Characters / Disco Elysium - The Detectives

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The Detectives

You

You, The Detective

Featuring The Expression

^{Click here to see yourself "cleaned up."}

^{Click here to see The Icebreaker.}

^{Click here for a glimpse of the man you used to be.}

Potential Aliases: Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau / Firewalker / Tequila Sunset / The Icebreaker / Dick Mullen / Captain Sober

"Mother, help me, there's a head attached to my neck and I'm *in* it."

The protagonist, a washed-up Defective Detective who wakes up one crisp early winter morning in a hotel room with a monster hangover and no memories of his life. You take control of him throughout the game.

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• Acrofatic: Downplayed. You're not excessively fat but do have a gut. But despite having let yourself go over the years, if your Savoir Faire is high, you remain both stealthy and hard to knock down, and with high Physical Instrument, you possess considerable Stout Strength. Kim is genuinely impressed by how you manage to run without pause every day (though Electrochemistry claims that's just trace amounts of speed lingering in your system). And regardless of your specific skills, if you knock out Measurehead, it's with a pretty impressive spinning kick to the head. You used to be a high school gym teacher before becoming a detective, which helps explain this.
• Aesop Amnesia: Can optionally suffer from this. Even if you get the dream about Dora and talk to the Phasmid about letting her go, one dialogue option can have you claim that winning the case will convince Dora to come back to you, showing that you can’t let go of your obsession.
• Agent Mulder: Unless you choose to deliberately play as a Boring Cop, there is a great chance that you will fall into this role vs. Kim's Agent Scully, especially with a relatively high Inland Empire skill, as you will constantly come up with rather fantastical and supernatural explainations to not just the murder, but also some of the weirder situations you and Kim encounter around Martinaise. Of course, everything you say about the Insulindian Phasmid's involvement in the case turns out to be more or less true, and by passing a certain Logic check, it is implied that your theories about the workings of the pale are scarily accurate.
• Agent Peacock: Has no hang-ups about dressing up like an obnoxious eyesore as a cascade effect of trying to find a wardrobe to compliment his impossibly tacky and newly purchased Horrific Necktie.
• The Alcoholic: In principle, the trope's deconstructed to show off the gritty and not-so-glamorous reality of chronic alcoholism. Depending on how you play, you can descend into the abyss of addiction or try to follow the path of recovery.
• Always Gets His Man: You are known as a "human can-opener", because you used to have an absolutely ridiculous success rate at getting people to confess to their crimes.
• Ambiguously Absent Parent: In the Final Cut's Fascism vision quest, a very hard passive Shivers check allows you to recover a fleeting memory from your early childhood which heavily implies that you were brought up by a single but loving mother. Your various Skills will attempt to remember or guess as to what happened to your father, but they'll be trying in vain.
• Ambiguously Bi: In the original release. The Final Cut, makes your attraction to men more explicit, making you a case of Transparent Closet, though Harry is always revealed to have loved Dora in spite of this.
• Ambiguous Situation: Even if the player plays a completely straight-edge Sorry Cop, completely regretting everything they've done, attempting to improve, and solving the case with flying colors, whether this attitude will actually stick is left open in the ending. Jean and Judit will point out that you've gone through a similar routine two times in the past, only to fall off the wagon and revert to your nastier personality in short order, and that this isn't the first time you've gotten blackout drunk and suffered amnesia.
• AM/FM Characterization: You are a big fan of disco and local rock station Sad FM, which seems to characterize you as stuck in the past and willing to wallow in misery. However, you can really get behind modern anodic dance music, which proves that you still have a lot of youthful energy left in you.
• Amnesiac Hero: You start out with your memories, identity, and information about the world you live in completely wiped from your mind, to the point of having to be reminded of what money is and what century you're living in. While some of your skills, such as Encyclopedia and Electro-Chemistry, can fill in some holes, their usefulness is often limited: for instance, the former's knowledge mostly focuses on obscure facts about the world's history and culture, and the latter's is about the various types of drugs that can be found in the world. Internalizing certain thoughts can sporadically allow you to unearth more concrete details of your past.
• Animal Motifs: Various bird species.
  • Your first name, which is Harrier, refers to a family of hawks, known for hunting in open terrain and snatching small prey like rodents or lizards straight from the ground. This may refer to your ruthlessness and determination when chasing after criminals.
  • During a small sidequest, you can go to the bookstore and pick a species of cockatoo that you think represents you best. Cockatoos are a species of large parrots which are affectionate, needy and vain, as well as prone to self-harm if ignored by a pet owner.
  • At one point your thoughts directly compare you to a seagull, once a proud bird that thrived on the shores, now adapted to digging through trashcans looking for food. You take pride in that comparison, noting that you've managed to hang on despite your changing life situation.
  • In one of your dream sequences, the Ancient Reptilian Brain calls you a "broken bird".
  • Whenever you see a bird you almost always refer to it by species rather than just saying "a bird", and you can identify a lot of them, much like an avid birdwatcher.
• Apologizes a Lot: As a Sorry Cop, you're constantly apologizing for the awful mess you've made of your life — which only undermines your authority as a police officer, as Kim notes.
• Awesome McCoolname:
  • Your real name, which can be discovered during the story, is Harrier "Harry" Du Bois. In a subversion of the trope, you can embrace it, wonder what kind of parents call their kid "Harrier", or reject it altogether. Kim speculates that it came about during wartime, however, and he at least thinks it's actually pretty cool.
  • If you fail the Conceptualization check when Kim first asks for your name, you immediately come up with "Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau", which you, Conceptualization, and your necktie (if it's been animated) are convinced is very cool. You can keep calling yourself this for the rest of the game and even unlock a Thought for it.
• Authority Sounds Deep: The few times you actually speak out loud in cutscenes, it's in the raspy voice of the Ancient Reptilian Brain. The one exception is if you fail your Drama check while trying to sing karaoke, at which point Limbic System takes over with a high-pitched, off-key screech.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: You desperately want to see Dora again. And if you remember "The Final Dream", you will. With an impossibly beautiful and imaginary version of her that leaves you. Every night. Forever.
• Berserk Button: You seemed to not have been excessively violent in the past, only having three confirmed kills in your career working in a rough district. However, when going through your cases you'll find details on an incident where you reacted to a drunk knocking your ledger out of your hand by violently beating him with it to the point of permanently crippling him. It's because the ledger has a hidden compartment in it containing a letter to you from the ex-something, which the drunk wound up damaging to the point that the compartment was jammed shut. You were so distraught and overwhelmed with rage that you resolved to 'fix' it by hitting him with it until it got unstuck.
• Big "OMG!": Once you realize that you totaled your 40000 réal-worth motor carriage, you'll be forced to have this reaction.
  You: OH MY GOD, IT'S MINE, I DROVE MY CAR INTO THE SEA????!?!?!?!?!!!??!!!!
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: By internalizing the "Date of Birth Generator" thought, you recall your birthdate and the circumstances surrounding your birth, and realize that it is rather seeped in this kind of symbolism. You came to the world in the winter of '07, the last year of the Commune of Revachol, right before it fell, and you were born in the Old Military Hospital, on the ground floor where people usually came to die, during a snowstorm.
• Blank Slate: Subverted. While you wake up amnesiac and can define several things about yourself, you still had a life before the amnesia and it will catch up with you in several points through the game. Even the things that you can define (such as your political ideology or copotype) are things that you already were or had the potential to be in your past. For instance, the Sorry Cop copotype is all but stated to stem from your guilt over several misdeeds during your career, such as shooting a running suspect in the spine and accidentally making him paraplegic.
• Bondage Is Bad: Your flawed and masochistic personality is emphasized with numerous hints of fetishistic sexual behavior:
  • Numerous setpieces reveal your obsession with Erotic Asphyxiation, including one scene where the Horrific Necktie advises you to leave an existential conversation to go and strangle yourself, after which you can announce that you are going to do this.
  • You can call the Precinct lazareth and tell them you've been bad and you want someone to abuse you. Nix Gottlieb gives a subdued, bored reaction ("Oh, it's you"), implying you're known in the precinct for these predilections.
  • Even if you choose to have him restrain the emotion, the detective is fascinated by the idea of spying on Klaasje using a peephole.
  • Your skills encourage you multiple times to do inappropriate things in public, such as pissing yourself, sticking your thumb up your ass, and masturbating on the street.
  • There is a running joke where skills will encourage you to shove objects into your asshole as some kind of proof of character. Authority thinks shoving your thumb up your ass is a symbol of honor, while Endurance (in the Ultraliberal quest) thinks you should do this with money ("nothing is a better proof of a man's mettle than the 'Fortune Yawn'.")
  • A few pieces of dialogue, when taken together, suggest you are into banging prostitutes while drunk, on speed, and also on sildenafil (in order to make "that feat" possible).
  • In The Final Cut's Fascism vision quest, when trying to think of something you can do with Measurehead that will get him alone in a room with you, you can suggest "Light bondage?"
• Break Them by Talking: This was a specialty of yours, even before you lost your memory. They don't call you the "human can opener" for nothing. Your preferred approach is, and has always been, to understand your opponent's motives and psyche and then trying to talk them down, either by appealing to their better nature, or just by establishing domination over them by besting them verbally. That said, if anything else failed, you were always willing to resort to Cutting the Knot if you felt the situation called for it.
• Broken Ace: As you rediscover your past, especially by rifling through your official police records, you realize that by all metrics, you were a truly superb detective. Despite a self-imposed, extremely heavy workload, you managed to clear the vast majority of your cases, especially thanks to your eye for details and talent for approaching problems from new and often unexpected angles. Cold cases that other, more traditionally competent detectives had struggled with for months, you would often solve in a matter of days. Despite working in a neighborhood infamous for its absurdly high rate of violent crime and worryingly high kill counts amongst the officers in the local precinct, you had a noted talent for psychoanalyzing your culprits and taking them down peacefully, only racking up three confirmed kills in your entire career. That said, you also were, and are still are, a highly disturbed individual with blatant mental health issues and substance abuse problems, and you've apparently suffered numerous severe mental breakdowns in recent years, culminating in the episode of total amnesia that kicks off the game's story.
• Broken Smile: The Expression, for all the manic energy it exudes on the surface, also clearly hints at a deep, deep underlying sadness. Should you succeed in making your face finally drop the look, the game will mention just how sad you look. When asked what The Expression is when you first see it, one of the choices is "It's an expression of pain." Your brain's response is depressingly blunt.
  "You are correct."
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer:
  • The most likely playstyle is as an eccentric cop. You can be an addiction-riddled, conspiracy-theory "race realist" maniac who also happens to be able to pull information from crime scenes incredibly easily and is able to deduce information logically and accurately.
    You: Chaos is my method. I am its scion.
  • This applied even before the player character lost his memory. Your case files, once found, show that while you were still pretty volatile and struggling with substance abuse and bouts of self-destructive behavior, you were very good at your job. Throughout an eighteen-year career, you managed to close 216 cases while maintaining a workload of about two cases a week with only three recorded kills in that entire time, which Kim notes is a pretty extraordinary record. ^NoteFor comparison, Kim himself has been with the RCM for 20 years and has solved 104 cases while amassing six confirmed kills. In the better endings, Kim flat out states that you are completely insane... and also the best detective he has ever seen.
• Bungled Suicide: At least implied. When you regain consciousness at the start of the story, you awake under your hostel room's loft ventilator with your tie hanging from the said ventilator, seeming to indicate that you had been attempting, or at least planning to hang yourself before you blacked out. There are a couple other clues to this being the case; you were apparently running around the hotel cafeteria putting your gun to your head and telling the guests in graphic detail about your planned suicide, the narration notes that "the [Horrific Necktie's] knot reminds you of a noose", Inland Empire is instantly distrustful of the Horrific Necktie if it starts speaking to you, the last thing Klaasje heard from your room before you went quiet was you shouting "I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore!" at the top of your lungs, and the first dream sequence has you meeting your own corpse hanging in the Hanged Man's place. (It could also be interpreted as an attempt at Erotic Asphyxiation.)
  • The Necktie's usage as a method of suicide is also almost spelled out for the player, as using it as the fuse for the Molotov cocktail thrown at Korty during the Tribunal turns it into the "Beautiful Necktie", revealing its "purity" as it literally goes out in blazing glory, being used for the sake of killing somebody, as it intended to do to you in your hotel room.
• By-the-Book Cop: A Boring Cop strives against all odds to maintain professionalism and act like a proper cop — despite the way your mutton chops and The Expression make you look.
• Call-Forward: The Cop of the Apocalypse copotype will make frequent allusions to a cataclysmic event in 20 years, which is the time that Sacred and Terrible Air, a novel set in the same universe, occurs.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Due to either Kim being just that perceptive or a game development oversight, even if you drink, smoke, and/or do drugs when he isn't around, he'll know if you have. And even if you only partake in those substances once or twice, he'll write you up as having a serious addiction problem in his final report of you.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: One of the more shameful moments of your past revealed through the completion of the "Rigorous Self-Critique" thought is that you once jerked off in a locker room and were caught in the act.
• The Cassandra: In addition to the Mad Oracle, you, as the Cop of the Apocalypse, will rant and rave about the encroaching pale swallowing the world, only to be ostracized and ridiculed by everyone you meet. Even so, there's a grain of truth in nearly everything you say, and your estimations can be eerily accurate. Later on, you'll converse with La Revacholiere and confirm that Revachol is indeed going to be destroyed by an unknown atomic device in 22 years. You're also able to share this information with Kim — provided you flunked the Authority church check — to which he'll earnestly request you to keep this secret to yourself for now.
  Kim: [...] What did you do before you volunteered?
  You: I walked the land telling whores and liars of the End to come. There are 9855 days [(27 years)] remaining.
  Kim: Cool. I'm glad you joined us. Not a lot of money in doomcrying... Let's move on, shall we?
• Celebrity Resemblance: Downplayed. You can at several opportunities point out that you kind of resemble Kras Mazov, the father of Scientific Communism. The people you point it out to will admit, sometimes begrudgingly, that you do actually look quite a bit like Mazov, albeit a version of him who has fallen on extremely hard times.
• The Champion: If anything can save you from your heartbreak, it is your love for the city you patrol — a city whose horrors and glories are mirrored in your personality. Notably, the only mandatory check in the game is Shivers-based — your ability to solve the case literally hinges on how well you can listen to Revachol, and no character can substitute for you in this.
• Character Tics:
  • You seem to have a strange aversion to using articles specifically in connection with the F-word, as if you're implying that it is an abstract force.
  You: I want to have fuck with you.
  
