You can describe Disco Elysium in three equally-accurate ways:

The smartest thing about Disco Elysium is how cleanly it delineates these, and demonstrates that they are by no means one and the same. In fact, it is only successful as a political game—that is to say, a game whose ideology is deeply built into both its narrative and its mechanics—because it understands how facile and fruitless it is to simply make a game in which politics are discussed and played out.

The "game mechanic" aspect of its politics is the most evident, as you play through the game: you, as the amnesiac detective Harry Du Bois, are offered ample opportunity to spout political takes on what you observe along the course of your investigation. Both the game and its various characters take note of which beliefs you declare: you can mark yourself as a bigoted fascist or a radical communist, come out as a free-market-supporting "ultraliberal," or stick to the "moralist" perspective that these situations are too complicated to declare easy right-or-wrong judgments on them. Several days into your investigation, you are prompted to go on a "vision quest" for your preferred political ideology, deepening your ties to it and exploring the role it plays in the dilapidated city of Revachol.

That's the take that makes Disco Elysium sound an awful lot like other video games, which it decidedly is not. Plenty of games have played with moral alignments of various kinds, or given their player a choice to align with various political factions. Games are all about empowerment, after all—are they not? A better game is a game that frees its player to do whatever he or she or they think would be fun.

But Disco Elysium is decidedly NOT a sandbox game in that sense of the word. This universe is not yours to reign over. It's not just that your power to affect change severely limited, either: the game's central conceit is that you don't even get to decide who you are.

Harry wakes up one day with a hangover and severe amnesia. You quickly learn that he has been in Revachol for this investigation for several days already; you don't know exactly what he did across those days, but the horrified and hostile responses you get around town suggest that he was up to nothing good. Beyond that, his past is a blank: you don't know who he used to work with, whether he was good at his job (or even what his exact job is), how old he is, or how he got to this sorry place in life. And while you can make new choices for Harry going forward—severely curtailed by random chance, by a limited player-designed skillset, and by the impressions he's already made on everybody around him—one thing the game impresses upon you over and over again is that you will not be able to take back your past actions, no matter how dearly you'd like people to believe that you've outgrown them.

This is analogous to the game's take on history, too. You know nothing about this world's history, its geography, or even its basic physics. As in many games, and many works of fiction, Disco Elysium slowly fills in the gaps in your knowledge, via (biased) books and (biased) characters and (unavoidable) material evidence of what this town has been put through. Unlike most other games, however, Revachol's history is not mere window-dressing. It is intricately connected to the murder you're here to investigate, and to the hotel you find yourself staying in, and to every person you encounter, however major or minor a role they may be playing. If on one level you're really investigating who you are, on another level you're investigating what this world is. The present is forever inseparable from its past.

Which takes us back to the gameplay mechanics. As time goes on, you begin to realize that declaring your political alignment has nothing to do with constructing a version of Harry who can meaningfully enact change, because Harry can't meaningfully enact change. Your declaration of your politics is really just a declaration of your personality: who you'd like to be, perhaps, or who you'd like others to think you are. It rarely matters what you say to someone at all—it opens and closes very few doors. On the other hand, your actions are transformative. How you act, how you treat others, affects the flow of the game, resulting in storylines that play out wildly differently based on your behavior.

And in a game that centers you trying to discover the truth behind a tangled web of cover-ups and lies, perhaps it's unsurprising that the people you meet declare their identities in similarly untrustworthy ways. The union boss who's running the local workers' strike says one thing and does another; the corporate rep who's positioned as the unions' main adversary similarly talks a fine game that has nothing to do with her company's actions.

You can spend an endless amount of time trying to unravel who's being sincere where, which characters can be "believed," and which ones are full of shit, but on some level it's pointless to do so. What matters is that, at the end of the day, these people allow certain things to happen but not others; they will lift a finger under certain conditions but not others. The lovely Joyce Messier will tell you that she strongly opposed Wild Pines sending armed mercenaries to Revachol to deal with the union, and she'll openly tell you that she harbors communist sympathies herself—but at the end of the day, she is content to represent her company, armed mercenaries or no, and she will continue to position herself against the union as if it's her job, because it is. That might not define her character, but it certainly defines her politics—and one of the central themes of Disco Elysium is that action alone defines politics. What we say is not who we are.

In the end, it doesn't matter what you define Harry as politically. All of his potential ideologies, and all his potential "copotypes"—personas like Superstar Cop, Honor Cop, Sorry Cop, and Hobocop—are just attempts to assert a control over reality that Harry flatly cannot have. In this sense, the political isn't just personal, it's psychological. Politics, like anything else, is a way to assert control and take power, and the underlying question is always why somebody wants to assert control, why they want power, and what they intend to do with the power they're given. (In Harry's case, suffice it to say that anyone who drinks so hard they lose their identity wanted to escape themselves pretty bad. More than anything, Harry is desperate to stop being himself—to change his life, not in the present, but in the past.)

