Two weeks ago, Disco Elysium was immediately dubbed the Second Coming of Planescape: Torment. After two weeks, these comparisons have died down a bit.

The comparison was mostly surface-deep. The two games share an amnesic protagonist, excellent writing, a weird setting, and lots of text. Disco Elysium is doing its own thing, though. It is brilliantly funny and creative, both in its world-building and its mechanics. It is also great for this particularly moment, October of 2019, because it resonates with growing frustration with neoliberal capitalism. For many people, it’s 2019’s Game of the Year.

But I’ve seen one piece of criticism stand out: the ending sucks. More precisely, the conclusion to the murder mystery feels like a disappointment. It’s a fair criticism.

After thinking about the ending for a while, though, I think the ending works. Let me explain why.

Obviously, spoilers below.

The Case for Why The Ending Sucks

Harrier Du Bois (a.k.a. Raphael Ambrosius Costeau) (a.k.a. “The Gloaming”) spends the bulk of his time in Martinaise investigating half-truths and interrogating complicated characters. It works like any good detective fiction. We start with a too-simple-to-be-true narrative: there’s a labor dispute, some folks got drunk and rowdy, and a company man is hung. Right off the bat, Kim Kitsuragi dismisses the proposition that this is a “mysterious” case.

But Du Bois uncovers facts that don’t quite fit with that narrative. He tugs on the thread and the hanging story unravels. Then the player tries to tie weave these threads into a story that fits the evidence.

Did Klaasje kill Lely for reasons we don’t know yet? Was this a revenge killing by Ruby, a spurned would-be lover? Is Klaasje who she says she is? Maybe the merc got merc’d by another merc? Does the peephole factor into this? Was the bullet meant for Klaasje instead? Was Klaasje even there that night? Who does the eighth footprint belong to? Why is Titus fighting so hard to hide Ruby? Where did this fourth merc come from?

Then, however, the finale renders most of these questions moot. We stumble upon the culprit, The Deserter, a holdout from the communist revolution nearly half a century before. He snipes residents of Martinaise without much reasoning beyond, “They are subjects of a decadent bourgeois world order and traitors to the working class.” From my playthrough, at least, it wasn’t clear that he even knows who Lely or Klaasje are. Sure, we find him by analyzing where the shot could have come from, but we have no idea who this guy is.

So after investigating half-truths and sussing out motives, the killer turned out to be a hermit with no connection to any other character. None of the participants in the violent catharsis outside the Whirling-In-Rags know the real reason for Lely’s death. It’s an absurd result.

And it’s disappointing! Nobody likes a mystery with an answer that comes completely out of left field. The more transcendent parts of the finale (the phasmid and Dolores Deis) don’t fix that.

But I think that disappointment works in the story’s favor. It is a break with the rules of the genre. That break resonates with the world that Disco Elysium builds more than the straightforward whodunnit conclusion that we’re primed to look forward to.

The Rules of Detective Fiction