Major spoilers for the climax of Disco Elysium to follow.

At a point about 2/3rds of the way through Disco Elysium’s story, your character – a detective pursuing a string of false leads for the killer of a mercenary found hanged during a dockworker’s strike – follows a suspect into a cave under an abandoned building. As you and your partner round the corner of a long tunnel, you’re caught in a blast of sonic energy and frozen in position, barely able to speak. Immediately, you lose a point of health, likely a scarce resource unless you’ve specifically invested the points to improve your health bar.

The suspect, controlling the radio emitting the energy, turns it down enough for you to be able to speak, and the objective of the scene becomes clear: extract as much information as you can before your health bar is drained and your heart gives out from the strain. The first time I attempted the scene, I lasted long enough to hear the her divulge a critical piece of information about my background and then give a tip that implies a previous suspect lied about a detail of the murder. But each time I retried that dialogue path, I was one health point short of success and my character died.

Finally, I destroyed the transmitter early, hoping to interrogate the suspect further. Instead, she started to move to shoot herself to avoid being detained, and I promised to let her go to avoid another death. She ran off, and in this branch of the game my partner and I were left without any additional knowledge of who may have committed the crime. Not wanting to replay the scene again, I decided we’d just have to live with that outcome.

Returning to the center of town that night, you find that the partners of the hanged mercenary have gathered their murder suspects and arranged a tribunal to find and execute the killer. The mercs are armed with automatic weapons and wearing heavy ceramic armor; you need to talk, not fight your way out of this scene.

My character was called on to explain his theory of the case, and convince the mercs that the assembled dockworkers are innocent of the alleged lynching. But, in this life, I had no hard evidence of their innocence, and my attempt to interrogate the previous suspect had come up empty-handed. With my character unable to articulate an alternate case, the scene erupted into violence; multiple people I’d come to know over the course of the investigation were killed, and my character was badly injured and would have executed if not for help from his partner.

There were two parts to that scene that deepened the emotional impact, and that have made it stick with me well beyond when I finished the game. The first was just good writing, and the attachment I had to the characters from previous days in the game. The second was interesting, though, and something I hadn’t had happen before and that I don’t think you could replicate outside of a video game:

I actually knew for a fact that my character didn’t have all the information I could have potentially used in that scene, because I had seen it come out in a previous life in the game before I’d died and attempted to complete the interrogation scene in a different way. I knew that had I spec’d my character a little differently, or equipped the right set of items, I might have made it a little further into that dialogue tree before I was forced to destroy the transmitter and end the conversation.

This is basically just dramatic irony, but it feels really different. There’s a sense of guilt and responsibility that comes from knowing you chose to take the easy way out of a scene and missed critical information that I don’t think you can replicate in any other medium. It’s also hard to say if this was intentional or not; a different character build might not have struggled at all with that scene, so I’ve been thinking of this as a really cool example of emergent gameplay, more so than something that was necessarily a deliberate choice by the designers.

Consider this a small contribution to the “games as art” debate, as an example of how games can interact with the emotions of players in a way that isn’t otherwise possible, and without game designers necessarily even explicitly intending the interaction to occur.