Look beneath the surface, and you'll notice that Disco Elysium defines all of its political ideologies by their relationship to material reality and power. On the fascist vision quest, for instance, you quickly notice that none of the fascists you meet have the same political beliefs. One lorry driver is a lonely man who begrudges that women are drawn to more handsome and successful men than he. An elderly soldier bitterly resents that the world moved past the monarchy he swore his life to, and thinks the world has fallen from grace as a result. A tall, jacked-up racist thinks that everything boils down to bloodlines—and justifies his attraction to women who aren't his "superior" race by touting the virtues of semen retention. And Gary the Cryptofacist is just a nebbishy dweeb who buys into racist conspiracy theories as a hobby: he thinks his magazines have helped him understand the world, by connecting dots that never really existed in the first place.

Fascists, in other words, are united not by singular beliefs or political stances: they are united by a vision of a world that is somehow made "right," and their guiding political compass is simply to assert their bullshit explanations and rationalizations onto the world, until everybody is forced to align with their version of reality. Some of them are fueled by resentment or a sense of personal injustice; some of them are driven by a belief that they alone know the way things "should" be. Their stated beliefs matter less than their shared assumption that the world ought to be forcibly aligned according to their standards.

This same sort of materialism applies to the other political factions too. "Ultraliberals" are convinced of the virtues of the free market: it's every man's responsibility to earn his worth, and the world should be shaped by the byproducts of their attempts to make bank. Communists are driven by their belief in workers seizing power for themselves, and are as suspicious of any non-labor form of power as they are forgiving of the corruption and abuses of those who claim to act on labor's behalf. And "moralists," who are Disco Elysium's centrist ruling class, hold that abstract economic and governmental theories are the key to making the world a better place, and hold themselves aloft from the concerns and struggles of people right under their noses—save, that is, for the fact that they possess superior firepower and will eagerly slaughter any group of people who seem to threaten their control.

Looking through this lens, it starts to make sense why Disco Elysium seems to save the worst of its contempt for moralists, while it approaches fascists more with mockery than with anything else. It parallels, I think, the frustration that many Americans have with centrist politicians and institutions, even while the threat from the right is more conspicuously violent and dictatorial. On the one hand, it is horrifying to have soldiers patrolling the streets of cities, or masked men hauling American citizens into vans. But there is something uniquely infuriating to the way that publications like the New York Times or politicians like Hakeem Jeffries treat fascism like it's a thought experiment, handling the crises in our government and our nation with kid gloves, refusing to violate their own sense of "standards" even as citizens are dying. In fact, by treating fascists like they're intellectually serious and worthy of sober political thought, they grant fascists a dignity and a respect and a power that should never be offered to them. Fascist ideology is dangerous and brutish, but it only has as much power as our institutions allow them to have—so the fact that our institutions so calmly hand them power is enough to make even the mildest leftist see red.

Fascists are delusional, in other words, but they seek material power to act upon their delusions. Moralists, in Disco Elysium's parlance, have power, but they refuse to concern themselves with material reality, focusing instead on abstraction and ideology that they insist will eventually supplant whatever woes the world has here-and-now. Is this a completely fair assessment of all centrists and all fascists and all leftists? Absolutely not—and in Disco Elysium, there are ostensible moralists who get their hands dirty, just as there are plenty of communists who talk a big game but affect absolutely no change. I think the game would argue that these distinctions matter more than the ideological ones: better to call yourself a moralist while taking action to make the world a better place than to call yourself a communist and spend all your time picking fights with other communists. 

And regardless of which political ideology you've chosen to stan in your run of the game, Disco Elysium makes sure to end on a note that makes it clear where its priorities lie.

(Spoilers, obviously, follow.)

First, there is the matter of the killer. It's safe to say that Disco Elysium has no interest in being a conventional whodunnit: it's far more interested in your investigation of Revachol and of Harry himself than in any kind of fancy footwork where culprit and motive are concerned. When it comes to making progress on your case, you're rewarded far more for discovering the secrets of this city and its inhabitants than you are for sniffing out individual motives. And that's a good thing, because it turns out that the killer isn't someone you've met at all—and he's significant not because of who he is, but because of where exactly he fits into the world at large, and how he justifies his actions.

Iosef Lilianovich Dros, referred to in-game as The Deserter, is an ancient communist who once witnessed the senseless massacre of the revolutionaries he was supposed to lead into battle. Traumatized by his loss (and by the way he fled the scene in order to survive), he has spent forty years observing the world through a sniper's lens, bitterly despising that the only "true believers" he ever knew were all killed for their convictions, convincing himself that anyone who dares live a life after such atrocities must not be human at all.

The man he kills, a mercenary mostly known as Lely, is by no means a good man. At some point, you can persuade a former squadmate of his to regale you with stories of how he acted in third-world countries; beyond massacring men, women, and children alike, Lely's crimes extend to literal cannibalism, among other things. And partway through the game, the surviving mercenaries become a far more pressing concern than your still-missing killer: they get drunk, and a bloodbath ensues. Play your cards right, and you might limit the killings to "only" six or seven people; make a mistake, and quite a few more people will die.

