There were many points in Disco Elysium that had me laughing or keenly interested in whatever was happening, but the illusion ended up being shattered at the very end thanks to some railroading followed by an ending that almost feels like it comes out of nowhere. Not everyone feels that way, of course, but I’ve yet to see anyone delve into the reasons why it feels like such a cop-out, so it’s time to dig deep into spoiler territory and talk about why Disco Elysium‘s ending struck me as a betrayal of everything it had been up to that point. Again, there will be spoilers.

You spend the entire game investigating a hanging, only it turns out that it’s actually a shooting that was subsequently covered up with a lynching. Things become increasingly interesting as your suspect list shrinks and you close in on your prey, but then your last potential suspect is cleared of the shooting and you meet the real shooter: an old communist who’s been hanging around on an island for over 40 years, unable to let go of his cowardly failures during that time’s political and military upheaval. He’s done some work for other characters over the years, but the shooting itself is mostly an attempt to punish Klaasje, who he develops a voyeuristic fascination with.

I’ve never cared for whodunits where the murderer isn’t introduced until the very end. Disco Elysium encourages you to follow up with suspects and speculate about what happened at every turn, only to reveal that it never gave you enough relevant information to figure out what actually happened in the first place. This is something I can get over. However, I can’t see myself playing Disco Elysium a second time knowing that most of the information you can stumble across is a red herring designed to mislead you rather than a trail of crumbs leading to the killer.

Disco Elysium has a seemingly irrelevant sidequest involving a pair of cryptozoologists, and this culminates in learning that Lena—the wheelchair-bound wife of one of the cryptozoologists who you can meet early in the game—saw the reedlike cryptid that they’re there to catch when she was a child. It turns out that this very cryptid is on the island with the shooter, influencing it with pheromones. Trying to talk to it (which might just be the main character’s oddball personality filling in the blanks) results in it explaining that its pheromones exist to hide it from humanity and keep it safe, but that the shooter’s prolonged exposure has basically destroyed his mind.

It’s also convinced that humanity is chaotic and bound to lead to the destruction of the planet thanks to their thoughts (which might be connected to the mysterious, mind-regressing force know as pale). That would have been nice to follow up on, but this conversation happens at the very end, so there’s no opportunity to look into it despite pale and a local oddity connected to it being one of Disco Elysium‘s most interesting elements.

There’s an entire sidequest where you can start a dance club in a church that’s already occupied by a programmer. I convinced her to coexist with the characters trying to start the dance club, and this came in handy when her research into a part of the church where all sound disappears required better speakers. Long story short, this mysterious soundless field turns out to be pale in its youngest form, which is likely partly responsible for Revachol’s long history of bad luck. There’s more you can learn about pale, but discovering that it’s beginning to form in the area rather than existing far away like most pale is a huge revelation.

And at the very end, despite your partner Kim’s assurance that he also witnessed this same phenomenon, your police unit doesn’t care. They’re more interested in the cryptid and using it for their own PR. Them being self-interested isn’t inherently a bad thing, but you never have an opportunity to actually do anything with this world-shattering information outside of warning a couple of characters. Watching the most interesting part of the game get brushed aside like it’s nothing at the very end is just insulting.

Speaking of huge parts of the story being brushed aside, it turns out that the ex-something whose memory torments your character all throughout the game was never an ex-wife. Just someone attractive from 6 years ago who they never got over. You can learn that her name is Dora, but details are irrelevant—she’s basically a punchline at the end. It’s not like she’s an unimportant part of the game; even the cryptid tells you that it’s important to get over her. That may be the main character’s mind manufacturing a conversation, but having it show up at the end like that really reinforces how central she is to the main character’s identity, and then you find out that she’s no one. You spend the game trying to piece together this bit of trauma, only for it to become a bad punchline at the very end.

I was striving to play as a cop seeking redemption and making up for all of the mistakes in his past, but you don’t get a chance with Dora. You might not even owe her an apology. She’s such an afterthought that it’s hard to say.

Nothing bothered me quite as much as finding out that getting blackout drunk and then recovering is an established pattern, though. You’re supposed to have agency over your character, and again, I was trying to play as someone making up for that bad behavior. Disco Elysium seems to suggest that the whole thing is cyclical and that he’ll be blackout drunk again before long. They might as well have ended the game with a screen that says “all of your efforts to play as a good person will be in vain.”

And at that point, why even have choices?