“After the World, the Pale; After the Pale, the World Again”: The Slow Apocalypse of Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is a 2019 video game where the player plays as Harry DuBois, an amnesiac policeman and complete disaster of a human being tasked with solving a murder. Unlike more traditional “post-apocalyptic” narratives, this game’s setting exists not after a catastrophe, but at the intersection of several. It is a story where the world at once has ended (failed social and political revolutions of the past), is ending (Harry’s own obliteration of and struggle to rebuild the self), and will end (the Pale, connective tissue that both holds the world together and will someday swallow it). All the game’s characters are caught in a moment between the failures of the past and the inevitability of destruction in the future, unable to change either. Yet this is not cause for despair, but an invitation to discover the wondrous in the everyday and rebuild freed from normative demands.