Failure is not (always) the end
Disc Elysium it opens with you on the ground. Your character, whoever they are or whatever is left of them, is face down in an undescribed hotel room. You are on the surface, breaking the plane between the void and the living only to find yourself welcomed into the grandfather of all hangovers.
This is the introduction to the character through which you will live Disc Elysium. There are many things and they can become more: calculate, feel, think, judge, decided or repent. But right now, you’re at a minimum, possibly the lowest of the minimum.
Moments later, he may die trying to pull the fan tie off the ceiling. The headline says “The cop suffers a final heart attack,” and the boy makes the word “final” a lot of work.
Some people may be recovering Disc Elysium for the first time right now, as he has just received his Final cut it was updated and addressed to consoles. For some, this moment can be quite frustrating – going through the whole process of creating characters, only to die of a heart attack while trying to retrieve a piece of clothing. But I’m here to tell you: embrace those moments.
There are many ways to die Disc Elysium. Very few are noble or worthy. You can die hitting a mailbox, in a fight that you have no business or even just suffer intense mental damage from seeing your own face in the mirror.
Disc ElysiumFault moments are not terminal either. At first, if you’ve managed to resist the wear and tear of waking up and putting on some clothes, you can take it easy and go outside, just to be face to face with a pretty woman. With intense confidence and potentially unearned, you could try to flirt with her. And the words that are spread can be eloquent: “I want to fuck with you.”
In other games, failure can feel very bad. Getting this FALCED marker with uppercase and lowercase letters means that some content may have been blocked. Disc Elysium it’s okay with failure, though. It is written to embrace failure. And you really should do the same.
Let’s take the example of flirting: after your detective has had the will to talk and failed, the woman —Klaasje— laughs. He even asks you to say it again. It’s a humanizing moment that can even lead your character down the path of defining himself, as someone regrets it and always says things he regrets.
Right now, you’ve learned more about one of these Disc Elysiumkey characters, while also being able to establish an identity for your own character. After all, your cop has just come out into the air from a cataclysmic folder; maybe they apologize for all their wrong decisions, or at least they should be. These thoughts can be destroyed until you are finally the Sorry Cop.
This path opens through failure and you can continue to inform the dialogue throughout the game, because that is the kind of story Disc Elysium fabrics. Failure can be a game about the state, potentially, but trying to play in a “perfect” way means you can miss a lot of this world.
Failures feed into the setting of your narrative, so let’s be honest, your cop isn’t Sherlock Holmes. With enough points, they could combine visual calculation and logic to imagine crime scenes in real time, to discern the size of the boot of the prints in the mud, and then calculate the number of people present when a murder occurred. Oh, it is true, a murder occurred; apparently, your character is in the Martinaise district to find out why there is a body hanging in the garden behind the hotel.
However, you often cannot complete a task that a theoretically good inspector can do. It’s a struggle even to move the body, a task that becomes the focus of the first game. All attempts can cause your character to simply run out, unable to withstand the task. Your failures aren’t just deadly mailboxes and word disorders, but as you learn, your character has long been in Martinaise. Your ever-present companion, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, is not only here to help you, but to make sure the task you have completed is likely, as you are likely to no longer be at work.
It can be bad to fail at a checkup and see how the health counter is reduced or simply faced with humiliation. You may lose a lot of money in the first few games, or it might just make it a little difficult going forward. But if you are playing Disc Elysium for the first time, I can’t stress it enough: embrace those moments.
Failures can end up defining your police and, by extension, and making your game feel more like yours. Losing an option makes the next opportunity for progress even more serious: I didn’t like having to ask corporate negotiator Joyce for money to have a bed one more night, but I had to, because there was no source of income left. In a brief moment, I had to put my morale aside just to stay warm one more night, because I had failed catastrophically during the day and so many times before.
Nor is he just your character; many of Martinaise’s people have their own shortcomings. They could struggle to understand each other, or be seen for their old life because of a failure, or simply be bad people. One of my favorite moments is that Kim Kitsuragi, a brilliant human brilliance, says something wrong during a brainstorming session and realizes it instantly. When you see this inner realization and correction, which clashes with the anxiety of admitting the mistake out loud and committing to recording it, you can allow that moment to reflect and correct.
This is a small miscalculation with no critical narrative consequences, but it is a small kindness that you can bestow, as someone whose errors are much deeper than a simple inaccuracy. Because the guy Kim tries to drag out of the abyss is the least you can do.
Disc Elysium it is shaped by these faults and therefore I seriously ask you to embrace them. I’m as guilty of making savings as the next one, but of writing Disc Elysium it seems to reward those who are not afraid to fail. Each lost check adds more to your character as much as it takes out and makes their own situations feel their own. Of course, yes, you died trying to pull a loop on a ceiling fan, but you (the player) were also the one who urged your character to keep trying.
Failure can end up creating some of the most memorable moments of your time Disc Elysium. It could mean you end up playing the saddest excuse for a detective to never wash Martinaise, but at least he’s rarely a boring person.