  You: You can tell us about drugs and shit, I don't give fuck.
  • You can get in the habit of making finger guns at people. It even has an associated Thought that gives you a bonus if both your hands are empty.
• The Chosen One: During the dance scene in the Church, you can through Shivers have a short conversation with La Revacholiere, during which she will tell that you are the only one who can keep her alive. It takes a quite difficult passive check to figure out why, but essentially, she knows that a nuclear strike will be launched against Revachol in 22 years, and you are the only person who is in a position to stop it and save her and the city from death. Given the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane nature of Shivers, it is possible that you might just making it all up in your head, but if La Revacholiere is to be believed, you're actually a Chosen One, even if you're not the Chosen One within the confines of the game's plot. You're basically the fated Hero of Another Story.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: You can pounce on even the most inoffensive of absences as a missing persons case, try to pull threads on perceived criminal conspiracies that have nothing to do with the Hanged Man, reconcile feuding locals, drag Kim along to investigate alleged "supra-natural" phenomena, or just offer to help a number of random persons you come across. Depending on how you build your character, you might have this because you're a Thrill Seeker, a Glory Hound, a Death Seeker, or a genuine Super Cop with benevolent if unfocused intentions. Kim will usually permit this, but only to a point.
• Chummy Commies: You can potentially be this if you decide to become a communist while also generally acting like a decent person (or at least trying to do right by others and remain somewhat morally principled despite your personal demons).
• Classical Anti-Hero: A far cry from your usual noir anti-hero, you are a genuine disaster of a human being who most other characters view with disdain or pity. It's up to you to either get your shit together and become a better person, or become the worst version of yourself and allow the cycle to continue.
• Commie Nazis: Nothing is stopping you from declaring yourself to be both a Fascist and a Communist and becoming even more of an incoherent political mess as a result. If you do, Kim will hang a lampshade on it in the game's denouncement by pointing out that you vocally endorse contradictory politics.
• Compensating for Something: Your reinvention of a vestigial wing of your department into a major crimes task force curiously coincides with the year your girlfriend left you.
• Cowboy Cop: You were decidedly this before your amnesia and may be after this. Strangely, you were not violent, though and killed less people than a typical police officer of your district and service.
• Crazy Sane: Against all odds, Trant suggests you might be this — you're too sane for this reality, and drinking yourself into oblivion is how you cope with the batshit-insane world you live in. The game being what it is, you can either agree with this hypothesis or call him a quack.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Even though you're a drunken emotional wreck, you're capable of doing incredible police work and performing amazing feats of heroism such as during the tribunal at the end of the game.
• Cuckoosnarker: A very likely result for most styles of play. You can be an absolute lunatic who talks to his tie, gets sidetracked hunting for cryptids, snorts half the speed in the city up your nose, and is overall perpetually a couple points of Morale damage from complete mental collapse, while also picking a number of dry, caustic, cutting dialogue options. If you invest a lot of points into both Inland Empire and Rhetoric, this is the inevitable result.
• Drinking on Duty: You can drink amounts of beverage that can actully boost your Physique stat, but in return your morale will go down.
• Declining Promotion: It's in your rank. "Yefreitor" is an honorary rank in the RCM given to an officer who was offered a promotion but declined it. The fact that you're a Double Yefreitor means you've done so twice. It also means that you technically outrank Kim; it means that you're the one with the seniority between the two of you.
• Death Seeker: You seem to have been this prior to the start of the game, given your binge drinking and excessive drug use along with all the other self-destructive behavior you engaged in. If we assume the tie on the ceiling fan is evidence of a Bungled Suicide, you already have at least one suicide attempt under your belt and possibly more you don't remember (during your bender, you put your gun in your mouth in front of the other hotel patrons and you tried driving your motor carriage into the canal, so you can up that count to three). It's not initially clear at the outset why you're like this, but it's revealed as the story goes along that you have your reasons. You can reject your death wish and try to get your life back in order, but the game also allows you to keep pursuing it i.e. taking Kim's gun and blowing your brains out in front of the Hardie Boys. There's even a thought you can unlock for repeatedly trying to off yourself called "Finger on the Eject Button," which gives you the option to commit suicide at the end of each day once you've returned to your hotel room or the fishing village shack.
• Defective Detective: No matter what you pick, something is seriously wrong with you. You either have a whole suite of mental issues, are addicted to a variety of substances, are riddled with awful body issues, or have some combination of the three.
• Depending on the Artist: Most of the promotional artwork for the game and even the in-game model itself portrays the Detective with fairly long and shaggy '70s Hair, whereas the in-game portrait makes his hair look more on the short (albeit still unkempt) side.
• Determinator: The gameplay pretty much orients you towards playing this way. While you may be a Determined Defeatist instead, the most constant thing across all possible playstyles is that you never stop chasing leads and will get whoever you have in your sight to talk, given enough time.
  Limbic System: He is the infernal engine, can't you see? He never stops. He only gets worse.
• Disco Dan: The detective is an avid fan of disco music and this is one of the few things he remembers quite clearly. He can use "disco" as a slang term for being awesome, has a fascination with the death of a in-universe disco singer, and if you pull off a fantastic dance move set, will bust out moves that were once groundbreakingly fantastic. Disco is also, in-universe, Condemned by History.
• The Dreaded: To criminals all across Jamrock, you're a "human can-opener", a relentless investigator who never stops asking questions and often manages to pit suspects against each other, making them talk. Ruby believes you and your squad are a hit team of Killer Cops working for the gang leader La Puta Madre, and a late-game quest has you investigate whether or not you are in fact dirty. In the final conversation, Jean confirms that you're not on the take, if only because you're far too mentally unstable to be of any pratical long term use to any would-be briber.
• Dirty Commies: As a Communist, it's possible to end up espousing the worst of Communist rhetoric such as declaring violence against anyone with slightly more pocket change as you as well as reveling in the idea of a Reign of Terror.
• Dirty Cop: You're free to take bribes and declare out loud that you're incredibly corrupt. Ruby believes you're a Killer Cop on the payroll of La Puta Madre — you're the reason she's in hiding. In the ending, your Station 41 partner firmly establishes you aren't one of Madre's peons, if for no other reason than because you aren't stable enough to be used that way.
• Drives Like Crazy: After the waterlock is freed of the knocked-down billboard that had been obstructing it, you can venture forth and find a half-submerged motor carriage close by. Turns out, on the final day of your three-day self-destructive bender, you took your motor carriage, sped across the plaza, jumped the canal – smashing the billboard in the process – and plowed straight through a jetty and into the sea. The Union of Moribund Alcoholics witnessed every second of this spectacle, and you'll have to relive it too post-amnesia.
  Inland Empire: The throttle is jammed and the brakeman's nowhere to be seen! There's no getting off this ride!
• Drunken Master: In gameplay, drinking alcohol improves your physique skills, which effectively makes you capable of surviving more damage, withstanding more pain, and performing physical feats you otherwise might have failed. According to Kim, judging by your number of cleared cases, you are also considered in the top 90% of all RCM officers in spite of your alcoholism, though clearly by the time of the game it isn't doing you any favors.
• Dual Wielding: Subverted. You can carry one item in each hand, but you only get your gun back at the end of a lengthy quest, and the other two weapons are easily missable. For most of the game, you'll likely be wandering Martinaise with, instead, a clipboard, bottle of booze (or drugs), pack of cigarettes, various hand tools, or a plastic bag full of recyclable bottles or cans in either hand. If you do manage to track down your gun and one or both of the other weapons in the game, you can come into the tribunal toting your gun and Ruby's, or, alternatively, either gun and the sword Lilienne gives you after your date.
• Erotic Asphyxiation: A potential alternate explanation as to what you were doing with your Horrific Necktie in the hotel room before the beginning of the game. Other clues are pointing in this direction; your fixed Expression is taken from Guillaume le Million, a disco star who died autoerotically asphyxiating himself, and the condition of Guillaume's room is similar to the condition of your own once you wake up; the Horrific Necktie likes to recommend you use it to autoerotically asphyxiate whenever you're getting bored of information you're learning; you've thrown off most of his articles of clothing (including one of the shoes through a window), but your flare-cut trousers are laid out neatly on the floor under the fan, as if you'd taken them off especially before doing the deed; your embarrassing rampage at the Whirling-in-Rags had you getting rid of your gun in fear that you would actually kill yourself, suggesting your goal wasn't death; and you might guess that the hanged man, who you see in a dream sequence as yourself, was trying to autoerotically asphyxiate, persuading Kim to let him order a test for semen. (The other explanation is a Bungled Suicide.)
• Experienced Protagonist: Not that you can remember it, being an amnesiac and all, but you're an older detective, and retain a pretty phenomenal muscle memory when it comes to certain subjects, like firearms, and you can often claim your actions are based on instinct or a forgotten habit. It's not an exaggeration to say you were a legitimate supercop, with 200+ closed cases under your belt in just 18 years, holding the rank of lieutenant double-yefreitor (meaning you also refused promotion twice) and still alive with only three kills to your name in one of the most violent districts in the city.
• Expy: An Amnesiac Hero wandering through a city slum recovering Repressed Memories and suffering (one way or another) heavy Amnesiac Dissonance? Voluminous dialogue options which reward the player more than just going for a blunt and obvious approach? Are we talking about the Detective or the Nameless One?
• Extreme Omnisexual: With high Electrochemistry, you can hit on the barely legal, the obvious Femme Fatale, the middle-aged, the mentally disturbed, and if you process the Homosexual Underground thought, you'll be prone to unleash yourself upon unsuspecting men, too. The only demographic that's safe from your leering is the extremely elderly, and even that might change in a few decades.
• Finishing Each Other's Sentences: Invoked and Defied. After you meet the Final Cut's Capeside communards and are tasked with reviewing a book called "A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism,'' you'll stumble across a section that discusses telepathy between people who share a belief. Kim will tentatively take this for granted, but after you invoke the trope and wait for him to finish your sentence, he leaves you hanging. You can then express your indignation.
• Former Teen Rebel: Certain thoughts probing into earlier parts of your past, reveal that you were the founding member of a street gang of small-time hustlers. Interestingly, the "former" here puts a lot more emphasis on "teen" than "rebel": despite getting a "respectable" and high-ranking job in the police force, you have still very much retained your youthful Rebellious Spirit and defiantly kept operating under your own rules and strange logic well into middle age (although you are free to subvert this as a Boring Cop). Jean even calls you out on this during the evaluation at the end, comparing some of your stranger and more annoying antics to that of an immature teenager.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: With sufficient Esprit de Corps, it becomes clear that you are this to your precinct — they react to news of your situation with equal parts concern and exasperation, deciding to cover for you until they can be sure you haven't completely lost it out of respect for you as a fellow officer. The ending provides more context, explaining that many of them are members of a respected task force that you're the leader of, and that your jerkish hard-partying Cowboy Cop behavior used to be endearing, until it drove you straight over the edge.
• Frozen Face:
  • The Coming of the Lawbringer (Law-Jaw) thought reveals that, as a child, you suffered infantile paralysis from polio. This has left you with a twinge in your jaw that causes you to slur certain words — including "justice" and "the Law" (a Shout-Out to Sylvester Stallone and his role in Judge Dredd).
  • A potential Double Subversion. Guillaume le Million's Expression qualifies, though you can wipe the grin off your face by passing a difficult Electrochemistry check at any time. A much harsher variant occurs should you pursue the Vision Quest for Fascism: by choosing to become the last kingsman or icebreaker, you sacrifice "your pitiful, sad look" for a "perfect reflection of your unyielding resolve." In reality, however, this merely means irreversible nerve damage. As Coach Physical Instrument puts it:
    Physical Instrument: [...] The only way you'll be able to change your face now is with your fingers.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: You can express that sentiment on multiple occasions: During your first visit to Frittte, you can point at a photo of two women kissing on the cover of the magazine the clerk is reading, saying that you like it, and you find it very "futuristic". During your confrontation with Ruby, you can pester her for details of her affair with Klaasje, which only causes Morale damage as it's clearly an absurd thing to focus on during what is a violent encounter.
• Going Cold Turkey: By internalizing the "Waste Land of Reality" thought, you can put your alcoholism behind you through this method. It does however come with drawbacks; most prominently when you're internalizing the thought, where you get a whopping -2 penalty to the Physical Instrument skill, but upon completion, you get a whole extra point in Psyche, which is the only opportunity the game offers to permanently increase a stat. The drawbacks of completion are most notably that you won't get any more bonuses from consuming alcohol, which of course would defeat the purpose, and a -1 to Physical Instrument due to insomnia, while the penalties to Inland Empire and Suggestion are offset by your increased Psyche. The thought does make it clear that this is just the beginning of getting truly sober:
  Full recovery will take years, though. It'll be depressing. And it'll be boring. Don't expect any further rewards or handclaps. This is how normal people are all the time.
• Good with Numbers: A high Visual Calculus turns you into, in its words, a 'human measuring instrument', capable of astonishing feats of mathematical precision without outside assistance.
• The Grovel: When your too darn creepy Stalker with a Crush tendencies aren't taking over, you're this. In other words, you've absolutely stooped to such sycophantic behavior in the past — however, the trope is subverted in that Dora has moved on and has no intention of coming back to you.
• Hearing Voices: A key part of the game and your character. Your various skills, as well as other parts of your body, talk to you, give you advice (sometimes good, sometimes bad), try to force you to see things their way and quarrel among themselves.
• Implausible Deniability: Justified as a result of your memory loss.
  • You can potentially recall a lot of things about your past, but you'll never remember your Precinct 41 partner even as irrefutable proof is flung into your face, which gets Played for Laughs as your Esprit de Corps skill tries and fails to offer anything about the man.
    Man with Sunglasses: He corrects his blonde wig. Khm... his hair. He corrects his hair.
  • Happens when you stumble across your sunken motor carriage. As you speculate what the blue-and-white police livery and the number '41' on its side could ever mean, you can blurt out many an absurd statement before Kim gently takes you out of it.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: You're a disaster of a police officer and you're well aware of that, but even then, should you choose, you can dramatically downplay your failings and assure everyone that this is your modus operandi. And you'd be right: you've closed many cases by pretending to be — or actually being — absolutely smashed.
  You: I am a highly experimental cop. But if I am right... this is *outré* even by my standards.
  Kim: Really?
  You: I arrive at the scene three days early, drink myself to oblivion, fully re-immerse myself in this reality and then work the case from an angle so crescent fresh it produces *never before seen* results. Not only for criminology but for the human mind.
  Kim: It can't be that...
  You: I am a notoriously difficult-to-work-with *wunderkind* with extremely unorthodox methods.
  Kim: Wouldn't that be something? And who could say it's not true? If you really don't remember anything.... how would you know? (The thought makes him uneasy.) We should move.
• Inner Thoughts, Outsider Puzzlement: Sometimes your conversations with your skills can drag on for quite some time. In a couple of cases, this results in your skills themselves ends up telling you to snap back to reality and say something aloud to ease the tension, because you have been standing around in silence and staring blankly into space long enough for other people to notice and making the conversation you were supposed to be in the middle of awkward and uncomfortable.
• Innocently Insensitive: Some of the dialogue options you can pick can end up coming across as this after the fact. Part of the issue is that, since the detective can't recall their memories, they are prone to just parroting things said to them without being aware of how rude or foul what they said was. You can say some horribly racist, sexist, or offensive things to people while genuinely not knowing it, with Kim sometimes having to step in and make it clear why what you said was not really a good thing.
• Insane Troll Logic: At one point, you're allowed to attempt to decipher the case files in your waterlogged ledger. Believing your name is Raphaёl Ambrosius Costeau while doing so will make your Logic perk up — who will then earnestly try and persuade you that since the ledger is yours, the stamped "HDB" before every alphanumeric heading are your initials. Stating that Logic had meant to say "RAC" instead of "HDB" will force it to reluctantly let you browse the case files. Upon finishing the UNSOLVABLE CASE, Logic will once more try to convince you. Remaining steadfast despite the overwhelming proof will make it capitulate for good and present you with the "Detective Costeau" idea for your Thought Cabinet.
  Logic: Fine then — you've earned it.
• The Insomniac: During the nights, it becomes clear that you are having severe trouble sleeping. Most of your downtime is just you lying down in your bed for hours, unable to quiet your racing mind. What little actual sleep you manage to get is turbulent and unrestful, with the Ancient Reptilian Brain and the Limbic System constantly tormenting you in your dreams, whispering vague hints of your sordid past and reminding you of your numerous character flaws and screw-ups. As it turns out, this is actually your own subconscious trying to protect your fragile psyche. It is terrified that the dreams about the moment Dora left you are going to start up again at any moment, so it tries to prevent you from getting any deep sleep so you don't dream.
• Ironic Nickname: Subverted. When your colleagues at Precinct 41 call you "Dick Mullen", it would be natural to at first assume that it is meant as a mocking nickname they have given you for being such a drunken and mentally unstable screw-up. But as you slowly come to rediscover how good an investigator you actually were before the amnesia, it becomes clear that they are actually comparing you to the fictional detective in earnest out of respect for your skills as a detective.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Years of combined alcohol and drug abuse have wreaked it fair share of havoc on you, and people constantly guess you to be much older than you actually are. When you recover your badge, you noitce that the picture on it is you at a younger age when you were much less broken by your lifestyle, and it shows that you were once not a bad-looking person at all. And it's a new badge, so you deliberately chose not to take a new photo — you already knew how bad the damage was.
• Jaded Washout: Particularly when playing a Sorry Cop, you're quick to assume you haven't done anything with your life and the RCM must be desperate if someone like you can be a detective. Subverted as you discover more and more of your past — you didn't peak in high school (or as a high school gym teacher), you were in fact a superstar detective who hit an early mid-life crisis when the woman you loved left you six years ago.
• The Killer in Me: Discussed and Subverted. If your Inland Empire is high enough, you can convince yourself that it was you who killed the mercenary behind the Whirling-in-Rags and then conveniently erased your own memory. You can then talk through this with Kim, to which Kim replies that no evidence points to that and you should let it go. Inland Empire — begrudgingly — does just that, but it won't stop you should you decide to "admit" to killing Lely to the remaining Krenel mercenaries — which leads to even more ire. And indeed: Lely was murdered by a then-unknown third party.
• Lawman Gone Bad: Before your drunk induced amnesia, you were known as an Human Head Can Opener. Then you sold your fire arm, crushed your car in the sea, and have lost your identity because of the drink.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: You have quite a prominent chin, now practically the only remaining vestige of the rugged good looks you had in your youth.
• Large Ham: Some of the dialogue options, particularly under the Superstar Cop copotype, are hilariously over the top.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Your amnesia starts broadly enough that you cannot remember anything about your past and even have to be reminded what money is. As your memories do slowly start coming back, there are moments where it is as though something in your mind is actively blocking your attempts to remember your past. This leads to scenarios and confrontations where you should remember or realize something blindingly obvious, only for it to go completely over your head. The 'Cleaning Out the Rooms' thought is even you acknowledging that something is ensuring that you only remember things when that entity deems it suitable for you to remember it.
• Last of His Kind: One thought all but outright states that you used to be a member of an eight-man gang of small-time delinquents called "the Fifteenth Indotribe" in your adolescence. The thought also notes that the seven other kids from the gang are dead, having fallen victims to car accidents or drug overdoses in the years since, and that you are the only one who remains.
• Life of the Party: Deconstructed. You were — and are, by all accounts — this, but it becomes abundantly clear as you advance the story that this lifestyle hasn't made you any happier.
• Literal-Minded: When someone says they're "not really there", as in, not in town on a professional basis, you can instead wonder if they are some kind of astral projection.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: You seem to have an odd case of this, as you both idealize and vilify your "ex-something" as some sort of quasi-religious symbol of purity and perfection, and a barely human, cruel, uncaring monster. Your ex-something Dora — the two of you lived together for years but never actually married, so she was more than your girlfriend but not actually your wife — is projected in your dreams in the form of the historical Messianic Archetype Dolores Dei, who was similarly a saint or a war criminal, depending on who you ask.
• Mad Oracle: As the Cop of the Apocalypse, you're a disheveled, hung-over supposed police officer who shambles around the district announcing to witnesses, suspects, and random passersby that The End Is Nigh.
  You: The wolf is at the door, Kim. It will eat the sun.
  • Having a high enough Inland Empire also allows you to have certain visions both of the present and the future, though given what Inland Empire represents, these can be interpreted as either visions or your character having twisted perceptions of reality. The best example of this happening if you pass a Legendary Inland Empire check after failing the check to deactivate Ruby's machine, leading to you attempting to have a "vision of the future" and seeing the aftermath of the nuking of Revachol.
