by Modris Walker
“I lost my memory, too, but I like it. It’s like I get to create a whole new me, start again from scratch” (Disco Elysium).
Following the disbandment of the original creative team behind the hit computer role-playing game (CRPG) Disco Elysium in 2022, Eurogamer news reporter Victoria Kennedy conducted an interview with several former ZA/UM employees surrounding a cancelled project, codenamed X7, that was supposed to be a standalone spinoff of Disco Elysium. “[X7] would have advanced the story, the emotional threads, and gameplay elements all at once to truly evolve the genre of psychological RPG as Disco Elysium started it,” explained lead writer Dora Klindžić (qtd. in Kennedy 2024). Despite the many attempts to develop a spiritual successor that could continue the legacy Klindžić identified (Litchfield 2024; Lewis 2025; Kennedy 2025) one has yet to be found, leaving the emerging psychological RPG genre unfilled… and undefined.
Video games are recognized by many as a postmodern media form, often taking from a variety of external sources and cultural inspirations (Garda 2020). Not to be confused with the preexisting (and popular) subgenre of psychological horror, the psychological RPG genre is likely an extension of the broader literary genre of psychological fiction. Psychological fiction, occasionally correlated with the neurological novel subgenre (Roth 2009), focuses on the mind and internal dialogues of its characters (“Psychological fiction” 2023). This pattern of focusing on the mind mirrors the original goal of Disco Elysium’s lead writer Robert Kurvitz: to create a game able to simulate how the human mind works (qtd. in GameSpot 2020). These parallels may lead one to wonder: Is a psychological RPG truly the best descriptor to put to this new subgenre that Disco Elysium has created? Or would it be more appropriate, taking into account the unique characteristics that video games offer, to label the experiences created for the players by ZA/UM as a neuropsychological RPG?
A Game Unlike The Rest
Disco Elysium is a role-playing game released in 2019 by Estonian game development studio ZA/UM. Written and designed by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvits, the independent studio’s breakout title was originally released for Windows in October 2019 and Mac OS in April 2020. An expanded version–featuring full voice acting and new content–was released under the name Disco Elysium: The Final Cut on all consoles in 2021 (“Disco Elysium” 2020) and is the version being used for this analysis.
Fitting within just a few city blocks in the district of Martinaise, an impoverished part of the city of Revachol, the player follows police detective Harrier ‘Harry’ Du Bois as he investigates a lynching outside the hotel Whirling-In-Rags, where he awakes- hungover and with no clue who he is. Utilizing a unique skill system, Harry must explore Martinaise to solve the murder, unravel the political web around it, and ultimately find out who he was and who he now becomes.
What Makes A Genre?
Generic analysis is a subset of rhetorical analysis wherein a critic tries to find commonalities between rhetorical artifacts (the pieces of media under rhetorical study) instead of focusing on a singular object. The ultimate purpose of generic analysis, also known as generic criticism, is to “understand rhetorical practices in different time periods and in different places by discerning the similarities in rhetorical situations and the rhetoric constructed in response to them” (Foss 2009, p. 137). Genre itself is a French word referring to “a distinct group, type, class, or category of artifacts that share important characteristics that differentiate it from other groups” (Foss 2009, p. 137) and is made up of three key elements: situational requirements, which establish the context surrounding a rhetorical artifact; substantive and stylistic characteristics, which define the content and form of the artifact respectively; and the organizing principle, which both acts as a sort of thesis for the genre and as an umbrella term for the other two elements combined (Foss 2009, p. 137-138). Generic description, the method used for this analysis, is the process of analyzing the individual characteristics of an artifact(s) to discover if a new genre is able to be named (Foss 2009, p. 140).
Despite this relatively simplistic structure, video game genres are harder to classify. Not only is there no one overarching taxonomy accepted to categorize video games, but any attempt to create one must also take into account the crucial element of the player’s agency within the video game. In this generic case study of Disco Elysium, I will utilize a taxonomy system proposed by Doug Church in 1999 (originally made to create a common game design vocabulary) that identifies three functional and formal aspects of computer games that appear in varying degrees in any given game: the ludic game, the narrative, and the simulation (p. 5). This is especially useful because Church makes a point to note that RPGs are an example of a game genre that “incorporate[s] prominent features of all forms, being games, simulators and narratives” (1999, p. 5).
Don’t The Voices in Your Head Talk To You?
One of the fundamental characteristics of the RPG genre is character progression and character customization. Defined by Roger Altizer and J. Zagal in a 2014 study, “[Character progression] refer[s] to rules and game mechanisms that articulate or define how player’s characters improve from one game session to the next” (p. 2). Within Disco Elysium, this character progression system is seen in the 24 skills made available to the character when they boot up the game.
