There are a lot of stories in Disco Elysium. The award-winning game has taken the detective story and the narrative RPG and welded them together so uniquely that it has, in a couple short months, become a new critical standard for thinking about games and the way they tell themselves. Players craft their own stories about their detectives rooting around with the impoverished and the wealthy and the saved and the damned and then, at the end, something miraculous happens: a mythological cryptid appears and tells you that none of this matters. And how that intersects with the rest of what Disco Elysium has going on is fascinating to me.

Amidst all the excitement of discovery and mystery, the game wraps its ending of ideological change and national struggle and personal discovery around a semi-mythical creature. Two elderly cryptid hunters put the protagonist on the case to find something that lives in the reeds around Martinaise. Their relationship is founded on an encounter that one of the pair claimed to have as a child: once, vaguely, this thing reared up out of the reeds in front of her, mysteriously wavering in and out of existence before receding. When they met, it made him fall in love with her. Now, years later, the pair hunt for it again, but late in life she worries that it was never really true to begin with. The infection that is consensus reality has crept in and robbed her of this impossible thing that happened to her.

Chris Breault has done a great job at outlining the stories that Disco Elysium tells and discussing them in terms of what lasts about them and what doesn’t. Your strange detective roams a small section of the world and then, at the end of things, probably continues on with their life in some capacity. It’s a game that takes place in the middle of a big world and many lives, and it functions similarly to a novella. Philosophers Deleuze & Guattari said that the novella was organized not around the question of “what will happen?” but instead “what happened?” As soon as you can figure out the world, as soon as the mystery that kicked us off is solved, then life returns to normal. When life returns to normal, the reader doesn’t have an incentive to stick around. As Breault writes, the end of the game returns its characters to “a status quo too boring to depict.”

So at the end of the game, when the player gets a weird feeling about the rushes surrounding an ailing assassin central to the main plot, it’s revealed that this cryptozoological stick bug is real. It appeared, lithe and leaking some kind of psychic fluid, and it waxed and waned, almost threatening to disappear and disprove itself somehow. Against all of the evidence presented to him, my detective believed in the cryptid, and it paid off. Contrary to everyone else, including his partner, he held out for belief.

“I exist,” it begins. The insulindian phasmid, the specific name of the cryptid, explains the universe. Here, beside the gunman that literally made the plot of this game appear with a single bang, we learn about the long history of this region. “Nothing ever ends for me,” it explains. “There is only room for two, maybe three pictures in my mind.” Later it tells me that its sense perceptions, memories, and experiences make it feel intruded upon. By what? “Shapes of plants and animals. And *internal* sensations. A swarm of sounds, tiny vibrations on the inside of my forearms - all speak of complexities totally beyond my understanding.” For the insulindian phasmid, what we call life is something to be put up with. It has to stand up on the face of things. It seems to have little joy or pain. Just a long series of things that have happened to it and a resiliency in the face of those happenings.

There is a purposeful otherworldly beauty here. Or maybe more precisely, there is a beauty of the world with the phasmid. We’ve spent the whole game digging around in the ruins of political ideology. Socialist weapons caches and cursed commercial districts lie in equal ruin while leaders and commoners alike champion the ideals that buried them. Martinaise tells dozens of stories about dashed hopes, and is overall quite bleak in its depiction of the possibility of a better future. You might make good friends. You might have a successful business. You might organize a better life for the people around you. But time will happen, and the human mind will happen, and the churning friction that works against all human creation will happen, and these things will pass on just like you will. Your works will measure against their potential for ruin, and like everything else, potential is always greater than actuality.