• Man of the City: It may be argued that he loves Revachol more than any person in his life, including Dora.
• Married to the Job: Once you and Kim uncover your RCM service record, you find out that you were very consistently working two cases a week, something which Kim notices is an impressive workload, though clearly bordering on the excessive. You can in turn wonder if your mental breakdown and amnesia might actually have been caused by you burning out from extreme stress. During your final dream, both you and Dora will in part blame your obsession with your job for having wrought havoc on both your mental health and your relationship.
• Mask of Sanity: The Boring Cop copotype. You argue with and get advice from voices inside your head. Real sanity is off the table. But trying to act the part of a Consummate Professional will at least convince others you're normal — or at least, convince those who don't have to work with you for any length of time.
• Mean Boss: While your case record establishes that you are a very competent detective, the finale reveals that your instability and alcoholism has made you a terrible task force leader. Your team only has two loyal members left, both of which bitterly note that your behavior and frequent meltdowns has driven everyone else away.
• Meaningful Name: Your full name and rank. Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Harrier "Harry" Du Bois, is noted to have two instances of the word "double". It fits well with a story where the duality of man is a central theme. Also, harriers are a breed of French beagles, who are tracking dogs who specialize in sniffing down prey, as well as several species of hawk known to hunt low to the ground, picking out tiny animals out of wide fields. Kinda like what a detective should do, no?
• Mind Hive: Not in the usual sense, but your fractured psyche has all of your various mental and neural attributes talking to you like a bunch of Game Masters all vying for your attention, trapped in one single body.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: Downplayed. While getting shot is hardly a minor injury, your skills make it sound far worse than it is. Reaction Speed even claims that "most of what's down there" is gone, even though the detective retains use of both his legs and Kim confirms that no major arteries were hit in the worst case scenario.
• Mr. Imagination: As a man who can conduct conversations with the various pieces of his own mind. How much of what's going on in your head is just your imagination versus hallucinations you can't control versus the real possibility of some kind of supra-natural sixth sense is something of a sliding scale, and the game doesn't confirm anything one way or the other. In particular, Esprit de Corps, Shivers, and most of all Inland Empire all provide "visions" of other people, places, and times you couldn't really be seeing — yet the information gleaned through them is often scarily accurate. Even Visual Calculus, one of your most straightforward, sensible skills, fills your vision with glowing images of diagrams and measurements.
• Mr. Vice Guy: You can be this if you so choose. It's perfectly possible to be an eccentric, slovenly, and poorly-dressed party animal who nonetheless tries to do right by people and help them with their problems.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Downplayed. Many parts of your past life are set (like your past job as a gym teacher, meteoric rise and fall as a detective, and breakup with Dora), but the parts of your personality/reputation that the game tracks (Superstar Cop, Apocalypse Cop, Sorry Cop, Boring Cop) are retroactively referenced by people who knew you in the past (like Dora in flashbacks or your squad in the present).
• Naïve Newcomer: Exaggerated. You can ask questions about things that even people in the real world would consider common knowledge, let alone the people of Elysium; among them, the purpose of money.
• Naked on Arrival: You wake up on the floor of your hostel room, only dressed in your briefs and socks. One of the first things you are tasked with is to dress yourself.
• Noble Bigot with a Badge: You can potentially be a foreigner/woman-hating fascist who uses "Welcome to Revachol" as a Catchphrase while also trying to be as much of a good cop as you can, though naturally Kim will not be happy with you.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: You physically bear a strong resemblance to Gene Hackman, particularly in the 1975 film Night Moves. Same hairstyle, same mutton chops, same fashion sense, and to top it off you have an athletic background and troubles with women just like his character in that film, as well as the same first name.
• No Name Given: Eventually subverted, though it's possible to miss; eventually, you hear that your real name is "Harrier 'Harry' Du Bois", but the game allows you to refuse your old name and pick another one.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: There's a rumor going around Jamrock that you're on the take. You weren't. You were just a churlish, addled, unstable, selfish, invasive, and egotistical investigator.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: And/or Obfuscating Insanity. It's entirely possible to play up your "condition" and act like you're completely oblivious to the world you've forgotten and eccentric to the point of being wholly detached from reality — keeping your insights and the knowledge skills like Encyclopedia provides to yourself, only to haul them out and surprise suspects and witnesses with just one more thing after lulling them into a false sense of security. Kim encourages you to do so when you first meet Joyce, and the Hardie Boys are genuinely impressed when they realize Ruby was right about your reputation as a "human can-opener". On the other hand, of course, you could be as thuddingly ignorant as you appear, and how much you let your skills (mis-)guide you is up to the player.
• Obsessively Normal: A "Boring Cop" is the Detective going out of his way to act like as much of a normal human being as possible by avoiding saying or doing anything particularly weird. It's noted that this takes an enormous amount of willpower from him since it goes against his very nature.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: You can opt to have only one point in the Physique attribute, which means the Detective is highly competent in many areas, but one bout of exertion can give him a heart attack. The same can happen if you have only one point of Morale due to starting off with only 1 Psyche; you could freak out and quit the game after seeing the hanging body, or by looking at Kim's car and having a weird flash to another car at the bottom of the sea.
• One of the Kids: Your middle-aged protagonist can build a natural rapport with characters that are roughly half his age or less, such as the Anodic Dance Kids or Cuno. When your old partner reminds you that you were a former high school teacher, Kim notes how that must be why you're so "juvie".
• Opt Out: You can potentially pull this off at the end of the Final Cut's Moralintern questline. After you communicate the presence of a 2mm hole in reality to the local Coalition aerostatic, you can follow up on that and be extracted by them. Doing so will discontinue the ongoing murder investigation and result in a unique game-over in which you've ostensibly been recruited by the Moralintern and become their agent, disappearing from public life completely in the process, though prior dialogue also heavily implies that you've been unpersoned instead.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: It's possible to give Raul Kortenaer an absolutely horrible death by burning him alive with a Molotov cocktail. It'd be an atrocity if it was literally anyone else in the city, but considering that the victim is a repugnant war criminal who was in the middle of trying to massacre a hotel full of civilians, it's a highly satisfying example of Laser-Guided Karma.
• Perpetual Smiler: Your default expression is an awkward and forced smile known as "The Expression" that combined with your muttonchops makes you look rather disturbed. You can force yourself out of it by passing a difficult Electrochemistry skill check, upon which you become a Perpetual Frowner instead.
• The Pig-Pen: Your room at the Whirling-in-Rags can be left trashed, and the initial shirt and pants you find scattered around after waking up on Monday are described as smelling of urine.
• Psycho Ex: The game doesn't shy away from showing your uglier side in how your lost love has affected you:
  • Passing a skill check while dialing random numbers on the phone reveals that you've memorized the ex-something's phone number at her home in Graad, halfway across the world, to the degree that you're able to dial it on reflex. Her reactions to your (at-times incredibly dark) dialogue options heavily implies that this is not the first time that you've made unsolicited calls at random hours of the day to harass and emotionally blackmail her.
  • Some of your worst self-destructive tendencies seem to be born out of a desire to emotionally hurt her for leaving you. The Solution to the "Finger on the Eject Button" Thought Cabinet leads to you resolving to end your own life by convincing yourself of how much "they" will miss you.
  • One of the most consistent motivations you can choose for solving the case is a desperate belief that doing so will convince her to come back to you, even after your dream of her spells out to you in no uncertain terms that she has moved on from you and that you need to let go.
• Psychometry: The closer you get to understanding Revachol (which is modelled in gameplay by the amount of sidequests you complete), the easier it is for you to succeed at a specific Shivers check: hearing Revachol itself tell you where Ruby is hiding, something that is highly plot-relevant and you could not have known otherwise.
  Kim: [Y]ou're the sensitive one.
• Quick Draw: By having a high enough Hand-Eye Coordination (and/or making the right dialog choices) you can do this to Kortenaer, taking him out of action at the very beginning of the "Tribunal" and throwing his goons into disarray.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Contrary to your drunken, drug-addled beginnings, you can still play as a reasonable cop with some rather unusual quirks. You can convince a group of teenagers to open their concert without drug use, break up a riot, and even catch the killer should you be able to follow the trail of clues properly. How well you do determines whether you keep your job at the end of the game.
• Rags to Riches: The Ultraliberal Vision Quest can result in the Detective obtaining stocks in a company courtesy of the Mega-Rich Light-Bending Guy, resulting in a "Net Worth" counter above your money counter that's in the six-digits. Granted, it means nothing in practice since he doesn't have a way to actually access that money, and no one in Martinaise is willing to accept "Net Worth" in the abstract by way of payment, but at least he's now technically richer than he was before. The one exception to this is Roy the pawnbroker, who will sell you his (equally useless) street lamp in return for stocks.
• Red Baron: You've accumulated many nicknames throughout the years as a cop and it's apparent your Precinct 41 co-workers prefer those monikers to your name. Highlights include Dick Mullen, The Human Can Opener, Tequila Sunset, and Jean's Shitkid.
• Rummage Sale Reject: Throughout the game, you can collect a ridiculous mishmash of clothing, most of which will be from several different outfit types. Since each piece of clothing confers stat bonuses, you're going to look utterly ridiculous, but get to pull off some amazing feats. If you wish, you can avert this trope somewhat by wearing matching clothes and favoring cleaner-looking garb.
• Sad Clown: You can be anything from a smug Deadpan Snarker to a Life of the Party who constantly makes a fool of yourself in front of others, but there's no getting around the fact that it's all a coping mechanism for the total implosion of your personal life and your disastrous breakup with the ex-something.
• Sarcasm-Blind: Generally, having low Rhetoric is going to make you this, but you'll be this by default when chatting to your long-suffering partner at the Whirling-in-Rags. This gets out of control so fast that even Kim — with his hatred for intradepartmental dealings — has to intervene to protect you from being dissed on.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: As you need to start remembering things to start functioning again as a cop, you wind up disinterring "The Final Dream" that you desperately wanted to erase, rendering your destructive three-day bender meaningless.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Defied. You start out the game in a dirty suit, tacky snake-skin shoes, and a horribly garish necktie. Your wardrobe from there on out consists of random articles of clothing you find or purchase second-hand, most of which look worn, tacky, inappropriate, or all three. This combined with your bloated, pale appearance results in you always looking at least somewhat cartoonish and disheveled, no matter what you're wearing.
• She Cleans Up Nicely:
  • Downplayed and Deconstructed. Wrapping up the Fascism Vision Quest with a passed Endurance check of facing yourself in the mirror will permanently change your appearance (portrait) to one that looks somewhat less haggard and disheveled... but it'll likewise make you unable to ever show emotion due to severe nerve damage.
  • You can try to clean yourself up by shaving and wiping The Expression off your face. If you do, Kim tells you that this probably wasn't a good idea, since those muttonchops hid the worst of your alcoholism-induced bloating, and without a manic grin on your face you just look deeply, deeply sad. Composure and Logic, on the other hand, argue that it is a good idea, as it helps you look more like a normal person and, more importantly in their opinion, a proper law official.
• Significant Green Eyed Red Head: You have reddish brown hair and your badge notes you to have grey-green eyes.
• Single-Issue Psychology: Averted. While a lot of your current dysfunction is the direct fallout of Dora leaving you, it's ultimately made clear that you were a goddamn wreck of a man well before that. While you'll never know exactly why she stopped loving you, your addictive and self-destructive personality certainly had a lot to do with it, and when she walked out all it did was make everything a hundred times worse.
• Smoking Is Cool: You have the option to express this opinion, which Electrochemistry enthusiastically agrees with. Mechanically, smoking cigarettes raises your Intellect while deducting a point of HP.
• Snarky Inanimate Object: Having points in Inland Empire will cause your Horrific Necktie to develop a personality and start butting into everyday conversations. Its commentary is quite sarcastic, pesky, and superfluous, but there's no way for you to obtain the Spirit Bomb with which you can take out Kortenaer without its help.
• Snipe Hunt: One possible explanation you can come up with for being put on the investigation despite being a complete wreck; that your higher-ups sent you solely to saddle their rival precinct's detective with The Load as a big joke. Kim dismisses this due to the highly competitive nature between the two precincts making such a move unlikely, and your case record also demonstrates that you're not as incompetent as you may think. You also were supposed to begin the investigation with the assistance of your task force, but you wound up blowing them off and trying to do it all on your own.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Your personality will likely tend towards this if you have a high intelligence stat. You will be very perceptive, be capable of easily picking up on and pointing out logical holes in other character's arguments and making quite insightful analyses of literature and art on the fly, and even your thoughts and theories on more "hard" scientific matters turn out to be scarily accurate at times. Of course, for maximum comedy, you can then deliver these deeply intellectual observations in as crass and foul-mouthed a manner as possible.
• Stepford Snarker: The inevitable result of playing a snarkier detective. All of your cool ironic detachment is just a very thin cover for your deep, gnawing sadness, which is getting harder and harder to hide from everyone around you. It's totally possible to play a cop with high Intellect who constantly puts other people down and has a devastating comeback for any insult, who also struggles with constant suicidal ideations and has to make a literal dice roll every night before going to sleep to decide if you'll kill yourself or not.
• Straw Character: Regardless of your political alignment, you'll end up coming off as an extreme caricature more than anything. Justified in that you aren't especially stable to begin with and walking through a Heroic BSoD; nuance in position isn't exactly something you're capable of.
• Straw Feminist: You can opt into being one (by slotting a thought called "Inexplicable Feminist Agenda"). Even some women can find it off-putting.
• Sympathy for the Devil: You can choose to show compassion for Raul Kortenaer as he dies, hoping he'll find peace now, despite him being little more than a Psycho for Hire whose only positive trait was the loyalty he felt towards his brother.
• Technically a Smile: The Expression. You're technically smiling at people, but the circumstances make you come across as a weirdo. Other characters comment on finding it creepy when you constantly smile at them, no matter the circumstance. There's an Electrochemistry check in the bathroom mirror just after starting the game which changes it to a neutral, somewhat downcast face instead of a smile, but it's quite a difficult check even if your starting Electrochemistry is relatively high. What, exactly, the Expression represents is up for interpretation (a grimace of pain is one option), but it has its origins in a disco superstar of yesteryear.
• That One Case: THE SQUARE BULLET HOLE MURDERS. Reading about this mysterious serial murder case (victims shot dead, except the bullet holes are square-shaped and there's no trace of a bullet) reveals that despite your best efforts (and that's really saying something; you're surprisingly good at your job) you never turned up any solid leads or hard evidence and the trail went cold primarily because the killings just suddenly stopped for no discernable reason. Even in your amnesiac state you express a deep frustration at this, with Inland Empire reassuring you that you might still find the guy someday. If you have the right set of skills in the finale, a Flash Sideways reveals that the killer is indeed preparing to strike again, giving you a second chance to crack the case.
• Throw the Book at Them: How you resolved the aptly titled UNSOLVABLE CASE in your backstory. You beat one of the perps with your ledger within an inch of his life, leaving the man an invalid, forcing the other perp to stay at home and take care of him. You dodged a disciplinary hearing only because the case was now quote-unquote closed.
• Toxic Friend Influence: You can whittle away at Kim's integrity (and perhaps, even his sanity) over the course of the game to the point that he'll feel self-conscious (a "naughty boy") when one of the endings has him suddenly confronted by three cops who aren't you.
• Transparent Closet: Your bisexuality, especially when it comes to attraction to men, is made much explicit in The Final Cut, albeit to your own obliviousness.
  • You're clearly attracted to women, but your fascination with the Smoker on the Balcony suggests you have latent feelings for men as well. This is supported by your oddly specific obliviousness towards the idea of two men being in a relationship, making it seem like you're suppressing something. The specific censorship of the homophobic f-slur ^note the slur is "flaubert" and not what you're thinking of — the only censored word in the game, even including other slurs — also suggests that the detective's mind is refusing to grasp onto it.
  • You can spend a day internalizing the "Homo-Sexual Underground" thought to determine whether you do in fact have repressed same-sex attractions; it just ends up criticizing you for wasting time with it without answering the query.
  • The Final Cut's Fascism vision quest upgrades this from ambiguity to almost Transparent Closet. After getting sick of your fascist nonsense, Kim orders you to take a good long look at yourself in the mirror. Whatever the outcome, the Detective will see something in the mirror that implies his disgusting politics are the result of his internalized homophobia and repression of his attraction to men — a desire to "bend over and grab your ankles" so that the huge foreign invaders can "wear you like a sock", deciding that the secret darkness within you that you are scared of has to be suppressed with the symbolic destruction of your "homo-sexual grin", or your brain providing a fantasy of you riding up on an aerostatic for a future with the people you love, which turns out to be the woman and Kim.
  • If you have internalized the "Homo-Sexual Underground" thought before embarking on The Final Cut's Communism vision quest, upon hearing Steban righteously denouncing "over-educated office workers who lack proper revolutionary outlets for their social dissatisfactions and repressed sexuality" Kim will cut in that "repressed sexualities are something of an idée fixe of his".
  • When hugging the Working Class Woman, you comment that you would "prefer a man".
  • The Mysterious Pair of Eyes ask whether you are bi-curious or plain curious. You can respond with bi, but are confused about what that means.
  • In multiple events, you can tell people that you think you 'might be a homo-sexual', or scream in the faces of people harassing you with homophobic abuse that "you're goddamn right I'm a f***t".
• Undignified Death: Due to the game's health system, many possible deaths in the game fall into this. It's especially true if you have a low Pain Threshold, which will see you suffering heart attacks from the slightest physical exertion.
• Vague Age: Your lifestyle has taken a toll on your appearance and you look like quite an old man, but by internalizing a certain thought you can remember that you're actually only 44 years old. Klaasje guesses that you're in your mid-forties; meanwhile Kim, going by appearances, thinks you're 56. Klaasje only gets it right due to your mutual fandom of Ostentatious Orchestrations and the timeframe of their popularity. You can make yourself look slightly younger by shaving off your muttonchops, or by wearing a line of tracksuit wear popular among teenagers.
• Vicious Cycle: If your task force elects to keep you on the force, your fellow officers will grouse that this is yet another instance of you dazzling them with a high quantity of quality police work to compensate for your erratic behavior, gross substance abuse, and violent outbursts. They find themselves wondering if they've fallen for yet another smokescreen or if you really mean to improve yourself this time.
• Vomiting Cop: Due to a combination of the body being really grody from hanging for seven days and your own amnesia and crushing hangover/withdrawal symptoms, the corpse smell comes as much more of a shock than it might otherwise. This can be overcome with an Endurance check; failing that, you'll need to internalize the "Volumetric Shit Compressor" thought (thus "getting your shit together") before you can try again.
• Workaholic: Per your ledger, your standard case load is two cases a week, something Kim tells you is a quite a lot and requires you to really push yourself.
• Working-Class Hero: Very much so. No matter how you play, you are heavily implied to come from a lower-middle-class background, you are notably rough-edged in your behavior and manners, and your detective's salary is noted to be quite low.
• Would Hurt a Child: Not only can you punch Cuno in the face to assert your authority to him, but you can also shoot Cunoesse with a gun. Naturally, Kim strongly disapproves; the latter brings the investigation to a crashing halt, as reported in the newspaper game over screen where you're arrested for killing a child.
• Younger Than They Look: You're a late-stage alcoholic, and it shows in the damage you've done to yourself. Kim estimates that you're pushing sixty, and whilst Klaasje tells you that you look to be 44, she estimates this based on logic rather than your actual appearance — she knows you associate your youth with disco and suggests that you must have been about 25 ("a good disco age") at the time disco peaked, 19 years ago. That said, you can internalize a thought that allows you to remember your birthday, which reveals that Klaasje was actually right; you're only 44 years old — just a year older than Kim.
• Your Days Are Numbered: At least implied. Your downward spiral of alcoholism and self-destructive behavior before the start of the game has left its mark all over your body. The Limbic System mentions that every single part of your body is damaged and in pain, and one conversation with yourself in a dream leads you to consider that, given the current state of your liver, you might have as little as days left to live. On top of this, it's possible to discover through a failure in the church dance quest that you may have some kind of seizure disorder, which has contributed to your memory loss. On the other hand, by internalizing the "Date of Birth Generator" thought, you can recall the fact that you are actually 44 years old, which gives you hope that you least have some time left to undo the worst of the damage you did to yourself. You never actually get a medical prognosis, though, so it's ultimately ambiguous.