These skills–split into the four sections Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics–are widely understood to be the personifications of Harry’s shattered psyche (Tudor-Alexander 2025), but their organizational structure and in-game function act more like the neurological structure and function of Harry’s own brain. Intellect, which acts as the logical center and aids in information processing, represents the left cerebral hemisphere which primarily operates in linear reasoning functions of language and mathematics (“Cerebral hemisphere” 2020, Park 2012). Psyche, the social and emotional counterpart to Intellect, mirrors the right cerebral hemisphere, which processes intonation, social cues and facial expressions (“Cerebral hemisphere” 2020, Hartikainen 2021). Physique and Motorics control Harry’s bodily functions (muscle strength/stimulation tolerance and coordination/perception respectively) and are representative of the cerebellum and spinal cord (John Hopkins 2025).
Who Is Left Behind?
Within literary fiction, amnesia narratives are often used to grapple with the intricacies of memory, identity, psychological hardship, and the price of forgetting (Tougaw 2021). Within video games, amnesia stories are told to explore similar themes, but with the added aspect of utilizing player agency to expand them: using them as a driving force to aid and bring variety to the act of character development (Valentine 2010, p. 49).
In Harry Du Bois’s case, his amnesia is the narrative separation between Harry Du Bois the protagonist and what is left behind for the player to control. In video game studies, an ‘avatar’ is
common parlance for the embodied representation of player agency. As Rune Klevjer defines in her 2006 thesis on the subject of the avatar, “An avatar is an instrument that defines for the participant a fictional body and mediates fictional agency; it is an embodied incarnation of the acting subject” (p. 87). An avatar, as a representation of the player’s ability to interact with the world, is chosen upon starting the game. In Disco Elysium the world opens on a black screen, the player only able to interact with two voices: Ancient Reptilian Brain and The Limbic System.
Figure 3: A video showcasing the opening cutscene of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut. © ZA/UM 2019.
Harry’s identity isn’t discovered by the player until multiple hours into their playthrough, implying that whoever they have been controlling isn’t Harry–it’s what’s left behind. The jumbled mess of semantic memory and unknown muscle reactions the player starts off with can only be identified as an amalgamation of Harry’s nervous system (an interpretation corroborated by the nervous system imagery seen in the Thought Cabinet user interface (UI) screen).
Figure 4: The Thought Cabinet screen in Disco Elysium. © ZA/UM 2019.
Putting It Together
On one of the promotional posters for Disco Elysium, the tagline reads ‘What kind of cop are you?’ A clear reference to the central mechanic of players choosing their path within the game, the tagline also points to something deeper: the simulated experience achieved by the RPG mechanics and narrative structure within Disco Elysium is one of dictating who Harry Du Bois will be, both psychologically and neurologically.
Figure 5: A promotional poster for Disco Elysium. © ZA/UM 2019.
Concepts of the self are varied and many, but to take from a multilayer model of the self explained by Nicola Zippel in her 2012 article “Thinking of Identity as Self and Body. Recent Contributions from Phenomenology, Cognitive Studies, and Neuroscience”:
[B]oth body and world, at the level of consciousness’ experience, “belong to one and a single act of consciousness, constituted by two irreducible but inseparable modes of givenness (the bodily subjectivity and the intentionality of experience)” The notion allowing to bring together the subjective and the intentional forms of experiencing is the one of body as a “volume”, i.e. a s an entity present in the world that, given its localized and oriented nature, permits the subject to relate to the environment. (Legrand 2011, p. 212, qtd in pg. 93)
Harry Du Bois’s construction of self is tasked to the player by the combined bodily experience of the nervous system-as-avatar the player controls and the episodic memory of the world around him as he makes his way through the game’s events. Examples of this overlap can be found in both the inner monologue that interrupts non-playable character (NPC) conversation, each skills fighting for their chance to speak and influence their decisions, decided purely by Dungeons and Dragons-esc skill checks (Tudor-Alexander 2025, p. 414); and the Thought Cabinet, a system described by Kurvitz himself as loot aquired through conversations, allowing Harry to gain access to insights about himself he previously had lost (qtd. in GameSpot 2020).
Figure 6: A video depicting an interaction with the Hardy Boys in Disco Elysium with multiple skulls interrupting and interacting. © ZA/UM 2019.
This is the true nature of the neuropsychological RPG: a subgenre that facilitates player-driven identity formation and exploration through the agency given by RPG mechanics such as character customization, progression and NPC interactions. Further analysis will be needed to smooth out the theory proposed here; after all, Disco Elysium is only a singular example and cannot sustain a whole pattern on it’s own.
Either way, the neuropsychological RPG achieved by Disco Elysium is a unique and revolutionary way to approach character-driven and narrative-rich storytelling in a way that’s both engaging and captivating to the player.
