Early in the game they gain a partner, Kim Kitsuragi, another detective who acts as the protagonist's voice of professionalism and who offers advice or support in certain dialogue options.

Likewise, high Electrochemistry shields the player character from the negative effects of drugs and provides knowledge on them, but may also lead to substance abuse and other self-destructive, self-gratifying behaviours.

Elysium is made of "isolas", masses of land and sea that are separated from each other by the Pale, an inscrutable, mist-like "connective tissue" in which the laws of reality break down.

[1][12] Forty-nine years before the events of the game, a wave of communist revolutions swept multiple countries; the Suzerainty of Revachol, a monarchy that up to that point had been Elysium's pre-eminent superpower, was overthrown and replaced by a commune.

The player character wakes up in a trashed hostel room in Martinaise with a severe hangover and no memory of his own identity due to an ostensible extreme case of drug-induced amnesia.

Harry experienced an event several years ago that began a midlife crisis, and on the night he was assigned to the hanged man case, he finally snapped and embarked on a self-destructive three-day drinking spree around Martinaise.

Harry and Kim discover the hanged man killing is connected to an ongoing strike by the Martinaise dockworkers' union against the Wild Pines Group, a major logistics corporation.

Joyce reveals that the hanged man was Colonel Ellis "Lely" Kortenaer, the commander of a squad of mercenaries sent by Wild Pines to break the strike.

Harry and Kim discover that Lely was killed before the hanging, and the Hardie Boys, a group of dockworker vigilantes who act as the de facto peacekeepers of Martinaise, claim responsibility for the murder.

Unable to figure out the origin of the bullet and fearful of the authorities due to her past as a corporate spy, Klaasje enlisted the help of a union sympathiser named Ruby, who staged Lely's hanging with the rest of the Hardie Boys.

Depending on the player's actions, none, some, or all of the mercenaries may die, and Kim may also be hospitalized, in which case street urchin Cuno offers to take his place as Harry's partner.

The detectives explore the ruins and find the shooter, a former commissar of the Revachol communist army named Iosef Lilianovich Dros who survived the collapse of the Revacholian commune because he deserted his post.

It is directly implied that the Phasmid indirectly set off the chain of events leading to the murder, as the psychoactive chemicals it exudes inadvertently affected the man's mind for years, stoking his fanaticism and resentment.

In the best possible outcome, the squad expresses hope that Harry's state will improve in the future, and invites him and either Kim or Cuno to join a special RCM unit.

[13][14] Kurvitz since 2001 had been part of a band called Ultramelanhool, and in 2005, while in Tallinn, Estonia, with the group struggling for finances, conceived of a fictional world during a drunken evening while listening to Tiësto's "Adagio for Strings".

[15] Feeling they had a solid idea, the group created a collective of artists and musicians, which included oil painter Aleksander Rostov, to expand upon the work of that night and developed a tabletop RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons on this steampunk-like concept.

[15] During this period, Kurvitz met Estonian author Kaur Kender who helped him to write a novel set in this world, Sacred and Terrible Air,[14] which was published in 2013 but only sold about one thousand copies.

Its name can be read in Russian as a shortcut for the idiom взяться за ум (vzyat'sya za um), which is similar to the English idea of bootstrapping.

[22] The game's art, drawn mostly in a painterly style, was led by Aleksander Rostov, while the soundtrack was written and recorded by the English band British Sea Power.

One major influence is the 1999 video game Planescape: Torment, which, like Disco Elysium, features an amnesiac player character, heavily emphasises dialogue, and is rendered isometrically.

Kurvitz said while accepting the Estonian President's Young Cultural Figure annual award for 2020 "Without his modernism, Elysium – the world the game is placed in – would not be half of what it is."

Knowing they could not realistically cover all possible choices, Kurvitz and his team instead focused more on what he called "microreactivity", small acts and decisions the player may make such as an embarrassing comment, and how that may propagate throughout events.

[32] An additional factor in writing was the recognition that there was no real solution to the game; while the player may resolve some portions of the story, the primary case is nearly unworkable, similar to the rest of Revachol.

They came upon jazz musician Lenval Brown for the voice of the narrator and of the player skills, representing nearly half of the game's dialogue, and considered him essential to The Final Cut.

[42] In May 2020, ZA/UM released an update that improved some of the game's performance on lower-end hardware, as well as adding support for additional language translations, which are being developed by the community and by the localisation firm Testronic Labs.

The game was refused classification by the Board, making it illegal to sell in the country, due to its depiction of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, and violence, as well as showing "revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults.

[62] In a review of Disco Elysium in Black Gate, Joshua Dinges said "The nihilistic world is remarkably well fleshed out, the non-player characters earnestly realized, and the myriad plot threads extremely engaging.

[96] In October 2022, ZA/UM member Martin Luiga announced that he, Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere of ZA/UM had "involuntarily left the company" in late 2021, stating that ZA/UM "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on."

[106] On 17 March 2023, Kurvitz and Rostov responded to this statement by clarifying that the announcement was "wrong and misleading in several respects" and "[sought] to unfairly paint [them] - the remaining minority shareholders in ZA/UM - as mere disgruntled employees."

"[107][108] Following the ouster of Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere, work on the direct sequel project Y12 continued for several months under Argo Tuulik, one of the writers on Disco Elysium, and Dora Klindžić until management cancelled it in mid-2022.