Nightmare Fuel / Disco Elysium

"I don't want to come back."

For all of its quirky humor, the story of Disco Elysium is remarkably dark and sinister at numerous points. Be warned that spoilers will be unmarked.

• The decaying corpse of the Hanged Man is one of the first things you see in the game. It's consistently unsettling the entire time you spend examining it.
• The first dream you have has you meeting yourself dangling from the tree behind the Whirling in the place of the Hanged Man. The portrait of your bloated, dead-eyed corpse (pictured to the right) isn't exactly fun to look at while the Ancient Reptilian Voice cruelly berates you for your incompetence at being a functioning adult. The nightmarish, unreal atmosphere is reminiscent of the dream sequences in Hotline Miami when you're being chastised by the three people in animal masks.
  Bloated Corpse of a Drunk: You really dropped the ball, Harry. Four point six billion people — and you failed every single one of them. You really *fucked up.*
• Harry's internal thoughts that pop up during dialogue are frequently full of self-hatred and suicidal ideation, especially whenever something is unconsciously reminding him of his ex, Dora, but he's not able to pinpoint why it's bothering him.
  • Harry's Death Seeker tendencies are often played for laughs, but they hit uncomfortably close to home because of how realistically they're portrayed. The preamble to the euphemistically-titled "Finger on the Eject Button" thought sums it up with chilling clarity:
    Who doesn't toy with the thought of suicide sometimes? Or, like, most of the time? Okay, maybe some people don't – like the happy scientist girl named Marie, or Jean-Marc, the superstar whom everyone loves. But you — when the going gets rough, it's nice to think about your little trap door out of here. Do it. Put your finger on the eject button, see how alive it makes you feel — the freedom of finality. Think of how much they'll *miss* you.
  • If asked Roy will tell Harry how he bought his gun. Harry came into his shop haggard and drunk, said he wanted to get rid of his gun and that he couldn't be trusted with it. When Roy hesitated Harry started sucking on the barrel to show that he meant it.
  • Opening the locked compartment of the ledger seems innocuous at first, but then you get it open to reveal a pair of ticket stubs and a letter, with the game giving you options to look at the stubs, read the letter... and then the third option:
    Fucking kill yourself you asshole.
  • The backstory behind the locked compartment and why Harry gets deja vu after snapping it open with his knee. When he was on duty to stop recurring nuisances one of them dented his ledger so the compartment became hard to open. Harry went berserk over it and smashed the man's kneecap with the ledger until it opened. Half-Light even notes that at this moment Harry wanted to commit murder.
• Once you get a photo of the Hanged Man's tattoos, there's an optional dialogue where you can go show the photo to the Scab Leader. It starts off innocuously enough, with the Scab Leader revealing that he served with the Hanged Man on a previous tour of duty. Pain Threshold senses that something bad is coming and strongly urges you not to listen to his story. The nostalgic memory the Scab Leader is reminded of was the Hanged Man gang-raping a Semenese woman to death with other soldiers over the course of several days. They then sliced off pieces of her body to keep as trophies. One soldier even ate her sliced breasts raw. If you choose the dialogue options where you react appropriately horrified, the Scab Leader just grins while acknowledging how evil it was as though it impressed him.
• The Coalition invasion of Revachol is described by multiple characters as having been an apocalyptically violent and brutal conflict that reduced Martinaise to a smoldering wasteland. It's telling that the ramifications of the conflict are still felt in the city nearly fifty years later, both in terms of the bombed-out ruins everywhere and the way it permanently took away Martinaise's autonomy.
  • At the end of the game, the Deserter gives a harrowing firsthand account of the Coalition airships bombarding the city. His friends were obliterated by explosive shells and he just barely escaped with his life. The way he describes the airships makes them sound like eldritch monsters in a Cosmic Horror Story. The destruction was so inconceivably vast and terrible that he can only think to describe it in quasi-mythological terms.
    "May the 13th, '08, 44 years ago," he looks north. "The horizon was black with Coalition airships. Their petroleum rose to the sky and it looked like... like it *formed* the clouds. Storm clouds. When they started shelling it was... dark magic. The combined might of international capital, all at once — all the greed and terror in the world — tore in Revachol. It lifted streets from the ground and turned houses into ghosts."
  • His description of seeing the subsequent carnage is quite morbid as well.
    "I climbed out." He closes his eyes: " — into hell. The Landing was complete. The chain was submerged, I had to swim back. The fortress was half submerged too. Shattered. They'd all drowned in the lower levels, or got torn to shreds above. The anti-aircraft gun had malfunctioned — so had I. I had left them without ideological direction..."
  • The way the Deserter closes this conversation out perfectly illustrates how evil the Moralintern actually is beneath the organization's superficial civility and why he's as disturbed as he is. The conviction in his voice and the fact that the reality of what he's saying is impossible to deny makes it all the more unnerving.
    The Deserter: (he opens his eyes and stares right through you) It was real. I'd seen it. I'd seen it *in reality*.
    Half-Light: Some kind of great terror. Worse than what you've seen.
    You: Seen *what*?
    The Deserter: The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed. And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest, most courageous people in the world... (he's silent for a second) You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you *know*.
    You: What?
    The Deserter: That the bourgeois are not human.
• And then there's the Deserter himself. An extremely potent sniper, filled with nothing but hatred for a society that moved on without him, living on an island with a clear view of a civilian population center, still fighting a war that is long over. By the end it's ambiguous how many people he's murdered. The full voice acting in The Final Cut makes him an even more disturbed figure, his voice dripping with venom and at a few points almost gurgling with rage.
