For Fans of His Dark Materials

The 2007 film compressed the first novel into a handsome action picture and famously softened its ending. The BBC series had the confidence to slow down. James McAvoy's Lord Asriel is properly cold and visionary, Ruth Wilson's Mrs Coulter is genuinely frightening, and crucially the show commits to the theological argument at the heart of Pullman's books rather than routing around it. By the time season three reaches the Land of the Dead, it earns the weight Pullman put there.

Guillermo del Toro's 2006 film is not an adaptation of Pullman, but it works from the same assumption: a girl's inner world is as real and as consequential as the historical violence around her. Ofelia's faun, like Lyra's daemon, is a companion who reflects and complicates. The violence is not sanitised. The ending makes a genuine claim about what stories are for, and it costs exactly as much as Pullman demands of his readers.

Disco Elysium gives you a protagonist whose consciousness is literally externalised as competing voices, which is the daemon metaphor pushed to its logical limit. The game has no interest in sanitising its political and philosophical arguments for a mass audience, the same instinct that made Pullman refuse to pull the theological punch in The Amber Spyglass. Both works treat their audience as capable of handling ideas, and both are better for it.