Kim

Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi

My plan is not to get killed. But we have to intervene.

Voiced by: Jullian Champenois

"Every school of thought and government has failed in this city, but I love it nonetheless. It belongs to me as much as it belongs to you."

The Detective's suffering partner whilst in Revachol, on loan from Precinct 57. He's a Straight Man with some issues of his own.

---

• The Ace: Amongst the generally dysfunctional members of the RCM, Kim is regarded as one of the best. He's analytical, intelligent, insightful, and capable of exceptional marksmanship in a crisis — he's able to nail a mercenary between the eyes despite his acute hyperopia. Convincing him to transfer to Precinct 41 at the end of the game is considered a major coup for your department. The fact that a Consummate Professional like him has been assigned to your case is one of the major factors in convincing you it's not just a Snipe Hunt.
• Actually Pretty Funny: invoked Kim's sense of humor occasionally shows through, and often when he looks away in dialogue it's actually because he's barely containing his laughter when the Detective has a really funny observation.
• Agent Scully: He is completely unimpressed by the player trying to attribute otherworldly and outright mystical elements to the investigation, and gets especially annoyed if the player dedicates time to aiding the Phasmid researchers in their investigation. He's mostly willing to tolerate them because these pursuits do tend to have payoffs and steer the investigation in the right direction, potentially culminating in proving the existence of Phasmids. This is ironic considering that, while the case you are investigating is not paranormal, the world you inhabit is definitely not normal. (Kim doesn't even like to think about the pale.)
• Alliterative Name: Kim Kitsuragi.
• AM/FM Characterization: The seemingly straight-laced Kim is a big fan of local punk/metal station Speedfreaks FM, because, despite claims to the contrary, he's Not So Stoic and is a bit of an adrenaline junkie.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The Jamais Vu update makes it so that playing Hardcore Mode again after completing it prior will have Kim don his black Aerostatic Crew Jacket, which also alters the colors on his portrait to match.
• Arson, Murder, and Lifesaving: During the task force intervention, Kim is asked what working with the player character is like. Even if his opinion is a net positive, he's bound to have some complaints about the Defective Detective's eccentric habits and odd methods before acknowledging that the player character really is that good.
• Background Halo: A halo can be seen in his character portrait, because Kim is the Goodest of all Good cops. Late in-game, you realize the portrait is a snapshot from an in-game interaction, and the halo is the ceiling fan in your room at the Whirling.
• Ban on Politics: Kim prefers to avoid talking about politics or the war on the job — because he thinks it's unbecoming of an RCM officer, as well as to head off disagreements. He leans toward moralism personally, in its more moderate and realistic forms, but even then he's well aware of the Moralintern's failings and flaws. The status quo which the RCM is meant to uphold is only desirable in that the alternatives seem worse. If the player leans into the various political ideas they encounter during the investigation, Kim will readily try to direct things back to the case, and won't be shy about criticizing your choice to be distracted by them.
  Kim: Politics is habit-forming. And dangerous.
• Being Personal Isn't Professional: Kim is a firm believer in this, being unimpressed and frustrated if you complain about your hangover and amnesia at first, telling you to save whatever personal baggage and problems you have until you're off duty, because he sees such things as needless distractions from the investigation. That said, Kim can be relatively easily convinced to open up a little socially, if you argue that building some rapport between you will help you understand each other better and could make the nitty-gritty of the investigation move along somewhat faster and smoother.
• Beleaguered Assistant: For more eccentric player characters, he’s forced into this role. While he tries to maintain his composure and be accommodating of the player's current physical and mental state, he's quickly and visibly exasperated with your strange and volatile behaviors, especially when they directly inhibit the investigation.
  You: Something *weird* just happened to me.
  Kim: Don't take this the wrong way, but — during our short stint working together — *something weird* is almost always happening to you.
• Berserk Button:
  • A mild case, in line with his stoic professionalism, but he doesn't like pinball or delinquents to the point of going out of his way to avoid even talking about either if he can help it.
  • While his response to it never rises above Tranquil Fury, it's clear that Kim has a very low tolerance for racists and people treating him differently from any other Revacholier just because his grandparents were born in Seol. A failed Authority roll in the church resulting in you calling him a racial slur is, in fact, the only thing you can do in the game that will hurt him so much he will give you a "Reason You Suck" Speech and leave for the rest of the day.
  • In the Final Cut, if you fail the white check at the Feld Building twice, you're eventually given a chance to call Speedfreak FM as part of the investigation. You can choose to harass and insult the DJ on live broadcast and then give a shout out to Kim Kitsuragi, causing the DJ to ask both of you to never listen to the station again. Tuning in later has the DJ use Kim Kitsuragi's name as a euphemism for a fascist prick. Kim finally loses his temper, quickly turns off the radio and tells you that while he can put up with whatever political values you have, you've now successfully humiliated and defamed him over live radio by association, something that's never happened before and will never happen again, and if you do anything even close to that again, he'll have you sanctioned.
  • In addition to being a passionate car enthusiast, Kim is a big fan of Motorsport racing, and has even sewn a jacket emulating the ones of professional drivers. He does not suffer insults to it very well, and is tersely dismissive of Communist critiques of the scene.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • There's how he can lay into you for compromising the investigation or insulting him one too many times, but Kim also has racked up twice your bodycount, and if you help him learn that Iosef has information that could implicate the Claires in criminal activity, a high Esprit de Corps can sense that he's going to make sure that the RCM wrings a detailed testimony out of the old man one way or another.
  • Kim's pretty quick to arrest Klaasje when you point out that you have grounds to at least detain her. Unlike you and Jean, Kim doesn't consider her a flight risk, and mostly locks her up because he resented being manipulated.
  • After completing the Fascist Vision Quest, you can tell Kim that you will keep going down the the incredibly-dark and poisonous path as The Icebreaker; this will cause him to momentarily snap at you, dropping a Precision F-Strike, in a piece of dialogue that hurts both your Health and Morale at the same time, something which rarely happens elsewhere in-game.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Was born during the year the Moralintern put down Revachol's communist revolution.
• Blind Without 'Em: He mentions several times that the glasses aren't for show; his eyesight is getting worse even though he's only 43, to the point that he can't consistently hit a stationary target from a few meters away. His previous partner, Dom, at Precinct 57 was even nicknamed "Eyes", because he had to point things out to Kim.
  • That being said, his most impressive moment in the game is incapacitating Hoenkloewen during the tribunal by shooting him through his visor, something which Hand-to-Eye Coordination points out was an especially difficult shot.
• By-the-Book Cop: By the standards of the setting, at least; Kim cares far more about rules and procedure than most, even if he's not above bending the rules when necessary. Kim attempts to keep you on track and following the investigation, though he will allow the odd indulgence with some minor griping (if only because these side objectives tend to yield surprisingly helpful results towards your investigation in solving the murder of the hanged man).
• Character Tics: The Reverse Arm-Fold which is his idle pose. He also has a distinctive way of putting out the one cigarette he allows himself per day, stubbing it out on the sole of his shoe.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Downplayed. Kim is mostly content to let you indulge in your various crazy impulses and weird behavior, because — as he comes to admit after only seeing you in action for a little while — they tend to be surprisingly helpful in furthering the investigation. That said, he will also occasionally try to rein you in if you're going out on a tangent he thinks either is too time-consuming or otherwise doesn't appear productive in pushing the investigation forward, and he will especially protest if you do or try to do something violent. He will also often act as a walking disclaimer for your various political opinions, butting in on conversations to explain to the interview subject that your views doesn't represent the RCM's official views.
  You: Isn't *everyone* a little insane?
  Joyce: No, detective — no one's as insane as you.
  Kim: Don't worry, madame. I am very sane.
• Compelling Voice: A mundane example, but your own Authority skill notes that Kim's must be off the charts. While his incorruptibility means he'd never abuse it, Kim is a consummate police officer, and anyone with a modicum of respect for the law tends to listen up when he speaks up in that role.
• Consummate Professional:
  • The Goodest of the Good Cops, as the game puts it. Kim does everything in his power to embody the authority and trust placed in the RCM. While he'll put up with a certain amount of your lack thereof, he'll come down hard if he thinks your "personal issues" are actively hampering the investigation. Meanwhile, the quickest way to get Kim to really trust you is to refuse to take bribes or indulge in anything that's blatantly illegal.
  • With high enough Empathy, you can eventually come to realize Kim is so insistent on upholding his staunch professionalism because it's his primary coping mechanism for having a very tough job in a Crapsack World.
• Creative Sterility: He notes himself that his imagination has a way of failing him. Conceptualization points out that the lieutenant's own conceptualization skills must be a bit weak. This is actually part of what impresses him about your own skills, regardless of what they are.
• Creature of Habit: He ends every day by smoking a single cigarette while reviewing the day's events, a habit that your skills note would require so much discipline to maintain that simply quitting smoking altogether would likely be easier. Him having his cigarette the morning you wake up after the chaos at the Tribunal is an immediate indicator to just how badly things have gone wrong.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Parodied. While many of the characters of the series have their darker sides to them revealed through their backstories, Kim's backstory is more embarrassing then anything else, as his secret is that he was stuck in the Juvenile Crime Unit for fifteen years due to his youthful appearance, including a long undercover assignment as a pinball wizard.
• Deadpan Snarker: When he occasionally cracks a joke or makes a witty observation by himself, they tend to be as dry as sun-bleached bones, helped along by Jullian Champenois's straight-faced, stony but not lifeless voice acting.
  Kim: We are not the fashion police. We're the real police.
• Dead Partner: Implied Trope. The few times Kim mentions his previous partner, Dom (nicknamed "Eyes"), his normally calm and professional surface shows subtle signs of sadness, and he clearly doesn't like to speak about or even dwell on the subject for too long. And when ruminating about Glen getting shot during the Tribunal, he will morosely muse on the fact that it wasn't the first time someone else got killed by taking a bullet that was meant for him. It seems to at least hint at that "Eyes" might have gotten killed in the line of duty while Kim was by his side.
• Disappeared Dad: Kim is normally very guarded about his private life and background, but one of the few details he can potentially reveal is that he never knew his father, and that he is not too upset about that fact:
  "I was born and raised Revacholian. So was my mother. As for my father, I didn't know him, I don't know who he was. And I don't care. From what I've heard, he wasn't a very pleasant person to be around."
• Disco Dan: Kim is a fan of energetic and current heavy metal music, but there are indications that, like you, he is on his way to winding up as one of these. He is dismissive and suspicious of the emerging anodic dance genre, the DJ of his beloved Speedfreaks FM radio station looks old and sounds tired even before going on air, and if he's cajoled into dancing with the ravers, a medium Empathy check will clue you in that he's still very angry about doing so and wouldn't mind if his violent motions brought the whole nightclub and this music he doesn't want to understand crashing down.
• Embarrassing Nickname: He doesn't really want to be known by his nickname of "Kimball", from when he had to infiltrate a youth pinball ring and got exceptionally good at the game. He got so sick of pinball that he refuses to play it since he finished the case. He won't even talk about it, even if pressed at length.
• Establishing Character Moment: When you first meet him, passing a fairly easy Esprit de Corps check reveals exactly what kind of man Kim is, and what he would do for a total stranger.
  Esprit de Corps: If an assault were launched on this building right now — if the windows came crashing down and the whole world descended upon you — this man would hurl himself in death's way to save you.
• Experienced Protagonist: Not quite the supercop you were, but he's a veteran of the RCM who's extremely well-versed in both optimal investigative procedure as well as the grey areas where protocol meets reality. Kim is almost as good at dealing with people as you are, knowing exactly when to act the cool professional, when to twist the truth, and when to rein in your wilder impulses.
• Famed In-Story: He's respected across the RCM as a reliable, dedicated, and effective officer, which he appreciates with grace and humility. He's also known as Kim "Pinball" Kitsuragi or "Kimball" for short due to a long and colorful undercover assignment he undertook while he was still a Junior Officer. He just hates that.
• Fascinating Eyebrow: And it is powerful. If you're unsubtle about your attempts to pry into his past, he makes use of this expression and instantly cows you into submission. Even the highly belligerent Authority skill is in awe of it. The Jamais Vu update adds an option to have an eyebrow-standoff with him and with high enough Authority, you can overcome it and force him to tell you a secret about himself.
• Flat "What": If you convince Mega Rich Light Bending Guy to give you a hundred real to build a youth center.
• Foil: As your partner, Kim takes it as his duty to offset and balance out the Player Character as best he can, and will often do the opposite of whatever the player chooses. This can be overt and deliberate, such as playing Good Cop/Bad Cop with a witness or suspect, but also less conscious — if he sees you being visibly impatient while waiting for a phone call to connect, for instance, he'll assuage you by saying it's normal, but if you wait patiently, he's the one who starts tapping his foot. Small details such as these show that Kim is not naturally The Stoic or The Ace, that he, like everyone, is making an effort and putting on some degree of performance in day-to-day life — which in turn highlights the Detective's own progress as the player builds up a persona effectively from nothing, but also in reaction to Kim.
• Former Teen Rebel:
  • Downplayed, and only if your Skills are to be trusted. Being a communist and passing semi-difficult Drama and Empathy checks whilst discussing Kim's childhood career dreams will reveal that a ten-year-old Kim had had a soft spot for the Revolutionaries.
  • Also Downplayed, but if you have enough Authority to win the aforementioned eyebrow-standoff to make him tell something about himself, then the straitlaced, mostly By-the-Book Cop Kim will reveal that he used to smoke marijuana in his youth.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Either or. While Kim generally allows you to take the lead in dialogue, he'll step in to steer if he sees fit. This means establishing authority if you get overly apologetic, weepy, or wacky, but also showing the sensitive side of the law if you're too aggressive, bigoted, or downright insane.
• Heroic Neutral: He is laser-focused on the case of the Hanged Man, and it takes some convincing to have him engage in side tasks that have little to do with the story's central mystery. What appears to be ambivalence at potential tertiary suspicious activity is fleshed out as the result of him knowing his limitations as a police officer and the inarguable fact that the investigation is already lagging several days behind due to no one calling it in until a week ago and your three-days you spent getting wasted when you were supposed to be doing preliminary forensic work.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Among other honest cops, few and far between in the RCM, he's considered one of the very best detectives in the entire force. The RCM being what it is, however, it seems he's more accustomed to being mocked and undermined. One possible theory you can put forth with is that at least part of the reason he puts up with your various foibles is because even someone like you can rise further up the ranks than he can, not just in spite of your corruption and corner-cutting, but in fact because of it.
  Kim: I am the finest of nothing.
• Hidden Depths:
  • He is very nerdy about cars. He is also ambivalent about his role in Revachol, as he really seems to love his city and country, but is seen as an outsider by those he's serving and protecting. But the biggest one is perhaps that while he is ostensibly a Moralist, it becomes obvious as you get to know him better that he harbors at least a bit of sympathy towards the Communist cause.
