Forward-looking return: An interview with Disco Elysium writer Helen Hindpere

The February 2025 interview with Helen Hindpere — lead writer for the Disco Elysium: Final Cut and one of the three creative leads ousted from ZA/UM in 2021–22 — published in The Platypus Review, the journal of the Platypus Affiliated Society. Platypus is a small but persistent left- intellectual group with a distinctive theoretical position (broadly Frankfurt-School-and-Trotskyist, openly engaged with the death of the Left as an analytical question rather than a slogan); the journal has a niche audience and a long-form interview tradition.

Published online in February 2025, the piece is a primary interview, several thousand words long, in which Hindpere discusses her intellectual formation, her work on the Final Cut's political-vision quests (the communist, fascist, ultraliberal, and moralist endings that the Final Cut substantially expanded), the explicit dialectical-materialist frame the writing operated under, and her current creative trajectory after the ZA/UM ouster. The Platypus interviewer's questions are unusually informed — the framing assumes familiarity with both Marxist political theory and the game's text — and the resulting conversation is one of the deeper public statements on the how the writing happened question.

The piece sits as a complementary primary source to the Kurvitz 2018 Rezzed interview. Where Kurvitz tends to speak from the writer-as- demiurge position about the world of Elysium, Hindpere speaks more about the political-theory infrastructure underneath the writing and the labour of getting it onto the page. The interview is the most substantive public account of the Final Cut's political-vision-quest design and of Hindpere's own theoretical commitments. For readers approaching the game through the political-theory frame, this interview is essential.

The stake is creative and political. Hindpere has been actively trying to rebuild creative footing since the ZA/UM ouster and has made several public statements about her current projects and her view of the events; the interview is part of that broader public-facing arc. The Platypus venue suits a long-form theoretical conversation in a way that mainstream games journalism does not. The interview is best read as Hindpere's own statement — historically located in the post-ouster period, shaped by the politics of the moment — alongside the 2023 People Make Games documentary for the broader context.