I do wonder, though, if in a few years time, I won’t be much colder on Disco. Partly that’s because it feels like it has little to say about the most recent developments in global politics (which is fair, given the speed of these things). But it’s also because, despite Sunday Friend’s words, it feels like ZA/UM never let themselves have an opinion.

Disco Elysium is a game that is confident diagnosing social and historical illness, but it never finds a coherent ideology to support (unless you do a deep reading on some of the game's "supranatural" elements, but even then, I don't know that it’s “coherent" enough to be useful). Instead, like Parker and Stone if they’d done a grad seminar in Post-Marxism before making South Park, ZA/UM spends its energy swinging fists at every target it can.

The game's laissez-faire capitalists are the root cause of the world’s issues, and their wealth prevents them from seeing the problems (literally in some cases). The fascists feel that something is broken, but Disco is a game that knows that feelings lie (this is partly what’s so great about personifying your skillset), and so they turn towards racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism for easy answers that only make the problems worse. The game's communists know exactly what is broken but are only ever naïve clowns, corrupt hypocrites, corpses, or something in between. And the Moralist International (the game’s take on third way centrists) are the worst of all: Not only are they implicated in a historical betrayal of the working class in order to gain power, they know that something is still broken. They’re just either too cowardly to change it or else enjoy the status quo more than they're willing to let on.