  • Aces high, natch! He also gets notably excited if he sees you fiddle around with the Suzerainty boardgame, and can be convinced to play a round with you by passing a fairly easy Suggestion check. And even if you fail this check, you can immediately reroll it with an added +1 modifier because you’re that persistent to play the game. If you keep failing the checks, you get additional +1 modifiers, and after the third failed check, he'll agree to play with you regardless.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: His notes on your behavior to exonerate or condemn you during the task force intervention include annoying quirks and distasteful actions of yours that he never vocally commented on, particularly your potential predilection to use the word "disco" whenever possible.
• Immigrant Patriotism: He was born and raised in Revachol, as were both his parents, but many people (possibly including you) treat him as a foreigner because his grandparents were born in Seol. He will have none of it, and takes immense pride in being a citizen of Revachol, while dismissing any connection to his ancestral culture.
  Kim: You're barking up the wrong tree. I don't speak a word of Seolite, I've never met either one of my grandparents. And I've never *been* to Seol. I'm a regular Revacholier.
  Rhetoric: A point of pride to him.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Played with. Kim at one point states that he routinely scores 7/10 on his marksmanship tests, which is merely above average for most people but extraordinarily good for someone with acute hyperopia. That's to say nothing of the shot he takes on Ruud the Killer, which even your brain notes was such a startlingly good shot that it's nothing short of a miracle that Kim managed to pull it off.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: The Goodest of the Good Cops, so much so that you can't help but worry yourself about disappointing him even only having known him less than a day. The resemblance the white "orb" in his portrait has to common depictions of angelic halos in religious iconography does not seem to be in any way incidental in this regard.
  Esprit de Corps: This man does not crack under pressure. Stars would die before he'd succumb to any kind of manipulation.
• Jurisdiction Friction: According to him, his precinct and yours are currently feuding over who has authority over Martinaise, which is the reason you two are working together at all. Personally, he resents being used as a pawn in an inter-jurisdictional "pissing match" and just wants to do his job.
• Kick the Dog: He can help the protagonist rumble two aspiring hoods out of their leather jackets out of a combination of them voicing threatening ideas about his motor carriage and for just being delinquents. More insultingly, he doesn't even take either garment, and just lets his partner have them both.
• The Killjoy: Just a little bit. He actively enjoys being a coolly detached Consummate Professional, and thus spoiling other people's goofing off on the job counts as fun for him.
  Kim: Yes. I'm an unrepentant spoilsport. (the lieutenant appears pleased with this)
• The Lancer: In most playthroughs, Kim plays this role to the player; while your abilities can vary wildly depending on how you lay them out, Kim's Straight Man tendencies and his By-the-Book Cop knowledge of police procedure will make him the foil to almost all versions of the main character. He also tends to let the player take the lead.
• Living Emotional Crutch: The main protagonist meets him from his hang over, that will ultimately drive him forward to solve the case, and to bring down that body from the tree.
• Limited Wardrobe: Even when he leaves you for a brief length of time, he'll always come back with the same outfit.
• Million to One Chance: His terrible eyesight makes him struggle to hit targets outside the consistent and controlled conditions of a police shooting range, even from mere meters away. During the Tribunal, he manages to shoot the most heavily-armored of the mercenaries right in his only weak point — the eyeslits of his helmet — from across a public square, with only a fraction of a second to aim. Your inner monologue notes that landing that shot in his condition was an honest-to-god miracle.
• Morality Pet: One potential way his relationship to the main character can play out. Many times before you do drugs, alcohol or other unprofessional things, you have the option to worry about how he might react to it.
• Nerd Glasses: Kim wears glasses, being extremely farsighted. They're a significant part of his characterization — wearing glasses is still unusual in the retro era of the setting, but he's Blind Without 'Em. Much to his frustration, his glasses often see him mocked as geeky and square, no matter how cool his car and clothes might be. Both the Detective and others can call him a binoclard or bino — French for a wearer of binoculars, with a connotation similar to 'four-eyes'.
• No Points for Neutrality: His Suzerainty playing style involves mundane and efficient nation-building practices. The player cannot match him at this, and can only defeat Kim by driving headlong into extreme, narrow routes for victory including an inexplicable treasure hunting initiative.
• Nice Guy: One of his most notable characteristics is that, while it does tend to be hidden by a veneer of stoic professionalism, he is a genuinely kind and compassionate person who truly believes that his work is important and that people are worth protecting. It's fairly easy for you to notice that his concern for people in general and you in particular is sincere, and wanting to do right by him is a powerful motivator for your self-improvement as the story progresses.
• Nobody Poops: You discover very late in the story that his hostel room is supposed to share a bathroom with yours, which you have demolished into nigh-uselessness outside of the tub and half of the sink.
• Not So Above It All: Doing some really impressive things can actually crack through his seemingly stiff exterior. If you manage to get the corpse off the the tree by shooting it down, he'll excitedly offer you an "aces high" (a high-five). Empathy and Esprit de Corps will also point out that Kim is often genuinely amused by some of your sharper one-liners and wittier observations, but for the most part he is simply too professional to let it show.
  • If you succeed the Authority check in the dance club, Kim can be cajoled into joining the dance, and more than proves that he's got some moves.
  • He too gives darkly humorous titles, such as the case of "The Man with a Hole in His Head".
  • He's all for a game of Suzerainty. If you win, which is hard, he'll also be a bit of a Sore Loser about it. And if he wins, he can drop the line "Never fuck with Kim Kitsuragi."
  • The Jamais Vu update adds a number of these for him: you can convince him to wear the "Pissf***t" jacket as long as the detective is wearing the "Fuck The World" jacket himself (grudgingly noting that the two of you do look pretty cool while wearing them together), you can overpower his Fascinating Eyebrow with your own and make him admit that he smoked weed a few times when he was younger, and if you manage to finish the pinball game, he'll be extremely impressed at your ability to do so in a single try considering his own experience at it and other people who're able to pull it off being world-famous for their pinball skills.
  • If the detective chooses to ask Acele if she wants to "party", Kim will go all-in on pretending to be a drug-addled youth, popping his collar and throwing out old-school street slang like no tomorrow. While he's only doing it in an attempt to gain info on the local drug scene from Acele, his act is so sudden and so convincing (with Drama noting that he's even emulating the tremors of an addict) that even the detective finds himself somewhat baffled.
• Not So Stoic: It takes a lot — a lot — for you to do something so deranged or detached from reality that it elicits a strong reaction from Kim. Of the various types of shit you can pull, putting his gun in your mouth and threatening to shoot yourself in front of the Hardie Boys, going through a "rite of honour" (read: performing a thumb-based Ass Shove on yourself) for the Overproductive Honour Glands thought, calling him something very racist if Authority fails to convince him to participate in the church dance club, and making his go-to radio channel's DJ think he's a racist nutjob by association are the only that provoke Kim in any meaningful way.
  • Should you back down from threatening suicide, Kim will take you aside afterwards, trying to play off your very clearly self-destructive behavior as an 'Advanced interrogation technique' that he warns you to never use again lest the reputation of the RCM be negatively affected. One of your potential responses is "But why did she leave me, then?". Kim is so blindsided by this that he audibly sighs and takes a moment to compose himself, with a difficult Rhetoric check noting that he's trying to figure out the right thing to say, but can't.
  • A more subdued example, but he is noticeably uncomfortable when you inform the Working Class Woman of her husband's death. He'll let you take the lead, occupying himself with cleaning his glasses while you do, which your Empathy will note must be something that he does when he is feeling emotionally vulnerable.
  • He also shows a quick flash of fear and desperation when he aims his shot at Ruud's visor, quietly muttering a desperate prayer as he knows how badly the odds are stacked against him. It must have worked, because he manages to make the shot count.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: If the Tribunal goes badly but you manage to warn him at a crucial moment, Kim is able to fight off the uninjured Kortenaer to such a degree that he's confident that he won't be bothering either of you anytime soon.
• Oh, Crap!: If you make it to the island and find the sniper's perch with him, Kim will initially be ecstatic, until he realizes that the assassin might still be nearby. Even worse, due to his skepticism that going there wasn't going to be another dead end for the investigation, he might have allowed you to blast Sad FM music over your boom box for the sake of ambiance, which would have clued the killer that you were coming from nearly a mile away.
• Only Sane Man: As much of Martinaise is keeping its head down due to the strike and murder, only the biggest weirdos, freaks, and rogues remain on the streets. And the worst one of them all might be his partner.
• Older Than They Look: He was able to pass as a teenager well into his thirties. The RCM kept him in the Juvenile Crime Unit for 15 years, working undercover to infiltrate an underground pinball ring. The ultimate reveal is that he is merely one year younger than you, 43 to your 44.
• Prayer Is a Last Resort: Beyond his devotion to the Moralintern, which venerates the Innocence Dolores Dei, Kim is a practical man with little time for spirituality. So you know things have gotten bad when as he's lining up a shot on the heavily-armored Ruud Hoenkloewen, he mutters a single, almost silent "God, please..." And maybe someone up there heard him. Because despite his acute hyperopia, despite the fact that his target is the miniscule eyeslits of Ruud's helmet, despite the fact that his target is several yards away, and despite the fact that Kim has less than one second to aim, he makes the shot. Your brain can note that the fact that Kim somehow hit his target is nothing short of an honest-to-God miracle.
• Precision F-Strike: If you commit to the idea of being "the Icebreaker" at the end of the Fascist Vision Quest, Kim will ask you, point blank, if you are "fucking insane". The effect of the sudden F-bomb damages both your health and morale. What's more, even the highly belligerent Authority skill notices that Kim's question has instantly taken all the wind out of your sails, and Savoir Faire, who usually enjoys playing the contrarian, notices that now that Kim disapproves, the whole Icebreaker concept just seems rather "lame" all of a sudden.
• Plan B Resolution: Should you repeatedly manage to fail a check required to move a crucial part of the investigation along, Kim will notice your difficulties and usually step in and suggest an alternate solution.
• Queer Establishing Moment: If you talk to Kim at the end of the "Homo-sexual Underground" thought questline, you can proudly tell him that you've stopped obsessing over your own sexuality, only to then prove that you've just started to obsess over other people's sexualities. You can ask Kim if he's a "homo-sexual", to which Kim bluntly responds with "Yes" to get it over with, spare you some time and free up your mental capacities for the investigation. A drama check confirms that Kim is telling the truth.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: Kim doesn't know who you are, personally, but finding you without your gun or badge or memory at the start of things as well as the fact you trashed a hotel room doesn't leave him with a very good impression of the officer he's supposed to be working with. Depending on your playstyle, your insanely effective (albeit probably very weird) police work as well as behavior probably wins him over to becoming your True Companion.
• Reverse Arm-Fold: His idle pose, as befitting an uptight, disciplined officer of the law.
• Sanity Slippage: The story of the game can really erode his This Is Reality disposition, what with the spies, growing holes in reality, seemingly superhuman feats, Contrived Coincidence after Contrived Coincidence, and cryptids. It can come to a point that upon discovering a secret passage behind a door he had previously dismissed as unimportant, he will solemnly condemn himself to just shuffling into the rickety elevator that by his personal estimation might not've seen maintenance in decades to potentially trap himself with the insane yet inexplicably effective cop whose deranged whims brought them there, when he would have advised caution against entering it previously.
  "I just don't understand, officer. Please, help me understand."
• Scary Shiny Glasses: When the lenses of his glasses catch the light in such a way as to obscure his eyes, the effect is described as making him look more intimidating — an unflinching, unblinking authority figure.
• Seen It All: Over his two decades of service, he's borne witness to a lot of human tragedy, including gangland executions, death by overdosing, violent accidental demise, contraband smuggling, and domestic bedlam. To survive, he's become a driven and down-to-earth individual who scoffs at supra-natural concepts like curses and cryptozoology. You can potentially expose him to even more stressful stimuli that he'd rather not face such as supposedly empty cargo containers that open up if you speak to them correctly, international spies, "crab men", death rays, and even cryptids. Doing so will have him reluctantly fold them into his worldview of valid if chaotic possibilities, so much so that upon hearing its legend, he will glumly admit that he wouldn't be that shocked if the two of you encountered the Headless FALN Rider during your investigation (and that, too, can technically come true if you find its figurine in the pawnshop).
• The Stoic: Calm, unflappable, and professional to a fault. There are a few ways to break him out of this, for good or for ill, but it takes quite a bit to get Kim to show much emotion.
• Straight Man: The most likely dynamic between the player character and Kim. Kim is a straight-edge policeman who is professional to the core and whose role in the game is to make sure the investigation still gets carried out even if you try your best not to.
• Straight Gay: It only comes up in a single dialog, but if you ask him to his face if he's gay (or part of the "Homo-sexual Underground", as your character puts it), he'll say yes with no further explanation or discussion. Given that he's the consummate Straight Man in every respect and there's almost no indication that he's gay anywhere else in the game, this trope obviously applies. Among other hints, he goes completely stone-faced if you rise to the bait of Cuno and Cunoesse repeatedly calling the two of you homophobic slurs; and if your Volition is high enough to realize Klaasje is manipulating you through your attraction to her, Kim merely says he's not easily swayed by young women. He also gets progressively more amused as the Detective just can't put his finger on what makes the Smoker on the Balcony so different and compelling. His wheelhouse also includes offhand knowledge that anal beads are inaudible, as well as a keen sartorial sense (he regularly comments on your clothing when most other NPCs don't, snaps at the Scab Leader that his clothes are four sizes too small if you guard the button for Measurehead, and points out that he tailors his own wardrobe if mocked for a lack of style). He's also nonchalant when explaining Ruby's orientation to the rest of the Hardie Boys, and if embarking upon the Fascist "Political Vision Quest" added in The Final Cut, Esprit de Corps puts women at the top of the list of things that disinterest Kim (followed shortly by racism and time travel).
• The Summation: Letting him dole these out after the two of you solve a mystery is a good way to endear yourself to him. Besides driving his motor carriage, it seems to be one of the only aspects of his job that actually excites him.
• This Explains So Much: When it's revealed at the end of the game that Harry was a gym teacher, everything about his partner suddenly makes so much sense to Kim, he loses his calm demeanor.
• Totally Radical: Double subverted. He leans into this in a consciously farcical way if you ask Acele if she wants "to party" to lambast the absurdity of a middle-aged police officer interacting with a delinquent in such a way, only to try and roll it back when it looks like she might have actual information about the current state of illegal narcotics in current day youth culture, rendering him a straightforward example of this trope. When she informs him that people her age are partaking in much harder drugs than any he's heard of (she doesn't even recall what "dope" or "smack" is), it gives him pause as he realizes that his desire to definitively put his inglorious past with the Juvenile Crimes Unit behind him has put him out of touch with this sector of the criminal underworld.

