History VideoGame / DiscoElysium

** Klaasje's a drug-addicted mess who is still very, ''very'' good at what she does - not far off from [[FunctionalAddict cops with high Electrochemistry]], or [[spoiler:Harry before the amnesia]]. In addition, [[spoiler:the ID you find is implied to be her real ID, but using an outdated photo - just like Harry's.]]

** Alain is all too eager to prod back at you, and it's clear it's to try and get people to expose themselves, similar to what Harry was like as "the Human Can Opener", talking to get people to overextend themselves and reveal weaknesses. [[spoiler:Post-Tribunal, he can very likely end up like Harry and Ellis: a sorry, guilt-ridden drunken mess of a man who'll die soon, either at his own hands or due to his antics.]]

** [[spoiler:The Hanged Man]] has ''all'' the facets of every possible Harry. He was a violent drug addict threatening to kill everyone and everything in the name of racism, political ideas, or even because he can, [[spoiler:just like Harry]]. He was in a slow, destructive, world-ending spiral prior to the game beginning, [[spoiler:just like Harry]]. Despite his flaws, he [[spoiler:attracted a woman who saw past his tough exterior and left him all the same, just like Harry]]. Art Cops will note [[spoiler:Raul claims Lely dabbled in the arts]]. Human Can Openers will hear [[spoiler:Raul say that if Lely was here, he could have talked them all down, despite everything pointing to failure - not unlike Harry being able to open up a blustering Titus and his Boys with only a few words.]] Apocalypse Cops will heed [[spoiler:the fact that his drunken, genocidal ramblings about the world coming to an end sound quite a lot like theirs - on top of the fact it's HEAVILY implied both Lely and Harry were screaming into tape recorders the night of the murder.]] Druggie Cops will be pleased to hear that he loved his booze and drugs to drown out the world and loved the ladies, too. Corrupt Cops will empathise with the fact [[spoiler:his unit worked for the just-as-corrupt Oranjese megacorps.]] And if you take the ''bad thing'' that happened at the Church that involved Harry at face value, [[spoiler:you're potentially an atrocity-committing wreck, just like the Hanged Man leading the horrific violation and murder of a Semenese woman.]]

** [[spoiler:The Deserter, a violent communist all too eager to blame everything on the "ruling class" and kill them, too. What's more is that it's implied he can hear not only La Revacholiere like a Harry who has, but also other Cryptids like a Harry who ascribes to the Col Do Ma Ma Daqua Cryptid, and, finally, a devil figure - Iblis. "Shaitan". The ''total opposite of the Messianic Dolores Dei.'']]

* FantasyCreep: Depending on what choices are made, what can start out as a MurderMystery story can veer into a CosmicHorrorStory, between one of Harry's skills, "Shivers", potentially being [[spoiler:the city of Revachol itself manifesting a GeniusLoci to speak to him]] and [[spoiler:the revelation of the existence of The Pale, a substance that separates all of the major landmasses on the planet from each other, and has deleterious effects on the human mind, to the point where even those with training can only last a few weeks in it every year. What's more, it's revealed in supplemental material that the Pale is a pollutant caused by TimeTravel-- specifically, data from the future being picked up by sensitive humans who then use it to create an item or idea that should not exist yet, and said item, a 'Novelty', produces the Pale]].

*** [[spoiler: While you can luck out and DodgeTheBullet once during the Tribunal, it's only because the mercenary shooting at you is drunk out of his mind and winds up overcorrecting his aim in response to your sudden movement. Kortenaer's LastBreathBullet on the other hand ''will'' hit you no matter what.]]

*** While you can luck out and DodgeTheBullet once [[spoiler:during the Tribunal]], you can't do it twice. [[spoiler:Kortenaer]]'s LastBreathBullet ''will'' hit you no matter what.
*** Furthermore, the only reason he missed is because he was heavily drunk and overcorrected his aim in reaction to your sudden movement. Even then, the shot is close enough to graze your clothing. Actually dodging a bullet is impossible.

* DodgeTheBullet: With a good Reaction Speed, you can handily pull this off during [[spoiler:the Tribunal]], at least when the disastrously drunk [[spoiler:Hoenkloewen]] tries to shoot you. Visual Calculus explictly notes that the only real reason why you can pull off the trick is exactly because [[spoiler:Hoenkloewen]] is extremely drunk, and drunk people have a tendency to overcorrect when taking aim against a moving target. [[spoiler:Kortenaer's LastBreathBullet, however, is impossible to dodge.]]

** Your colleagues in Precinct 41 might not take you back. Say the wrong things in the final scene, and they will decide that they have had enough of your drunken misbehaviour, and dismiss you.

** Failure and moving past it. You feel like a failure as a human being and as a cop. Revachol is a city where every revolution and idea born in it failed. Sidequests like the Doomed Commercial Area also feed into the theme. Failed checks often don't have exclusively negative consequences, but can sometimes be outright helpful in unforeseen ways. It's up to you how you frame and respond to these failures. The [[spoiler:Plasmid]]'s parting comment sums it up perfectly.

** Failure and moving past it. You feel like a failure as a human being and as a cop. Revachol is a city where every revolution and idea born in it failed. Sidequests like the Doomed Commercial Area also feed into the theme. Failed checks often don't have exclusively negative consequences, but can sometimes be outright helpful in unforeseen ways. It's up to you how you frame and respond to these failures.

