Contemporaries Essays

The most expensive thing you can buy in Disco Elysium is a streetlight. It sits in the corner of the pawn shop on Rue de Saint-Ghislaine and has been modified…

Psychiatrist Marie Rudden describes a private, internal space her patient would withdraw to whenever he became anxious and confused — when the interpersonal reality insisted upon by others in his…

KIM KITSURAGI: “Not being hungover helps too.” I don’t drink anymore. Or at least I don’t drink with the apocalyptic fury I personified around a decade ago. No dramatic event…

Shivers come when the temperature drops and you become more keenly aware of your surroundings. It enables you to hear the city itself, to truly belong to the streets. It…

“Your shit is apart, and it’s rather unbecoming of a cop and a human being. It’s supposed to be the opposite of that: together.” So says the diegetically ambiguous voice…

In Kogonada’s debut feature film, Columbus (2017), two librarians take a brief moment away from the Dewey Decimal system to talk about reading and gaming. Considering their bookish nature, one…

Disco Elysium is one of those RPGs that it feels like you alone have played. I knew so many people playing at the same time as me, but I didn’t…

Early in Disco Elysium, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi arrives at the Whirling-in-Rags, the hostel where the player character, Harry Du Bois, has just emerged from an alcoholic spiral so intense as…

Inland Empire: DETECTIVEEsprit-De-Corps: ARRIVINGAuthority: ON THE SCENE Disco Elysium (2019) is an open-world roleplaying video game that opens with a familiar premise: the player character wakes up in a motel room with no…