  "Okay. That's...that's real bad. Someone should really look into that..."

• We Cannot Go On Without You: If you die or lose all your morale, Kim is unable to close the case by himself. During the Moralintern Vision Quest, your skills can glean that he's awfully uncertain if he can solve the mystery without you should you choose to leave the investigation to board the Archer.

Your Brain

Your Skills

Posterior Neocortex; The Skill Tree

The gang's all here.^note From left to right, by row: Intellect (in light blue) — Logic, Encyclopedia, Rhetoric, Drama, Conceptualization, and Visual Calculus. Psyche (purple) — Volition, Inland Empire, Empathy, Authority, Esprit de Corps, and Suggestion. Physique (red) — Endurance, Pain Threshold, Physical Instrument, Electrochemistry, Shivers, and Half-Light. Motorics (yellow) — Hand/Eye Coordination, Perception, Reaction Speed, Savoir Faire, Interfacing, and Composure.

Voiced by: Lenval Brown (Final Cut), Linah Rocio (La Revacholiere, Final Cut)

"It's the power of your... IMAGINATION."

Like all role playing games, you have a character sheet with skills. But in Disco Elysium, they each take on a life of their own, describing the world and events to you, sometimes even arguing amongst themselves over these descriptions, as well as challenging you with skill checks, acting as Game Masters for your brain.