Works Cited
References
Disco Elysium. (2020, February 2). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Elysium
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut. ZA/UM, 2021. Windows PC.
Dude Freak. (2025). Huge multi skill conversation and argument. Youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raBxBErbbM0
Foss, S. K. (2018). Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice (5th ed.). Waveland Press.
GameSpot. (2020, January 12). The Feature That Almost Sank Disco Elysium | Audio Logs. Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X0-W5erEXw
Garda, M. B. (2020). “Limits of Genre, Limits of Fantasy”: Rethinking Computer Role-Playing Games. In A. L. Brackin & Natacha Guyot (Eds.), Cultural Perspectives of Video Games: from Designer to Player (pp. 91–99). Brill. https://brill.com/display/title/54994
Hartikainen, K. M. (2021). Emotion-Attention Interaction in the Right Hemisphere. Brain Sciences, 11(8), 1006. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11081006
Johns Hopkins Medicine. (2025). Brain Anatomy and How the Brain Works. Johns Hopkins Medicine; Johns Hopkins Medicine. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/anatomy-of-the-brain
Kennedy, V. P. (2024, June 10). Cancelled standalone Disco Elysium spin-off would have been “most hardcore Disco since Disco.” Eurogamer.net. https://www.eurogamer.net/cancelled-standalone-disco-elysium-spin-off-would-have-been-most-hardcore-disco-since-disco
Kennedy, V. P. (2025, January 23). Disco Elysium spiritual successor Hopetown plans to “redefine” psychological RPG genre. Eurogamer.net. https://www.eurogamer.net/disco-elysium-spiritual-successor-hopetown-plans-to-redefine-psychological-rpg-genre
Lewis, C. (2025, September 18). The Disco Elysium spiritual successor rivalry gets even more confusing as one of the studios made of former ZA/UM devs change their new RPG’s name and gameplay style. GamesRadar+. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/the-disco-elysium-spiritual-successor-rivalry-gets-even-more-confusing-as-one-of-the-studios-made-of-former-za-um-devs-change-their-new-rpgs-name-and-gameplay-style/
Litchfield, T. (2024, October 28). With no Disco Elysium 2 in sight, who exactly are behind the 5 studios of Disco devs now vying to make its spiritual successor? PC Gamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/disco-elysium-successor-studios-overview/
Park, Dr. D. (2024). Study Links Math Abilities to Left-Right Brain Communication. News Center. https://news.utdallas.edu/health-medicine/study-links-math-abilities-to-left-right-brain-com/
Psychological fiction. (2023, May 20). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_fiction
Roth, M. (2009, August 3). The Rise of the Neuronovel. N+1. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-8/essays/the-rise-of-the-neuronovel/
Rune Klevjer. (2006, January 1). What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242412375_What_is_the_Avatar_Fiction_and_Embodiment_in_Avatar-Based_Singleplayer_Computer_Games
Rusu, T.-A. (2025). Disco Elysium: Voices and Thoughts. A brief overview of Skill Voices and The Thought Cabinet. EON, 6(3), 408–418. https://doi.org/10.56177/eon.6.3.2025.art.12
Sergio Varela. (2021, March 30). Disco Elysium (Final Cut): Intro. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V12Zt9209XM
Tougaw, J. (2021). Amnesia Narratives: Memory, Forgetting, and Identity. European Journal of American Studies, 16(4). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.17472
Valentine, L. (2010). AMNESIAC AVATARS -THE ROLE OF MEMORY LOSS IN FANTASY AND GAME. https://dl.uncw.edu/etd/2010-1/valentinel/lennyvalentine.pdf
Wikipedia Contributors. (2020, January 12). Cerebral hemisphere. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_hemisphere
ZA/UM. (n.d.-a). Disco Elysium Poster. In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 9, 2026, from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/Disco_Elysium_Poster.jpeg
ZA/UM. (n.d.-b). Disco Elysium Skill Selection. In Disco Elysium Wiki. https://discoelysium.wiki.gg/images/Skill_selection.jpg?8f1d2b=&format=original
ZA/UM. (n.d.-c). Disco Elysium Thought Locker. In Disco Elysium Gamepedia. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/discoelysium_gamepedia_en/images/0/06/DE_Thought_Locker.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20220125111334
Zagal, J., & Altizer, R. (2017). Examining “RPG elements”: Systems of character progression. International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Examining-%27RPG-elements%27%3A-Systems-of-character-Zagal-Altizer/c0dc7105afe5ca318a2a41c6515829f4f9c10279
Zippel, N. (2024). Thinking of Identity as Self and Body. Recent Contributions from Phenomenology, Cognitive Studies, and Neuroscience. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.4453/rifp.2013.0006
