Conversation

ive enjoyed my time with Disco Elysium, but something has scratched at the back of my mind the entire way thourgh.

that an Estonian team of all people would put together an invented alternate to our world where the political focus is largely on how awful that worlds version of EU/NATO is, symbols of centrism, while completely removing the USSR/Russia from existence, instead replacing it with a "glorious revolution communist".

That overt decision stratches at me. The game is often at its more vicious when critiquing the uselessness of the EU countries and their "slow, glacial, democracy" that has destroyed the country.

Yet the Estonians i know, tend to view a lot of their country's long term existence as the struggle between the Europe and Russia with a huge emphasis on the forced deportations that Stalin inflicted on their population post WW2 and imperialist attempts to genetically Russify the population. This is a country where soviet statues were torn down and every year there are fights over attempts to build them again.

So over the game this bad taste just built up for me that i couldnt put away and slowly disconnected me from the motifs it was putting forward. Something felt deeply compromised.