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• All Issues Are Political Issues: A high Rhetoric will make the world a much more political place, with many more options to skew seemingly unrelated things through the lens of whatever political ideology you've chosen to obsess over.
• All Take and No Give: There's no real penalty for levelling Electrochemistry just high enough to be useful while not partaking in any of the harmful substances it wants you to.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Visual Calculus is your being Good with Numbers and knowledge of physics and apply it to various situations, most notably forensic recreation. It can also be combined with Perception in order to defend yourselves in gunfights.
• Blatant Lies: Electrochemistry, the skill governing the Detective's reward-seeking and addictive behavior, and whose primary role in the game is to encourage him to leer at attractive people and take loads of drugs, will self-identify as "your moral compass". As Good Feels Good, Electrochemistry might once have functioned as a moral compass had the Detective not spent decades developing crippling personality flaws and chemical dependencies.
• Blood Knight: Half-Light gets notably eager when the option of using excessive violence to solve a problem is put on the table. It is also fond of advocating for Murder Is the Best Solution.
  Hand-Eye Coordination: Alright, here's the plan: you fling the chaincutters in her face — already darting right — and *immediately* close the distance. Left hand grabs the barrel, right one breaks the wrist...
  Physical Instrument: ...fingers lock behind her head, knee to the face, knee to the face, crush the ribcage, side-step and drop her with the hammer kick.
  Half Light: OH MY GOD, YES!!!!
• Body Horror: The Skills are depicted in their portraits as distorted, stretched, and misshapen representations of the human form, with multiple limbs, eyes, and other features. The art style deliberately set out to homage the works of Francis Bacon, the better to evoke your tortured mental state.
• Boisterous Weakling: Skills that are only leveled high enough to be heard passively can encourage you to perform skill checks that their meagre stats may be hard-pressed to pass.
• Boring, but Practical: Volition, at its highest, will make you boring. For the most part this is fine, as being boring means you aren't compelled to act out and do something that will alienate the people around you, make you look like a fool, or otherwise compromise the investigation. It also increases your Morale, letting you withstand emotionally-crippling situations instead of falling apart entirely. In fact, it's proud of being the Only Sane Man among the skills, as it represents your dignity and therefore your desire to be a good person, instead of something worse.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Naturally, since they’re just personifications of body parts and functions. Their advice, helpful or otherwise, will almost always pertain to their specific function with little understanding of situations that do not call for them. Your adrenal gland does not understand the finer points of suggestion, and your mirror neurons are little help during a physical altercation, but that won't stop them from chiming in.
• Broken Ace: Volition reveals itself to be this during the dream sequence at the end of the game. It candidly reveals that it's not as strong-willed as it would like to be and that it's powerless to protect you from Dora/Dolores.
• Casanova Wannabe: High Electrochemistry can nudge you towards being this, as besides drugs, it also want to get its kicks through sex. It will even bend your thoughts to make the women you interact with appear more sexualized in your eyes, and tell you that they are interested in you sexually, even when your more socially aware skills such as Empathy, Volition, and Suggestion will plainly tell you that is clearly not the case and that your lechery is highly inappropriate and making people visibly uncomfortable.
  Lilienne: Where would this... walk take us, officer?
  Rhetoric: Nothing creepy, *strange*, or out there. Keep it simple.
  Electrochemistry: Creepy? What is this kink-shaming?
  You: To the island of Ecstasy in the carnal Sea of Lust, baby.
  Lilienne: Wow... (shakes her head sadly) That's definitely a trek you're gonna take alone. Now, if there isn't anything else I'd really like to get this net done.
  Rhetoric: That's exactly what I meant. Incredibly creepy.
  Electrochemistry: Nah, it's definitely not that. She probably just wasn't ovulating right now.
  • Suggestion, when it fails, can also turn you into this. It making you say "I want to have fuck with you" to Klaasje being the earlier and most infamous example.
• Cast of Personifications: Each skill is an Anthropomorphic Personification, not just of the skill itself but also the portion of your brain associated with it.
• The Chains of Commanding: While Authority mostly concerns your ability to make others obey your orders, it also lets you understand power dynamics and how to approach situations where one member of a party is the weakest link.
• Charm Person: Suggestion simultaneously makes the player get what they want out of others while resisting the charms of others. Too much makes you a weasel — even if you're the only one that knows it.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Inland Empire is the skill of imagination and lateral thinking, which means it will latch on to irrational ideas and let you argue with inanimate objects. Subverted in that it bleeds into Bunny-Ears Lawyer territory: the insight it provides consistently hits the nail on the head, it's just that it often lacks so much additional context that it borders on impossible to notice quick enough.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Volition is this for all the Skills and for you. It's there to temper some of your more self-destructive tendencies, including warning you when the other Skills are unreliable due to external factors.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Inland Empire has some insane insights about the world, and they often turn out to be misdirections, but sometimes they're right on the money. Notably, it clues you in on the mouth of the murder victim, hinting that there's a bullet there. It also has a bizarre fascination with the penis of the murder victim, and the conclusion of Inland was that he enjoyed dying. There is some truth to it as well, since he was shot while he was having sex. Also, it warns you before the climatic Tribunal encounter happens. Finally, your character can figure out early on that the murderer is communism and/or love thanks to Inland Empire, but the full context is only revealed in the endgame.
• Color-Coded Characters: The four categories of the skills have a specific color palette associated with them. Intellect is blue, Psyche is purple, Physique is red/magenta, and Motorics is yellow.
• Comeback Tomorrow: Aside from letting you respond quickly to physical threats, Reaction Speed also governs your ability to swiftly come up with witty and effective retorts to other people's verbal sucker punches, so it will try its best to defy these situations. Of course, its ability to do so depends on how many points are put into it.
• Crown-Shaped Head: Volition appears as a crowned head with no face. It's a little less clear on Authority's chaplets, if they're actually worn or part of its body.
• Dare to Be Badass: When Rhetoric contacts you about undertaking the task of rebuilding Communism, and you express reluctance towards the idea, Volition chimes in and tells you that you should try to do it any way, "precisely because it's impossible."
• The Determinator: Volition represents your will to continue in the face of danger. In fact, it's one of the more reliable attributes throughout the game, as it increases Morale, letting you stay strong in highly stressful events. While the Physique skills let you tank physical damage, they're of no use if you end up falling to pieces from emotional strain. As such, Volition keeps you motivated to press on and finish the case with your dignity intact, while the other skills pick up the slack elsewhere.
• Dirty Coward: As the fight-or-flight response, Half-Light is Properly Paranoid at the best of times, since invariably, his fight aspect only kicks in when the target of his ire poses little threat (ex. a child) or is absolutely incapable of retaliation (ex. inanimate objects).
• Drama Queen: Drama, naturellement — pushing you to withhold information, stretch the truth, and generally milk your part in order to manufacture the most exciting possible moment.
  • Amusingly, failed Authority checks also tends to make you act in over-the-top histrionics in extremely counterproductive attempts at saving your wounded pride.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Physical Instrument is one of the high school coach variety, often pushing you to perform physical feats, whether or not they’re necessary or even safe, and belittling you if you decide not to or fail. This foreshadows the fact that you were a gym teacher before becoming a detective.
• Dysfunction Junction: Given how dysfunctional the detective is, it's inevitable that the skills embodying his psyche are this as a group; almost all of them at least partially represent (and, therefore, personify) serious character flaws.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • As much as Drama enjoys being The Gadfly, it admits that it has attempted to discourage you from constantly performing mock suicides with your gun, because it doesn't think it is a particularly funny act and it seems to make everyone at least mildly uncomfortable in an unfunny way.
  • Much as Electrochemistry loves recreational drugs, it's not into the idea of getting high on taxidermy chemicals until you lose control of your bladder ("even you could probably do better than that"). It also warns you away from the mega-lethal B-hydroxy-phenothiazine ("even I won't suggest it"), and does not nudge you into opioid use, except during an emotional breakdown where all hope is lost. Also, horny as Electrochemistry is, it will stop you from hitting on the Washerwoman on the grounds that she's 'an old crone', and if you decide you're going to masturbate in the street, it panics and orders you to save it for when you're in your room.
  • Physical Instrument and Endurance rarely contradict each other. They can even sound interchangeable at points. However, Harry's past as a gym teacher has Physical Instrument express relief that now they finally know why Endurance is so obsessed with fitness and machismo.
  • When you show the Scab Leader the photo of the Hanged Man, Physical Instrument can also sense that whatever he's about to say is going to be really nasty and will sincerely urge you to abandon this line of questioning for your own sake. It's proven right, as if you don't heed it Kortenaer proceeds to tell you about Lely and some of his other squadmates raping Semenese civilians to death while at war.
  • Should you first attempt to access the hidden compartment in your ledger after Kim was wounded during the Tribunal, Hand-Eye Coordination will bluntly stop you from doing so, telling you that too many people have died and too much is at stake for you to trap yourself in self-pity.
• Exposition Fairy: Encyclopedia's specialty. If high enough, it will inform you on the lore of the world when you hear terms that don't exist in the real world. If too high it will bombard you with useless trivia that is not particularly relevant, and may compel you to brag about this information or correct others, becoming an Insufferable Genius.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The Skills get hit with this twice;
  • Passing a fairly high Volition check when interrogating Klaasje reveals that, given her proficiency with lying and liberally mixing her lies in with the truth, she has all of your Skills other than Volition convinced that she had nothing to do with the murder or the victim. Thankfully Volition can guide you through the encounter, but even Volition gets played since he is convinced that, given that Klaasje is lying to you, she must be the culprit (since Volition is so extremely protective of you, his main motivation for putting the blame on Klaasje can be summed up as mostly being a spiteful attempt at "getting back" at Klaasje for trying to "harm" you — i.e. undermine your professional pride — by almost getting you to buy her cover story) even when the case ultimately proves that she isn't.
  • No matter what Skills you focused on, what your Stats started as, or what bonuses you have, there is no happy outcome to the dream of the ex-something for you. All of the Skills fall short of convincing her to stay, and even Volition (your sense of will and drive) utterly withers at the prospect of facing her again. Justified by the fact that this is a dream of something that has already happened, and only serves to show that you aren't over the ex-something and probably never will be since even your mind can't grapple with the notion of letting her go and moving forward with your life.
• Fantasy Character Classes: An unusual example. Each category of skills represents different aspects of your personality - Intellect is about your raw brain power, Psyche describes emotional intelligence, Physique focuses on physical toughness, and Motorics regards your senses and ability to move.
• Future Shadowing: Physical Instrument's entire personality is there to hint that you used to be a gym teacher. If you have the "Coach Physical Instrument" Thought internalised when you go to speak to Klaasje on the roof, it will straight up tell you that you used to be one, but if you press it on it, it will refuse to tell you anything else.
• Game Master: Each attribute acts like one, and speaks to you when something is relevant to them.
• The Generic Guy: Invoked by Volition. It is boring and will make you boring. It's proud of this. Subverted in that there's only so much it can do — it's still part of you, after all — and being the Only Sane Man in a crazy world makes you an oddity in and of itself.
  Volition: (on the other skills) They're all still of limited use, interpreting things to the best of their ability. Maybe they add flair or something? I wouldn't know. I don't add flair.
• Genius Loci: Unusual among the skills, rather than a voice in your own head, Shivers is said to embody the voice of the city, Revachol itself. The higher the skill, the more in tune you are with the city, its architecture and history, and in particular the chill wind that runs through it. This is further emphasized in The Final Cut by Shivers' descriptions having the same voice as the other skills, while statements from the spirit of the city itself (La Revacholiere) have a female voice.
• Good Feels Good: Electrochemistry wants you to solve the case so you can get high off the resulting 'serotonin jackpot'.
• Graceful Loser: Endurance encourages you to be tough and mighty, and to endure beyond hardship and sometimes even reason. But if you run out of health, he gently tells you that you've reached your limit, which is not shameful, as everyone does in time.
• The Heart: Empathy and Suggestion generally push for peace and understanding, occasionally to your detriment. Esprit de Corps gives you a window into the lives of your fellow RCM officers, as well as helping you to understand similar bonds among other groups — like the Hardie Boys, or the Deserter and his fellow Revolutionaries.
• Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut: Endurance likes to emphasize certain words like this. Examples includes "wömen", "vöws", and "bröther".
• He-Man Woman Hater: Endurance's attitude towards women is extremely hostile, to say the least. He goes on a full-on venomous rant when asked about the subject:
  Endurance: Wö-Men. Men of Wö. You don't like them. They're insane. Their idiocy needs to be scrubbed off the world with rubbing alcohol. Wömen need to go back to the fucking kitchen!
• The Hedonist: Electrochemistry. At low levels, the Detective is too naïve to understand the drug-riddled world of Revachol West. At high levels, he becomes a narco-nympho-dipsomaniac.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Subverted. Both Interfacing and Hand/Eye Coordination favor swords and will even nudge you into — somehow — MacGyvering one out of rotor blades and skis found in the Doomed Commercial Area. Interfacing eventually drops the subject, but only because it realizes the process of constructing a sword out of junk would take too long. They also all agree you need to use a gun for the Tribunal over Lilienne's sword, should you have it.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Electrochemistry is described as the 'party planet' skill, and its first and most common job is to encourage you to do shedloads of recreational substances and slobber after attractive people. However, spending some time with it will reveal it also has a side that is much more benign:
    • Electrochemistry governs your neuroplasticity and ability to rewire your own mind, due to the mesolimbic reward pathway's connection to learning, habits and behavioural conditioning. Electrochemistry is involved in gaining control over the ingrained nervous system spasm that causes the Detective's face to be stuck in The Expression, and also offers to rewire your brain for you if you choose to throw away the letter in the Ledger (converting it to the Ledger of Oblivion).
    • Electrochemistry isn't exclusively obsessed with self-destructive vices, either, and gets excited by learning about new things, especially cryptids. While not a lot of eating goes on in the game, Electrochemistry is also connected to food — it excitedly gives you ideas for how to make a sandwich into gourmet perfection with cheese and sprinkles of paprika.
    • Electrochemistry is delighted when you find the killer, eager for the hit of serotonin.
    • Electrochemistry ends up being crucial for communicating with the Phasmid — it communicates through pheromones, and is only able to get close to you if you're able to flood your brain with enough feelings of oxytocin-laced love to make it realise you mean it no harm.
    • Most of your skills are swayed by the rationality, self-restraint and sense of normality embodied by Moralism, but Electrochemistry isn't fooled — it understands incremental change just means you don't get anything rewarding.
  • Authority seems like an unpleasant skill that is about abusing your cop authority, and it has some very peculiar political opinions even by the standards of your brain (it will make you a hypocritical and moral-panicking Opioid Receptor Antagonist, and if you make Honor Before Reason decisions too often it will encourage you to shove your thumb up your ass in public), but in practice, Authority gives you the ability to avoid hurting and abusing others, by letting you see exactly how much pressure you need to apply to take command of a situation, and use violence judiciously. Failing Authority checks tends to be what leads to police brutality, as you throw public tantrums and scream racial slurs at people in order to try and get them to take you seriously. In one notable case, passing an Authority check leads to a calm conversation with a suspect, while failing it leads to you grabbing Kim's gun, babbling a bunch of incoherent gibberish, then blowing your brains out to prove a point.
