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.
Visual Calculus is objective and free from the destructive, misleading flights of fancy you get from practically every other personality trait. What it says makes sense because it only says what the trained eye can see — and when you pass its skill checks, you often end up with information that, to use a genre cliché, generates new lines of inquiry. Few moments in Disco Elysium are as satisfying as that.
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Visual Calculus is also Disco Elysium‘s “despite everything, it’s still you” moment. It offers one of the only chances to see who the man under the decades of regret and debauchery could still be, a feeble ray of light that might guide him back to life — or something closer to life than his current state of existence.
That’s what it was for me, anyway. A few early moments point to something functional and human left in Harry. When he investigates the window he threw his show out of, for example, he asks, “What am I doing?” to which Visual Calculus responds “Something you’ve done before,” though that little nugget of insight gets lost in the shock of discovering how cataclysmically awful Harry’s situation is. The most influential instance happened during the crime scene investigation. The “Goodest of the Good Cops” achievement, which you get after earning Kim’s trust for the first time, popped after I successfully used Visual Calculus to investigate the area around the body and discover an anomaly in the footprints around it. Prior to that, I was tempted to submit to Harry’s less admirable impulses, if only because they were written so well. Kim’s trust coinciding with Harry actually doing something right for a change made me realize he deserved better, though, that he needed a chance at redemption. (In my next playthrough, Harry won’t be so lucky, no matter how many points he has in Visual Calculus.)
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Like everything else in Disco Elysium (and Harry’s life), you can take Visual Calculus to excess. When he’s contemplating the broken arches near the apartment complex, for example, Visual Calculus sends him into a rabbit hole of speculation about what happened, dreaming up information that he couldn’t possibly know. The most egregious example happens when Harry and Kim are interrogating Klaasje roughly halfway through the main story.
You need to inspect her bedroom window for evidence of the shot that killed Lely to progress the investigation, and if you pass the Visual Calculus check, the skill identifies three potential angles the shot may have come from. Logic (yours, not Harry’s, at least not that I’ve seen) screams that it couldn’t possibly have come from the boardwalk across the river, and yet the investigation prompts a new side quest that sends you off to inspect three potential point-zero locations. It’s not required, sure, but you don’t know that in your first playthrough. Poor Harry. Trying so hard and missing the answer in front of his face.
That’s Harry’s story in microcosm, though. His entire existence is a series of botched jobs and desperate bids to stay relevant, most of which fail. Like Visual Calculus checks, though, when they do succeed, they’re game changers.
