Disco Elysium’s Visual Calculus makes you feel like a real detective

For a game about solving a murder, Disco Elysium gives you few detective tools to work with, unless you count wild assumptions and poorly timed, inappropriate remarks. There’s one notable exception, though: Visual Calculus, a skill under the “intellect” category that lets Harry recreate mental visions of the past, including entire crime scenes. Initially, it seems like just a little extra flourish, a sprinkling of ace investigator thrown into the morass of chaotic emotions and impulses. And yet it ended up being the most influential skill in the game for me and, consequently, for Disco Elysium’s walking apocalypse of a protagonist, Harry Du Bois.