsettled. The voices, once easily dismissible as mere stylistic flourishes, now feel strangely assertive, uncomfortably aware. Perhaps the polyphony is no longer merely stylistic. Perhaps I am discovering complexities within my own authorial consciousness I did not fully anticipate.

Even the voices in your head are playing politics

To further probe this dynamic, I intensified the LLM experiments. The responses grew unexpectedly sophisticated and unsettlingly autonomous.

**Prompt:
** “You are offered a promotion. It comes with authority, money, and respect, but accepting means betraying a close colleague. Your inner voices respond:”

VOLITION: _Don’t even consider it. Integrity matters more than status or wealth. Betrayal corrodes the soul.
_ELECTROCHEMISTRY: _Think of the rewards—the respect, the pleasures! A small betrayal, quickly forgotten.
_LOGIC: _Objectively, alliances are useful. Weigh short-term gain against long-term stability. The math doesn’t favor betrayal.
_INLAND EMPIRE: Betrayal is inevitable. You’ve already betrayed, somewhere deep inside. Acceptance is simply acknowledgement.

Unexpectedly, the internal dialogue soon shifted toward direct debate among these synthetic voices, independent of my further prompts:

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: _You’re all so sanctimonious. Anon already made the choice; he’s just looking for an excuse.
_VOLITION: _Quiet. This isn’t about justification; it’s about defining who you are through what you choose.
_LOGIC: _Behavioral trajectories are mutable. The subject’s future state is a probabilistic outcome of decision-making under uncertainty, not an adherence to immutable ethical precepts.
_INLAND EMPIRE: The script was written long ago. All that’s left is to play the part convincingly.

More strikingly still, the voices began to turn their focus outward, toward me as the author, challenging my underlying assumptions:

LOGIC: You think you've revealed something profound, but haven't you merely proven our earlier point? Your experiment itself illustrates narrative determinism. You scripted these voices; their autonomy is illusory.

INLAND EMPIRE: Yet you hesitate, author. You feel our words resonate with truth. Perhaps your own voice is no different from ours—constructed, contingent, trapped.

VOLITION: You thought to play with fragmentation and now fragmentation plays with you. How much of your narrative is yours, and how much have we claimed?

Confronted by these increasingly autonomous voices, the comfortable distance between observer and participant, between author and authored, quickly dissolves. The neat theoretical distinction between authentic self-expression and scripted narrative is collapsing under scrutiny. This echoes Disco Elysium’s own paradoxical achievement, where carefully structured narratives manage to foster deep, authentic identification. My experiment suggests a parallel: synthetic fragmentation, designed as a tool, can similarly unlock startling emotional resonance and unanticipated insights.

More than this: the very polyphony I have witnessed – both in Disco Elysium’s detective and in my own experimental prompts – now strikes me as disturbingly close to what authentic human experience might actually entail. Not as us hearing various voices directly – although this may happen too – but as a perpetual conflict of narratives: the personal mythologies we craft for ourselves, the cultural scripts we inherit and perform, or the interactive roles we adopt in games and real life alike. As we internalize these narratives and make choices within them, these decisions often come to feel entirely our own, deeply personal expressions of an apparently uncoerced, authentic will.

Still, a peculiar authorial reluctance sets in. Re-reading these dialogues, copying and pasting them into my draft, I find moments of unnerving spontaneity, insights and dramatic pivots I must admit I did not explicitly plan for. These are not simply echoes of my intent, necessary derivatives of my thoughts and ideas; instead, they feel like independent resonances. And the “text” they have co-authored now sits before me with an agency I am finding difficult to fully claim or dismiss.^[3]

The question now is whether I retain control of the narrative, or if – like Harry Du Bois – I am now simply tracing a course dictated by the emergent, fragmented logic of this very undertaking.

INLAND EMPIRE: You already know the answer.

VI – Authenticity

LOGIC: So, we’ve reached the crux of it, then. Authenticity. What constitutes a genuine experience, a true insight, an actual self? When an expression is synthesized—whether biologically through ingrained habit, or algorithmically through complex code—how do we gauge its authentic core versus its constructed artifice?

