I want to introduce a game called disco elysium1 which I felt it did not lie to me even it was a fiction. gAME starts with a dead man hanging from a tree and ends with finding the murderer. but I don’t believe it’s about the murder at all.
It’s about what remains after everything collapses. It’s about failure, and what grows inside failure if you stay there long enough. This failure is captured both in a person and in a city.
The city is Revachol. a discarded capital.
And the way you move through it matters. You walk like a flâneur2. and because the map doesn’t pull you, you drift.
the city is designed to be believable in the game because it does not function.. Its zoning isn’t spatial, it’s ideological. The rich are in solitary on islands, the working class walk in ghosted industrial zones. There’s no clean hierarchy, only historical residue.
This historical residue reflects ideologies that once shaped the city. Some people and buildings pretend like there is a liberal system that you are still a part of. Some of them are surrounded by thoughts of one flag which is too faded to mean something now. Some of them still believe in unity while leaning on to other.
And while everything has its own opinion, the architecture all together carry too much to speak clearly.
“I’m gonna make the working man as rich as Joyce Messier. That’s my job. Just like yours is to keep the peace.”3
“F*** does Cuno care?” The boy turns to you. (He doesn’t care.)4
Once a glamorous twelve story tenement, Capeside apartments did not fare well in the Antecentennial Revolution. Smashed to bits by Coalition artillery, then shot up in the fighting and filled with 4.46 mm bullets, the stone walls now barely rise to the fourth floor and provide marginal shelter to the weak, the disenfranchised, and the powerless.5
What moves me most is that the game doesn’t use architecture as scenery. It treats it as language. You can read Revachol from its bricks, its tiles, its dead-end staircases. I believe that’s what makes it so powerful.
You walk through a city, and if you’re paying attention, it tells you what’s been tried. What’s been broken. What it hoped for. What it gave up on.
And Revachol, for all its failure, still speaks.
- https://zaumstudio.com/#disco-elysium ↩︎
- someone who walks around not doing anything in particular but watching people and society.
-cambridge dictionary ↩︎ - https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Evrart_Claire ↩︎
- https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Cuno ↩︎
- https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Capeside_apartments ↩︎
this is not. 