Disco Elysium’s Hardcore Mode is just one way games can meaningfully explore poverty

Last week, the haunting and hilarious Disco Elysium added an extra difficulty setting called ‘Hardcore True Detective Mode’. On the surface, it seems like a fairly standard set of tweaked parameters. More demanding dice roles to shaft dear old Harry Du Bois at every opportunity.

If you take time to read the update notes though, it becomes clear that these new changes are storytelling devices as much as adjusted sliders. Since there are no monsters to make tougher, it’s your wallet and psyche that take the hits. It’s had me thinking about how ZA/UM’s surrealist cop odyssey, and other games, express poverty through their systems. Games that invert the traditional power curve of farmhand to godhood, or make us try twice as hard to get half as far. Far from being a detached add-on, the update is a deft application of mechanics-as-metaphor that wouldn’t work if desperation, isolation, poverty, and addiction weren’t already stitched deep into the fabric of Disco Elysium’s fiction.

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