** The game also bends a lot of traditional RPG rules and mindsets. Minmaxing results in less a character excelling in one specific area over all others, and more a character who becomes ''completely'' subsumed by that area -- putting too many points into a skill will cause it to manifest itself as a personality aberration, encouraging potentially harmful acts and even blocking off crucial dialogue trees. On the other hand, trying top be a JackOfAllStats with points in almost every skill results in your thoughts becoming vocal enough to where they argue with each other, opening it up to the chance for the player to make bad calls. Alignment charts are given a spin in the traditional Chaos/Order and Good/Evil paradigm being tossed out in exchange for a ''political'' alignment chart, and rather than giving explicit bonuses to which alignment you pick, most of them incur some kind of ''penalty'' instead, with people shunning you for your choice of political identity. The biggest of these is the ending: [[spoiler:the game outright states that no matter how you built your version of the player character, every single one of them is a mental "shield" of sorts to get over his traumatic breakup with his wife. You roleplay not so much who he ''is'', but rather how he copes -- the imaginary avatar he presents to the world. It then ends by further implying that your coping mechanisms of choice, your copotype and political alignment(s), will become his new dominant personality.]]

** The game also bends a lot of traditional RPG rules and mindsets. Minmaxing results in less a character excelling in one specific area over all others, and more a character who becomes ''completely'' subsumed by that area -- putting too many points into a skill will cause it to manifest itself as a personality aberration, encouraging potentially harmful acts and even blocking off crucial dialogue trees. Alignment charts are given a spin in the traditional Chaos/Order and Good/Evil paradigm being tossed out in exchange for a ''political'' alignment chart, and rather than giving explicit bonuses to which alignment you pick, most of them incur some kind of ''penalty'' instead, with people shunning you for your choice of political identity. The biggest of these is the ending: [[spoiler:the game outright states that no matter how you built your version of the player character, every single one of them is a mental "shield" of sorts to get over his traumatic breakup with his wife. You roleplay not so much who he ''is'', but rather how he copes -- the imaginary avatar he presents to the world. It then ends by further implying that your coping mechanisms of choice, your copotype and political alignment(s), will become his new dominant personality.]]

The setting was created by lead writer and developer Robert Kurvitz for the company's long-running TabletopRPG campaign. Kurvitz has also written a novel in his native Estonian set twenty years later in the same universe, ''Literature/SacredAndTerribleAir''. Published in 2013, the book was translated into English in mid-2023 and links to download it can be found [[https://old.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/12ysbl1/sacred_and_terrible_air_full_professional/ here]].

** The People's Republic of Samara mirrors other People's Republics such as China and North Korea. Like China it is described as having drifted away from its' socialist roots towards sustained democracy; it is ruled over by the dictatorial President Sapormat 'Sport' Knezhinisky, not unlike North Korea's deceased dictator Kim Jong-Il. Similar to both states, the Samaran Republic has initiated a rigorous fitness programme for its citizens; unlike any known fitness programme, it involves Bear Wrestling.

* TakeThatUs: The entire Fortress Accident storyline is one giant self-mockery quest. Game writers are depicted as whiny, edgy, and/or over-sensitive slackers who either fall apart at the merest sign of trouble or instead double-down on tasks they simply don't have the resources or manpower to accomplish in the first place by getting even ''more'' idiotic pie-in-the-sky ideas (at one point, when it was clear having one voice actor serving as a game master or as a few [=NPCs=] was prohibitively expensive, the writing lead instead decided to have ''all'' characters have unique voice actors, even for minor [=NPCs=], and inevitably blame mental health and decide to practice "self-care" (i.e.: abandoning the project entirely and claiming every time they shirk work is for "wellness" reasons). The game ''programmers'' are, on the other hand, are socially-inept geeks sneering at the plebs who can't understand code, [[StrawVulcan stubbornly refusing to be "emotional" or "illogical" despite being helped by people who can emote better than a rock in trying to find a reality-warping glitch]] (unless it's about [[{{Manchild}} whatever nerd bullshit they like]]).

* CommieNazis: Communism here took a far more violent rise to power akin to the ascent of the Nazis and the worlds' response to them: seizing on poor conditions, whipped into a frenzy by one charismatic individual with a pack of underlings as infamous as he was, and uniting the world against them in a massive world war. Official history even claims that Kras Mazov offed himself akin to Hitler after being surrounded by anti-Communist forces.

** Fail another Authority check with Acele, the woman recording stuff outside the church, and her casually saying "fuck the hat" when you offer her one immediately has you explode into a really weird and angry monologue [[{{Angrish}} about ungrateful civilians like being rude and demanding that culminates in you]] [[LiteralMetaphor screaming at the top of your lungs that she asked you to give her an "ice-cop-hat-fuck-show"]], before you then finally break down and start [[InelegantBlubbering bawling your eyes before her]]. Afterwards, a concerned Kim takes you aside and asks what happened back there.

** Revachol is superficially French, from character names to the Revolution to the use of motorized stagecoaches and muskets/flintlocks rather than automatic weapons, but its clash of ideologies and postwar ruins resemble many a former Soviet Bloc country once the Iron Curtain fell, its division into foreign zones of occupation after a disastrous global war with fascist and communist involvement evokes Germany (especially Berlin), and it's situated in the Insulinde, an enormous archipelago whose discovery and colonization resembles that of the Americas, minus the natives. The history also has a substantial amount of Estonia in it -- Revachol sounds a lot like Reval, today better known as the Estonian capital Tallinn. Reval was the German name for the city, which spent much of its history under the rule of a succession of foreign powers between the 13th and late 20th centuries.

* TranslationConvention: Possibly, although never explicitly stated. At one point Kim can tell you the language you're both speaking is Suresne, as Revachol was once a colony of the Kingdom of Suresne, which became the nation of Sur-La-Clef, and which is heavily implied to be the FantasyCounterpartCulture of France. Many characters who are explicitly stated to be natives of Revachol [[JustAStupidAccent speak with a French accent]], and unsubtitled French is quite common in both dialogue and the environment, without any sign anyone has any difficulty understanding what's being said.