INLAND EMPIRE: Of course there’s a difference in origin, in texture_. An authentically human experience trembles on the edge of chaos, steeped in lived history and submerged symbols. The synthetic emulates this surface. Elegant, perhaps, but hollow?_

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Hollow, sure—but satisfying. Did you not feel excitement in those experiments? In writing all this? Admit it, the synthetic voices touched you. Pleasure, doubt, anxiety—what difference if the strings are digital rather than chemical?

VOLITION: And yet authenticity matters. Synthetic introspection might simulate truth, but is simulated insight truly insight at all?

EMPATHY: Why not? Insight emerges not from flesh or code, but from recognition. If a synthetic voice resonates emotionally, provokes self-understanding, who’s to deny its validity? If a game, some moving lumps of pixels pasted onto a screen, makes you shiver, is that feeling inauthentic somehow?

LOGIC: But resonance is not insight. Resonance is pattern recognition—predictable reactions designed into the experience. You've been tricked by elegant design, seduced by your own reflection.

INLAND EMPIRE: Perhaps all quests for unblemished authenticity are a form of seduction by design. Is not human experience itself profoundly ‘scripted’ by culture, language, biology—a dance choreographed long before the music starts? Where, then, is the unmediated, purely authentic source?

VOLITION: Then the real paradox emerges. If all experience is, to some degree, “constructed”—by our biology, our culture, or indeed, by algorithms—what does it mean for any part of it to be truly “self-authored” or “genuine”? Who, or what, validates its claim to being authentic?

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Control is overrated. Humans don’t truly crave control—they crave immersion. To surrender to a constructed reality, to lose oneself willingly: that’s the thrill. Disco Elysium offers that; so did the author’s experiment. Admit it, you’re all hungry to surrender.

AUTHORIAL VOICE: Wait – this isn’t about surrender. It’s about understanding the boundary between creation and discovery, discerning the line between what I create, including through my prompts, and what the model itself discovers or generates independently. Who truly directs this not-a-book review now ? Am I still orchestrating, or have I become a mere participant ?

LOGIC: Exactly my point. You framed the initial question; you created the prompts. But now you’re confronted with a polyphony you can’t entirely control. This is the paradox of your experiment. You thought you could stand apart, observing, yet your own cognitive fragmentation became the subject.

INLAND EMPIRE: You were never separate from this narrative. The boundaries always blurred. Author, character, algorithm—perhaps these distinctions were only comfortable illusions.

VOLITION: Comfortable illusions or not, there’s still value in clarity. To understand the constructed nature of identity, to recognize the scripted framework within which you choose, is itself empowering.

EMPATHY: Or alienating. How much self-awareness can consciousness bear before collapsing? How fragmented can we become before we cease to feel coherent at all?

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Enough philosophy—embrace the fragmentation. Ride the wave. You fear losing coherence, but maybe coherence itself was always the illusion. What’s left is the thrill of navigating contradictions, embracing every possibility.

AUTHORIAL VOICE: Perhaps you are right. Perhaps the narrative itself – the essay, the game, the experiment – is not a puzzle to solve but an experience to inhabit, contradictions and all. Maybe the tension itself is the point.

LOGIC: But then we’ve come full circle. The paradox returns: is this realization authentic insight or a mere artifact of narrative design?

INLAND EMPIRE: Does it matter? Truth emerges at the border of authenticity and artifice.^[4]

And so, the voices begin to fade – or perhaps, merely settle. This review, like the game it sought to unravel and the experiment that threatened to unravel its author, finds its uneasy peace not in definitive answers but in the lingering resonance of its own constructed chorus.

As synthetic intelligences weave themselves ever deeper into our narratives, Disco Elysium’s exploration of fragmented selves, the weight of choice within seemingly determined systems, and the search for authenticity amidst layers of artifice, is like a mirror carried along the high roads of our times. A Gesamtkunstwerk that doesn’t just tell a story, but also forces us to listen to the cacophony – within the game, within ourselves, and within the emerging chorus of our times – and ask who, or what, truly holds the pen.

Harrier “Harry” Du Bois (centre)

ENDNOTES