“There is a specter haunting Europe: the specter of communism.”

Disco Elysium embodies these words, but probably for the opposite reasons Marx and Engels wrote them. They ushered in the rise of communism with these words, but Disco Elysium speaks of its fall.

In Revachol, communism is a *thing* that happened, but in the fog of the past. History does not happen in Disco Elysium. History *has* happened, and we are left with its footprints. Ideas like capitalism, communism, nationalism, they rise and fall like tides, and our protagonist, much like any other individual, is powerless to change it. We are left to live in its aftermaths and its precariousness, with nought but uncertainty in the future.

Events of a distant past leaving us ashes in the present with little vision of the future? Disco Elysium is basically about being a millennial.

Though we are left with but a powerlessness, Disco Elysium wishes to remind us: fuck, being alive is great isn’t it? The bullet pockmarks left by firing squads, the accented voice echoing from the rafters. It sends shivers down the spine does it not? We’re standing in the desiccated whale bones of history and good god does it fucking stink but that’s how you know it’s REAL, all of it! Better to be the one studying the corpse than to be the corpse.

So breathe in that stale Martinaise air. Live in that moment, whether you’re interrogating a white supremacist or kicking a mail box or punching a smug child, live it.

We’re alive goddamnit! That counts for something.