This is something unrelated to my previous posts (there will be more Brazil at some vague point — maybe even somewhat sooner than expected, now that I’ve opened Medium again), but it’s something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I played Disco Elysium for the first time in December 2020. I won’t spend too much effort here explaining what the game is, because anyone who doesn’t know absolutely should look it up and ideally go play it. Luckily, most of the actual plot of Disco Elysium isn’t relevant to this project at all, so I should be able to keep it brief regardless.
The above image — painting, really — is the first thing that greets you when starting the game. A strange city rises from the water and sprawls across countless hills and valleys, extending literally as far as we can see. This is the city of Revachol, once the “capital of the world” (what exactly that means is never really made clear), but now reduced to an economic colony of the Old World countries that occupied it after it had a revolution and briefly tried to set up a communist régime. A few islands of wealth and opulence, guarded by the Coalition military and its various political go-betweens, are surrounded by an ocean of pornographic poverty. Where this ocean meets, well, the actual ocean is Martinaise, once a seaside resort for the comfortable end of the working class and now a bombed-out husk of its former self. It’s winter, and a man has been murdered and left hanging from a tree in the yard behind your hostel. You are an officer of the Revachol Citizens’ Militia (RCM), the one source of political power not directly controlled by the Coalition, and you have come to find out who killed the man and why.
That is the gist of it. Other people have talked about the politics, philosophy and plot of Disco Elysium, many of them far more eloquently than I ever could — and besides, that’s not what this page is for. This page is for maps. As far as I can tell, no map of Revachol in its entirety exists on the internet. The developers have published maps that cover more than we see in-game (more on that later), and a fan has made a pretty good map of the world, but as for that sweet spot in the middle — all the neighbourhoods of Revachol that get talked about but never seen — wouldn’t you want to see what they look like all together? I know I have, and that’s what I’m going to try to do here. God only knows how far I’ll get.
As mentioned, the game takes place in the small, often overlooked district of Martinaise, which as far as we can tell basically consists of two or three streets, a fishing village and some coastal wilderness. Having grown up on the Baltic coast made me feel right at home, which is likely not a coincidence since many of the developers are Estonian. In terms of buildings, there’s the aforementioned hostel and courtyard, which sits next to the main road connecting the harbour gates to the 8/81 motorway (said road is currently blocked by traffic, since the harbour has been shut down by strike action), a couple of more or less war-damaged apartment buildings, some waterfront that must’ve been nice at some point, and a couple of old factories over by the fishing village. Then there’s the pier, which was never actually built out to the extent depicted on the in-game map, and the Dolorian church, which is clearly heavily inspired by Nordic stave churches. It’s supposed to be one of the oldest buildings in Revachol, and was one of seven churches built along the coast when this area was originally colonised.
So what about the rest of this giant city? We never see it in-game, so the only clues we have to go on are textual. At the bookshop where you buy the game map, there’s also a map of Revachol (which is apparently not for sale as it’s too valuable — the shopkeeper’s a tad eccentric) which you can interact with and have the city described to you in text. On top of that, there’s the various context clues given by the “Shivers” and “Esprit de Corps” skills as you walk around the city (the former) and interact with your fellow officers (the latter) — yes, the skill tree talks to you in this game. Like I said, you should play it if you haven’t.
We’ll get into more detail as I begin actually drawing the map, but for now, my interpretation is that Revachol divides into three rough parts. In the centre, as described by the above screenshot, is La Delta, the heart of the city. As the name hints, La Delta is built over a river delta, and the arms of the River Espérance still cut across the district. The river empties into the Bay of Revachol, which forms a good natural harbour that’s most likely the reason the city was built here in the first place — the river arms could function as canals to bring goods into the heart of the city by boat, before roads and railways made that unnecessary.
East of La Delta are a number of wealthy neighbourhoods, most of which we don’t know too much about. The ones that are named are Le Jardin, which was home to the royal palace and is still the most desirable address in town, Stella Maris, where one of the Coalition armies landed during the invasion (and which is thus presumably coastal — let’s pencil it in along the coast east of La Delta), and St-Batiste, which is home to Revachol’s pharmaceutical industry and presumably a lot of other high-tech industries.
Which brings us to Revachol West, and this is the part that’s going to get interesting. This is, after all, where the game takes place, and where the RCM is most meaningful. Revachol doesn’t have anything even resembling a welfare state, and the closest thing it has to a government is the Coalition occupation authorities, which arrived forty years ago and still show no signs of leaving. They’re not interested in governing the poorer areas of the city, and thus it falls to the RCM to uphold the law (which neither they nor the people had any hand in writing) and maintain some semblance of public order.
Most tantalisingly of all, we actually sort of know what this part of the city looks like. In a very early dev post, art director Aleksander Rostov (at least I think it’s him) posted a map of the Jamrock district, which, depending on whom you ask, either borders Martinaise to the south or includes it:
I’m going to try to incorporate this map as best I can, but for a couple of reasons, I’m not going to be taking it as gospel truth about Revachol. Firstly, and most importantly, it was posted in January 2016, almost four years before the game came out. The map and the post it’s in both include references to a bunch of places that aren’t mentioned in the final text of the game, and while that obviously doesn’t tell us that they don’t exist in the game world, it also doesn’t tell us that they do. For my purposes, anything in the text takes precedence over anything not in the text, and that includes this.
Because, secondly, this map is kind of strange. The rivers don’t behave like rivers should, at least not if they’re all part of the same delta. The industrial harbour, which in the game buts up directly against Martinaise, seems to be across the river here, and Faubourg, the slum south of Jamrock that looms over it like it looms over Martinaise, doesn’t seem to exist here. On the other hand, those could just be results of the map being smaller in scale than I had assumed — there’s no reason why Faubourg couldn’t be outside this map to the south, or La Delta to the east (although I strongly suspect the area called “The Cycle” on this map is what became La Delta), and we might only be seeing a small corner of the delta on the right edge of the map.
So before we can actually start drawing, there’s a fundamental question we have to resolve, and that will be addressed in the next post: just how big is Revachol, and what real-life cities could compare to it?
Next post here.
