Harry Du Bois wakes up on the floor of a trashed hotel room in the city of Revachol, and he doesn’t know who he is. Not in a philosophical sense. Literally. He can’t remember his name. He can’t remember his face. The game won’t even show you his face in the character window at the start because he doesn’t know what he looks like. Everything in the room is broken—the window, the furniture, the mirror, and Harry himself. He has been on a multi-day bender involving enough alcohol and substances to wipe his memory clean, and what’s left is a naked man on the floor with no past and absolutely no idea what comes next.
Disco Elysium, the 2019 RPG from ZA/UM, is one of the strangest and most literary games I’ve ever played. Technically, it’s a murder mystery. Harry is a detective; there’s a dead man hanging from a tree behind the hotel, and he and his partner Kim Kitsuragi have to figure out who killed him. But the murder almost becomes besides the point. What fascinated me about the game was Harry himself. Who is Harry Du Bois when he doesn’t remember being Harry Du Bois? More importantly, who does he want to be now?
As the game goes on, you start learning what happened to him. The woman Harry loved left him six years earlier, and he never recovered from it. He drank. He used drugs. He spiraled for years. By the time he arrived in Revachol to investigate the murder, there wasn’t much left of the man he had been. The game never gives you one definitive explanation for exactly what caused his amnesia, and that’s important. Maybe it was the alcohol and drugs. Maybe something stranger happened. The game even raises the possibility that, somewhere underneath all of that self-destruction, Harry was actually trying to forget. Maybe forgetting was the whole damn point.
Whatever caused it, Harry eventually wakes up with almost nothing left. No name. No memories. No idea what kind of man he was before he opened his eyes on that hotel floor. For the first time in years, whether he realizes it or not, Harry has a choice about what kind of man he’s going to be next.
That sent me to 2 Corinthians 5:17.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here.”
Paul is talking about spiritual transformation and makes a much bigger claim than simply saying people can improve themselves. Christianity isn’t supposed to be a self-help program where you sand down some rough edges, break a couple of bad habits, and become a slightly more respectable version of the same person. Paul describes something far more radical. A new creation. The old has gone, and the new is here.
Disco Elysium isn’t a Christian game, and Harry Du Bois certainly isn’t meant to be some kind of Christian allegory. But playing it made me think about that verse because Harry wakes up in an almost absurdly literal version of the fresh start so many of us wish we could have. He doesn’t know the old Harry. He doesn’t remember the things that man did. He gets out of bed, puts on whatever clothes he can find scattered around the room, walks downstairs, and starts figuring out who he’s going to be.
That’s where Disco Elysium being a video game becomes important. You get to make those decisions for him. What does Harry believe? How does he treat Kim? How does he treat the people he meets around Revachol? Does he start drinking again? Does he use drugs? Does he take responsibility for the absolute disaster he has made of himself, or does he keep running from it? You can make Harry ridiculous, cruel, compassionate, sober, corrupt, apologetic, or some bizarre combination of all of them. The game hands you this thoroughly broken man and basically says: All right. What now?
The interesting part is that Harry’s past hasn’t actually disappeared just because he can’t remember it. Other people remember. His fellow officers know exactly who he was. His body carries the damage. The people he hurt don’t suddenly become unhurt because Harry can’t remember hurting them. And eventually pieces of the life he tried so desperately to escape start finding their way back to him. Harry gets to choose what he does next, but he doesn’t get to pretend there was never a before.
Neither do we.
Most of us carry our past everywhere. We remember the stupid things we’ve done, the people we’ve hurt, the opportunities we’ve wasted, and the versions of ourselves we’d rather nobody else ever met. Sometimes you’ve lived as one version of yourself for so long that becoming somebody different sounds almost ridiculous. You know your habits. You know your failures. You know exactly how many times you’ve promised yourself that this time would be different.
I’ve been that person. I suspect most people reading this have been that person at some point.
That’s why I love how direct Paul is in 2 Corinthians. He doesn’t say the old creation is being renovated. He says there is a new creation. And unlike Harry, becoming new in Christ doesn’t require forgetting who you were. Christianity doesn’t ask you to wake up one morning with no memory of your mistakes. You can remember every one of them. Other people may remember them too. Some consequences may even remain. None of that means you are required to keep being the person who made them.
That’s the difference that kept sticking with me while thinking about Harry. He spends years trying to escape himself through alcohol, drugs, and self-destruction until his own mind finally gives way. Whether he consciously intended to erase himself or not, he wakes up having achieved the thing a lot of broken people probably wish they could have: distance from the person they used to be.
But Christ offers something better than amnesia.
The Christian promise isn’t that God deletes your memory so you can pretend the past never happened. It’s that the past doesn’t get the final word on who you are. You don’t have to destroy yourself to get far enough away from the old you to start again. You don’t have to drink until you can’t remember your own name. You don’t have to reach Harry Du Bois levels of rock bottom before you’re allowed to become someone different.
Harry wakes up on that hotel floor and has to figure out what he’s going to write on a blank page. We probably aren’t going to get a blank page that clean. We’ll remember what came before, and so will the people around us. But 2 Corinthians 5:17 offers something better than a blank page anyway. It offers a new creation.
Harry had to lose everything to get his fresh start. You don’t.
See you next Sunday.