• The pale. Vast swaths of unreality covering the majority of the planet, separating continents, in which the basic laws of physics break down and exposure to which causes at best Sanity Slippage, and at worst Critical Existence Failure. No one knows how it works or where it came from (though there's some suggestion that it is unconsciously created by humans), just that it's spreading and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Then there's the implication the Swallow, a 2mm sound-absorbing hole in reality inside the church, is a nascent patch of pale that will eventually grow to swallow all of Revachol.
  • Even worse is that exposure to the pale is addictive. Joyce has emerged mostly unscathed besides insomnia due to her access to upper class healthcare, but the Paledriver is an example of what happens to a commoner who undergoes a similar level of exposure. She sits around all day, seemingly unaware or uncaring of who she really is, reliving other people’s happy memories like immersive movies as her own identity fades further and further. The other drivers are terrified of her, not because of her behavior (she’s a little rude but utterly harmless) but because of what she represents.
  • The Pale is not just the past, but potential futures as well. You get a few (incomprehensible at the time) dialogue lines from the future if you pass certain skill checks. According to official side materials recently found, there are people called magpies who can reliably tap into this to take ideas from potential futures, but that by doing so they contribute a massive amount to the growth of the Pale and thus the extinction of mankind. This discovery naturally casts everything about the Innocences and Dolores Dei in particular into a new light, especially how her killer screamed that she had taken the chance for mankind to discover things ourselves away from us.
• Soona's experiment where she amplifies the "sound" (or lack thereof) through the ravers' speakers, which nearly causes the church to implode from the impossibly deep and bassy sound of the pale. Egghead is uncharacteristically unnerving throughout this sequence, and not even because he acts that differently than usual. It's not just that he maintains the same joyous attitude during what feels like the end of the world, but then his rave slogans get more ominous and foreboding. His repeated calls for the "mother of mega" to "come down to us" while huge chunks of glass and wood fall from the ceiling makes it sound like he's thrilled about the possibility of the pale killing him and his friends. It's uncanny how with the slightest tonal shift he goes from a jovial party animal to sounding like a rapturous cultist ushering an elder God into the world.
  • Egg Head's portrait itself is rather unnerving, too. The way the light catches his closed eyes looks instead like they're glowing orange, with his bleached hair seemingly glowing. He looks less like a raver and more like some kind of supernatural entity. Thankfully, your initial conversations with him are hilarious enough to offset it.
• Some of the Apocalypse Cop's declarations are surprisingly ominous even if the archetype is generally played for laughs. What's even more disconcerting is that these predictions are implied to be right because of the seemingly irreversible growth of the Pale.
  The wolf is at the door, Kim. It will eat the sun.
• The paintings that go with the various entries in the Thought Cabinet. More often than not, they're filled with surreal, grotesque Body Horror that feels like Francis Bacon by way of Hieronymus Bosch. The giant painted mural that the artwork of all the thoughts are sourced from has a particularly Bosch-esque quality because of how all the shapes and characters in it are mashed against one another.
• It's tucked away in a conversation with the pawn shop owner, Roy, but it's revealed that Revachol once had a nuclear reactor designed and built cheaply in a leftist effort to deliver energy to the working class. We're then told - vaguely - that the reactor failed and became the subject of an arduous cleanup, with Roy and others trying to remove radioactive waste spilled from what became known as the People's Pile. It didn't work. Roy goes on to note that the radiation probably got into everything in Revachol - even Harry.
  • Even worse once you get into the details. The People's Pile didn't fail due to sabotage, or some sort of wild plot by the enemies of the Communists- it was a bunch of civilians trying to build a nuclear reactor with absolutely no expertise. They simply wanted to provide a brighter, cleaner future for the people around them... and then reality ensued.
  • The only other lasting effect of the effort other than the radiation is the creation of an anti-radiation drug known as pyrholidon, which was handed out to civilian rescue forces cleaning up the aftermath. It has since become a modestly popular street drug due to how wantonly it was handed out, but is noted to only really be accessible to people who were affected directly by the Pile, or were a part of the cleanup effort. One of the very few places you can find doses of pyrholidon in-game is inside the apartment of one of the only teenagers in Martinaise.
• Arresting Klaasje for whatever reason and having high Shivers shows you a vision where the arrest predictably results in the ICP coming to take her away for... God knows what. Given Klassje has been utterly desperate to escape them, has alluded to numerous atrocities, and is partially a party animal to help self-medicate from the trauma, whatever it is won't be pretty. But we don't know, because:
  SHIVERS - Inside, in a cell, a young woman is withdrawing from amphetamines, barbiturates and alcohol. All at once. While two men in brown suits wave ICP badges at a young policeman. She hears the door open...
  SHIVERS - ...and knows it's over. They've come for her. Outside [...] the river flows [into] the Bay of Martinaise.
• Dolores Dei, the most important Innocence in the setting. She was a Humanoid Abomination with glowing lungs and preternatural knowledge. People close to her eventually noticed she was forgetting to breathe for minutes at a time. As her reign went on she began to grow more and more megalomaniacal. Eventually, she began to ruthlessly stamp out societies that didn’t align with her vision of the future, going so far as to call her army “The Army of Humanity” as if to her imply her enemies weren’t even human. Her later actions are so bad not even most modern Moralists can justify them. She was eventually killed by one of her own secret service agents who screamed “We should have come up with this ourselves!”. And judging by the information we have on the Pale from Word of God and background material, he was right.

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