Did you lose yourself?

It’s always in the last place that you check

—Will Wood, “2012”

To paraphrase another Will Wood line: I’m the guy who was never ready for anything. There are two points-of-no-return in Disco Elysium, and I triggered the first, a violent showdown between local muscle and hired guns that takes place on the doorstep of the Whirling-in-Rags, well before I was ready, and without understanding what I was doing. (It was pure hubris: I’d thought I was pursuing a lead that would allow me to solve the case.) The outcome of this pivotal event was bad—several people died, who should not have—but, as I learned after a debrief with Rudderless Gudgeon, not as bad as it could have been.

It also turned out that, in the previous installment of this series, I unfairly maligned the Horrific Necktie. True, the necktie had spent the preceding days of gameplay unhelpfully urging me to drink, use any drugs I could find, and hit on strangers; in the final moments of its life, however, it directed me to repurpose it into a Molotov cocktail, the successful use of which ensured that the showdown went largely in my favor. (I threw it at one of the mercenaries, broiling him alive.) With its last breath, the tie delivered a monologue about how the two of us had had a great deal of fun together, but not enough to heal me. Too sad to receive debauched psychological healing from a deranged necktie that celebrates its own immolation was a novelty of an affective state: territory hitherto unexplored on the Feelings Wheel. It’s also a testament to how good the game is that I didn’t bat an eye at the act of setting the emblem of my own self-destructive tendencies on fire, that nothing about it felt cheesy or overdone. For reasons that remain opaque to me, I was moved almost to tears by the Beautiful Necktie’s last words (deep down you are a good man); I really did cry a moment later, when I barely managed to warn Kim in time for him to avoid getting shot by another mercenary.

Mostly, what prematurely triggering this fight meant was that I was locked out of completing a number of the sidequests I had started. I had found my badge, but not yet recovered my gun; I had learned the basic facts of the world from Joyce, the company negotiator, and the basic facts of the neighborhood from Evrart, the union leader, but had not yet worked out the specifics of the history between them. I hadn’t cracked open the sealed cargo container, figured out what the deal was with the pair of foulmouthed children vandalizing the yard, or finished interrogating Klaasje. Even the teenage graffiti artist who lurked on a balcony near the harbor had vanished, leaving her final message scrawled in blood and fuel oil across the killing ground of the plaza: Un jour je serai de retour près de toi. The world suddenly felt much smaller, and emptier; all that was left was to finish setting up the nightclub in the abandoned church, and take a fisherwoman’s skiff to the mysterious island where, according to the ballistics analysis the aforementioned upstairs neighbor had left behind for me and Kim as a present, the fatal shot had originated.

And I still hadn’t sung karaoke. Though that one, at least, I could fix.

If I hadn’t already been crying, in the wake of Kim’s narrow escape, I would have started at the beginning of the next scene: I woke up, heavily bandaged, in the same room where I’d started the game. For starters, I wasn’t dead; for another thing, the place was unrecognizably immaculate, courtesy of the hotel manager. But the main thing was Kim: exhausted, bruised, but alive, and watching over me. (Thank you, I said, flushed with shame, when I found out he was the one responsible for the bandages. What I meant was I couldn’t have done that for you, if it had been the other way around, which is one of many reasons I did not deserve your care.)

Disco Elysium is, when examined in its most zoomed-out form, my favorite kind of story: two people who dislike and/or distrust each other must work together in an attempt to solve an impossible problem, and develop an intense connection through the medium of that shared task. This is the spiral arc Genly and Estraven travel in The Left Hand of Darkness; it’s Breq and Seivarden’s journey in Ancillary Justice; it’s El and Orion’s quest in the Scholomance series; manifest in its most lighthearted iteration, it’s what yokes Crowley and Aziraphale together in Good Omens. The novel that approaches Disco Elysium’s version of this plot most closely is Gideon the Ninth, which is no surprise given that it’s evidently Tamsyn Muir’s favorite game. (The source I wanted to cite for that, her 2020 interview with the now-defunct Three Crows Magazine, is sadly unavailable at this time, so you’ll just have to believe me that it happened.)

You like enemies-to-lovers, a professor who had read all the books I just listed once said to me with a knowing look, but it’s more than that. They don’t have to be lovers, per se, although I’m not opposed to romance or sex being a part of their connection. But there is, inevitably, love involved in any sincere mutual effort to do the impossible, and that strain of intimacy is what I’m after. Enemies to lay-down-your-life loyalty. Enemies to withstanding a spiritually corrosive level of knowledge of the other person’s very essence. Enemies to beloveds. Enemies to a bond that transcends all the circumstances in its way, because it grows directly from a shared and total commitment to the task at hand, and a foundational belief in the worthiness of that task. (An example: Estraven rescues Genly from the prison camp because he1 believes in the Envoy’s mission, but later asks to learn mindspeech from him as an expression of the bond they have developed in their journey across the Gobrin Ice.) There is a terrible exposure inherent in this kind of work, and in true belief in whatever principle it serves. (Why else would the strictures of mindspeech, a form of communication in which it is impossible to lie, force Estraven to hear Genly’s voice as that of his dead kemmering?) When that exposure is mutual, this is the story that emerges: two people come to know and trust each other so deeply that, for a short window of time, all things become possible.

Disco Elysium has a name for one facet of such a relationship, and enshrines that name as a stat: esprit de corps. While the descriptive text informs the player that esprit de corps concerns the very spirit of policing: the cop-geist, it’s only cop-related because this is a detective game, and Harry and Kim happen to be cops. In a setting drawn from Gideon the Ninth, this stat would address the spirit of necromancy and swordplay; for Left Hand, it would be diplomacy; for the Scholomance, it would be magic. As the broadest sense of its name indicates, this skill describes an affective bond that, because it’s rooted in and expressed through shared purpose and occupation, renders whatever initial feelings you may have about your workmates irrelevant. Developed to its fullest extent, esprit de corps overwrites those feelings, renders you not only willing and able but obliged to take a bullet for your partner.

I wrote all of this—have, as pitiful as this fact objectively is, spent the last two months trying and failing to write it—because I wanted to explain why I love Kim.

If you have played Disco Elysium, you didn’t need any of this to understand; odds are good that you love him, too. If you haven’t, I don’t think any amount of my explaining will make sense. I’ll go ahead and state the obvious: I love Kim because he’s everything I’m not, everything I wish I could be: capable, patient, restrained. A consummate professional. And yet, somehow, not really judgmental; someone who walks the relational tightrope of meeting you where you are and still holding you to the necessary standards. Kim is continually exasperated with Harry (as any reasonable person would be), but he doesn’t give up on their partnership. He refuses to allow Harry to drown in his own self-pitying disaster—demands better from him—insists that it doesn’t matter how Harry has failed up to now, because there’s still a murder waiting to be solved. When I finally did sing karaoke, on the last night, in the deserted hotel bar, Kim was there listening; when I called on him to dance, in the abandoned church that had indeed transformed into a nightclub, he did so. When I slept, a final rest before we were to confront the murderer, Kim watched over me.

Kim’s loyalty is to the mystery, not to me. But I am with him in the mystery, and so partake in that loyalty by theft, by accident, by proxy. I knew, as the version of Harry that I played, that I didn’t deserve any such thing; hadn’t I, as the dead man told me in my dream, failed Elysium? But there Kim was, giving it to me all the same. Caring for me, when I couldn’t care for myself. Expecting me to get up, when I could walk again after being shot, and chase the killer through the oncoming day. To stand at his side—because where else would I be?