In this light, Disco Elysium's central mystery might be seen as a simple pro-communist, anti-imperialist bit of propaganda. Sure, Iosef shot and killed a man, but didn't that man really have it coming? That's not the whole truth, though: investigate more thoroughly, and you'll learn that Iosef didn't kill Lely for any political reason at all. Simply put, he was a stalker, lusting after a woman who lived an island away, carving peepholes into her bedroom wall so he could watch her fuck the mercenary up close, bitterly hating her for fornicating with—and potentially even loving—a man who wasn't him. Who the man was hardly mattered—though Iosef, of course, is invested in convincing himself that this was a political assassination for a righteous cause.

Your encounter with Iosef is momentous, not because Iosef matters to you, but because it matters what Iosef has become. He is a specter of history, reflecting its loss and pain and bitterness, but he is also a man who has devoted his entire life to never letting go of the past. He has not lived his life. The only way he's touched the world is through the barrel of a gun—once to murder Lely, and once to help a union boss murder his rival. (And in the aftermath of that, he predictably decided that the union boss in question wasn't "pure" enough, and was as much a part of "the bourgeoise" as everybody else he witnesses—and loathes—from behind his rifle scope.)

Iosef, in other words, is you. He's who you might become, if you grow so consumed with your need to escape yourself that you abandon every way you could have touched the world in the process. His ostensible communism is just that: ostensible. He repeatedly attempts to call Harry a racist, without ever backing up his claims, but he is far more defined by misogyny and homophobia (he despises that the woman he stalks has had sex with another woman) than he is by anything resembling a political belief.

Yet it's not quite as simple as that. Because Iosef was a communist, once upon a time, and he did lose everyone he ever cared about in a politically-motivated carpet bombing. He is a part of the wreckage of this world, unmistakably, unavoidably, like an infected wound left to fester. If he seems to reflect every other resident of Revachol, in some way, shape, or form, that's because they too are byproducts of its history. They live in a town whose buildings are riddled with bullet holes where the firing squads exterminated dozens of people at a time; they reside in bombed-out buildings whose top stories no longer exist. Their parents saw war, and they saw their parents, and if everybody's on some kind of drug or invested in some kind of conspiracy theory, well, that's just the world they were given to live in. And while Iosef turns into something pathetic and monstrous, you can hardly place blame for the state of the world on his shoulders—not when you meet people with genuine power and influence, people who could heal this city if they cared, and realize that those people could hardly give less of a shit for all the folks you've spent hours and days investing yourself in.

One of the most curious targets of the Disco Elysium fandom's hatred is a man referred to in-game as the Sunday Friend. He is mild-mannered, mostly amicable, and talks a big game about helping the police with their investigation, and he is despised. Why? Because he is a moralist, and a tourist. He witnessed (what is believed to be) Lely's lynching more clearly than anybody else in town, yet couldn't be bothered to call the cops about it. He visits his young lover in one of the poorest and saddest apartment complexes in Revachol, wearing a crisp shirt and tie, but none of what he sees affects him. He talks about the importance of economic stability, and he talks about the "process" for bringing democracy to war-torn nations, and he walks past people who are impoverished and dying, he witnesses fathers beating their young children, and none of it matters to him. He is a diplomat for the same political faction that murdered everyone Iosef ever knew, and he is only in town to score cheap sex off of a college student who knows full well that the Sunday Friend will disappear at the first sign of trouble. It doesn't matter that he's mild-mannered, or that he's amicable, or that he talks of nothing but wanting to help people. Does he help people? Does he own up to the responsibility of repairing the nation that his government helped destroy? Is there any doubt that, should signs of an uprising occur, he wouldn't sign the paper that legalizes another round of bombings and slaughter and traumatized children left to fester?

When I say that Disco Elysium is a political game, and not just a game about politics, this is what I mean. It is not invested in bludgeoning you over the head with its ideology; yes, it was made by out-and-proud communists, but it spends as much time critiquing advocates of communism as it critiques advocates of fascism or capitalism. It would be hypocritical of it to act as if saying anything about politics, or flat-out telling you which political ideology is the bestest, would make any material difference whatsoever. Disco Elysium's politics are as follows: you cannot help but live in the world that you've inherited, and your only choice is whether you care about improving the world while you still can. You can't save the world, and you can't undo what brought the world to this point: your only choice is whether or not you take up the responsibility of living in it.

You have two opportunities to speak to the woman who Harry believes to be the cause of all his troubles. You can call her exactly one time, late at night, and attempt to say something meaningful to her as she sleepily tries to respond. At best, however, the things you say confuse her; at worst, they disturb her, less for what you're saying than because she has made it clear to you, again and again, that she no longer wants to be a part of your life.

Later, on Iosef's island, Harry has a dream of his ex, though in the dream she's turned into the woman-slash-saint who has shaped most of the modern world: the "innocence" Dolores Dei. While some of what Dolores says is more grandiose and fanciful, and while she's crueler in her summary judgments of Harry, the takeaway message is the same. What matters, in the context of the game, is not simply that she's done with you: it's that nothing you say will make a difference. You can call yourself an aspiring revolutionary, or a hotshot detective; you can buy her the things she used to love. None of that undoes your history. And nothing you say can change the present. Nothing you say matters nearly as much as what you do, and what you've done, and what you can no longer do at all.