    • Authority also lets you figure out the chain of command and the exercise of power that people have over others — or over you, for that matter. As one example, the skill gives you considerable insight as to Kim's behavior over the course of the investigation (being who he is, he is often more respected than you are as a cop.)
    • Finally, it is also the one skill that is called upon in order to save Kim's life during the ending of the tribunal scene.
  • Pain Threshold spends a lot of time trying to talk you into physical and emotional self-harm, up to and including suicide — if a botched Authority roll means you end up with Kim's gun in your mouth, Pain Threshold will be the one egging you on to try it, tempting you by making the inside of your skull itch. However, Pain Threshold can also be greatly compassionate in that it is able to help you empathise with and understand other people's pain. When informing Billie of her husband's death, it works with Empathy to help you tune into her distress and avoid amplifying it.
• Hope Bringer: With enough points put into it, Volition will constantly and often effectively try to rebuke your self-destructive and suicidal thoughts, telling you that no matter how bad things might seem and how seriously you might have screwed up, you can still become a better person and do good things.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Hand/Eye Coordination makes you a crack shot, i.e. being the skill you use to shoot the belt buckle holding the hanged man in the air or to shoot Kortenaer in the face during the tribunal. At high levels, it makes it very hard to resist taking the shot — fortunately or unfortunately, not having a gun for most of the game makes the latter a moot point.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Suggestion is typically an incredibly reliable Skill that helps you navigate many conversations for outcomes advantageous to you. It comes with no drawbacks if leveled highly, and even at modest tiers, it can help you perform passive dialogue checks. It's powerless before Klaasje and Dora.
• Insufferable Genius: High Intellect skills will lead you to behave like a showoff who lords his intellect over others and an obnoxious pedant who never misses a chance to grandstandingly correct people on minor details and errors. Logic, Rhetoric, and Encyclopedia especially are prone to this, and you can even call them out on it.
  You: Thank you, smartass.
  Logic: You're welcome.
  • Encyclopedia jumps at the chance to help with the pop quiz the Innocence History book gives you. This backfires horribly, as all of Encyclopedia's hints are completely unrelated to the topic of the question. And the one time the hint is relevant to the question, it's wrong.
• Jerkass: Some skills are decidedly mean-spirited and crass, representing the more foul aspects of your personality. In particular, Endurance and Physical Instrument will influence you to be a super tough man... who's also an abrasive asshole. Similarly, Authority will compel you to do grand displays of power to try and make others follow your demands, which can easily make you look like a power-tripping jackass.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Even the meanest and most fixated skills are doing what they are doing because they want to protect you and ease your pain. Endurance will take a break from encouraging you to become a fascist by comparing you favorably to a seagull to make you feel better; Electrochemistry might be there to get you to chase your fixations but it's also there to help you get out of them; Authority will sometimes stop creating absurd moral standards for you in favour of encouraging you to be a Reasonable Authority Figure whose self control allows him to respect himself and others; Pain Threshold stops the masochism routine in one instance to help you understand the pain others feel and keep from exacerbating it.
• Lawful Stupid: Authority wants you to flex your power over others, including by enforcing laws in comically petty ways.
• Lethally Stupid: Many skills at high levels:
  • Pain Threshold will turn you into a masochist for both physical and emotional pain and therefore will try and talk you into suicide, often. It also serves to induct you into becoming a "Suicide Cop", which — unsurprisingly — just results in a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • One particular Authority check results in Authority convincing you to put the barrel of a loaded gun into your mouth and then begging you to blow your own brains out, so that you aren't seen to be going back on your word.
  • Electrochemistry just wants you to have fun, but you are a late-stage alcoholic, and encouraging you to keep drinking is only going to end up with you in a coffin.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: The bickering, often useless Skills visibly perk up when it's their time to shine — Drama in particular becomes laser-focused when you call upon it to spin a yarn of total bullshit. A collective example is your interrogation of the Hardie Boys: several of them work in tandem to help you identify the weakest link in the group, when you should push and when to back off without fault, all the while keeping their more out-there tendencies in check.
• Living Lie Detector: Drama can help you being a downplayed version of this. Because Drama concerns itself with allowing you to act natural or flippant in stressed situations and telling convincing lies, it can also often pick up on the tells other character exhibits when they try to do it to you.
• Literal-Minded: Your Perception skill has a habit of being like this. It becomes way more noticeable when juxtaposed with the Purple Prose of your more abstract skills, like Conceptualization or Inland Empire.
• Lovable Rogue: Savoir Faire plays itself up as this, and can make you into one as well at high levels.
• Low-Level Advantage: The more you level up the Skills, the more likely you are to develop really extreme personality flaws as the Skill begins to dictate your relationship with the world. Generally, you will need 4 points in a Skill before it will become a prominent part of your personality, and the more you throw into it, the louder and stronger it will get.
• Luvvies: Drama acts a little like a stereotypical luvvie, and it will encourage you to act like one too ("You should say, 'Five hundred Lears and I can't remember the first line!'").^note As delivered by Albert Finney. Also another Manic Street Preachers Shout-Out — the quote appears at the end of "P.C.P.", the B-side of their single "Faster".
• Machine Empathy: Interfacing represents your ability to interact, fix, and feel machines. At higher levels this trope comes into effect. Too high, however, and you start thinking and empathizing more with machines and less with humans.
• Mad Artist: Conceptualization helps the Detective interpret and associate observations in interesting and creative ways. But when leveled too high, it becomes an overactive imagination trying to put extravagant misinterpretations of events in the head of the Detective and those he talks to.
• Male Gaze: Electrochemistry sometimes chimes in to ogle women's bodies. This is particularly pronounced when talking to the dream version of Dora, who is wearing a sheer silk robe that hugs her figure as it blows about in the breeze.
• Masochism: If Pain Threshold becomes too high, you will go from being resistant to pain to actively liking it, and the Detective will start to seek it out in self-destructive ways, up to, and including suicide.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Inland Empire, Shivers, and (at very high levels) Authority can give you visions that reveal things that you logically couldn't know by any rational mechanism, such as Inland Empire allowing you to immediately determine the underlying cause of the corpse's death by speaking to it. Are these supernatural visions, or is it just your intuition or subtle cues you noticed expressing themselves through the detective's psychosis?
• Medium Awareness: At one point, your Conceptualization can chime in and recommend you counter an insult by turning on your Caps Lock key.
  Conceptualization: You can't leave it like that — spin it on its head. ENGAGE CAPS LOCK.
  You: I LOOK LIKE A BURNING SUN.
• Morality Pet: Volition and Empathy act as this, steering you away from hurtful and self-destructive behavior. However, they're flawed in their own ways, as Volition will keep you from taking some of the more insane and out-there actions to progress the case, while Empathy slows you down by making you too focused on other people's feelings to proceed.
• Moral Sociopathy: Ironically, this is one of Volition's major flaws — for all that it exhorts you to do the right thing, its definition of "right thing" is inherently and absolutely focused on the Detective. Playing nice with other people is usually conductive to this, but not always, as Klaasje can find out the hard way should you listen to Volition regarding her.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Since Half-Light sees threats everywhere, it is also obsessed with neutralizing these perceived threats. Preferably with lethal force.
  Half-Light: Look at his shit-eating grin... He knows that there is nothing you can do to him. He's bullying you and you're helpless. Kill him. Kill him now. He won't see death coming.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Esprit de Corps and Shivers often give you a vague foreboding (or even outright visions with clearly audible dialogue) of far-off events that you have no real way of knowing about. This can foreshadow events that the player won't have any idea what they mean at first, or provide more depth to the world around you. Letting them get too high though can result in the Detectives grip on reality being a bit stressed because of this.
• Nervous Wreck: Half Light, being your fight or flight instinct, is one, and when overtuned it can easily turn you into one too, reacting with wild catastrophizing leaps of the imagination to nonexistent threats and ordinary situations.
• Not So Above It All:
  • You can get the inscrutable, mysterious, and collected Shivers to... join you in singing "Where the Hood At?". And they really get into it, with their text in All Caps.
    Shivers: HAVE A BROTHER IN THE CUT. WHERE THE WOOD AT?
    • In The Final Cut this is done in the voice of La Revacholiere. That's right, the city itself is singing to you.
  • In The Final Cut's Fascism Vision Quest, Volition's obsession with self-discipline leads it to be quickly seduced by Measurehead's spiel about semen retention, forcing Electrochemistry, of all characters, to push the saner opinion that occasional masturbation is not only harmless, but feels nice and relieves stress.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • The only time you can be absolutely sure any given skill is not attempting to misdirect you in any way, is when they say something that goes against their normal character.
  • In a more straight example, upon meeting Dora (in the guise of Dolores Dei) in your dream, you can try to leave. Volition, essentially the personification of your own self-respect and self-determination, and who has reliably been the Only Sane Man inside your head, is for once utterly unable to help you and just gives up without even putting up a token resistance, and you remain frozen on the spot.
    Volition: I can't help you. I am totally useless. Everything I've said is lies. I want the exact same bad things you want.
  • In almost every conversation your skills will bicker with each other or sometimes disagree for the sake of it, but when all of them except Volition start doing everything they can to help Klaasje or direct you away from her, it highlights that something is really off with her.
  • Throughout the game, your skills will constantly bicker with you/each other in order to get what they want, which makes the times they actually work together and try to give you good advice all the more noteworthy. One particular instance of this is when you have to inform the working-class woman of her husband's death. When you enter her apartment your skills noticeably become much more reserved, and they all try to give you helpful tips on how to handle the situation.
  • In life-or-death situations, like interrogating the Hardie Boys and the Tribunal, the Skills drop the goofs and become hellbent on getting you out of trouble. Authority in particular drops the desire to flex on others for precise, terse sentences, while the usually overdramatic Empathy and Drama adopt a teacher-like tone to guide you through the situation. The Tribunal in particular is one of the few times where every single one of them, even ones that tend to be self-destructive, work to ensure your survival.
  • Encyclopedia is mostly concerned with useless trivium, but when very serious subjects like the People's Pile come up, it speaks straight with you about the facts.
• Only Sane Man: Deconstructed with Volition, which represents your willpower and self-control. It will try to talk down the more extreme attributes and do its best to discourage you from the more irrational and self-destructive options, and will also never knowingly lie to, or otherwise try to misdirect you. However, just because it believes it is acting within your best interests doesn't mean it actually is, and it has its own biases which can cloud its judgement and lead to you making bad calls. Follow its advice too closely and those attempts to reign you in will devolve in to overprotectiveness, and will leave you completely unwilling to take some of the insane, humiliating, and at-times dangerous steps necessary to solve the case.
• Organ Autonomy: Much of the game is spent on prolonged conversations with your body parts. The Limbic System and Ancient Reptilian Brain (commonly known as the basal ganglia) are named outright, while the rest of the skills are according to Word of God parts of your Posterior Neocortex with shades of other organs:
  • Conceptualization is the ability to form ideas or actualize thoughts — generally associated with the hippocampus.
  • Electrochemistry is the pleasure centre — your mesolimbic reward pathway, as it refers to itself.
  • Encyclopedia is semantic or long-term memory. It very explicitly doesn't handle episodic or personal memory.
  • Endurance is the guts, specifically your lower intestine.
  • Empathy is, well, empathy, but also the mirror neurons.
  • Half-Light is the adrenal medulla, responsible for the body's fight-or-flight reflexes.
  • Interfacing, along with other Motorics skills such as Hand/Eye Coordination and Reaction Speed, is associated with the fingers, even being addressed as such in some dialogues.
  • Inland Empire is the imagination.
  • Logic is the frontal lobe, which handles problem solving and logical thinking.
  • Pain Threshold is the skeleton.
  • Perception represents the sensory organs in general, with different checks noting whether it's your sight, smell, taste, touch, or hearing.
  • Physical Instrument is the musculature.
  • Reaction Speed is the cerebellum, responsible for the body's motor functions.
  • Rhetoric and Suggestion are the Broca's area, whose functions are linked to speech production.
  • Savoir Faire is the vestibular system, responsible for balance and spatial coordination.
  • Shivers is your skin's ability to feel the city's Genius Loci talking to you through the winds... but also your alcohol-withdrawing brain giving you shakes, hallucinations and seizures.
  • Visual Calculus is the eyes and optical nerves transferring visual information to the brain.
  • Volition is the amygdala, responsible for the self-preservation instinct.
• Pride: Authority is really all about this. At best, it can help you gain respect with people who don't hold you in particular high regard or project the force necessary to make someone obey a command, but at worst (which is disturbingly often) it drives you to act in an extremely petty and bossy manner toward people who Authority feels have slighted you in some way or another.
• Private Eye Monologue: Skills leveled up sufficiently can form a thought patchwork reminiscent of this when presented by certain stimuli or situations. Depending on how developed they are, these monologues can last for entire paragraphs, with Kim expressing worry as to why the player character has just been standing in the rain for five minutes straight.
• The Profiler: Having enough points in Empathy, Composure and Drama allows you to read people's emotions, body language and detect their lies, respectively, which can be very valuable to solve the case. It's implied to be one of the reasons you are known as "The Human Can-Opener" back in Jamrock.
• Rabid Cop: Half-Light can turn you into this, if it is at too high a level, as it encourages you to respond to every threat with anger.
• Sensory Overload: When Perception is too strong, you are at the risk of this. After all, there is only so much sensory input the human brain can handle before it becomes overwhelming and confusing.
• Servile Snarker: Perception speaks in a very polite, old butler-like manner, most prominently calling you "sir", so when you fail to notice something very obvious, it tends to do this.
• Shadow Archetype:
  • Volition is this to You, because it is the personification of the part inside you that knows what is right and good — even though you can't help but want things that will make you worse.
  • Volition and Electrochemistry are this to each other. Both represents parts inside the Detective that want him to keep ploughing forward and finish the case, and their interactions with him both have a similar didactic, mentorlike tone where they soothe him if he gets overwhelmed and warn him against doing things that are unwise. The difference is that Volition wants him to keep going because it is the right thing to do, while Electrochemistry wants him to keep going while self-medicating with as much pleasure as possible because that makes it easier, and win for the sheer kick of it. And as you'd expect, Volition is a strong, benevolent Hope Bringer while Electrochemistry encourages you to indulge the vices that have already ruined your life, but Electrochemistry takes over as the voice of reason at times when Volition is fixating on hairshirted self-discipline that won't lead to anyone having a good time. The connection and contrast between the two is emphasized in the bad ending. After realizing you have no choice except to quit drinking, Electrochemistry tells you that you can replace the alcohol with another drug to 'buy you time' because 'all you need is time'. Volition then interrupts to say you can just stop, and 'it is possible because time is possible'.
• Sherlock Scan:
  • With Visual Calculus, you see the world through neon mathematical calculations and diagrams overlaid over the crime scene, picking out essential details and allowing you to succinctly communicate them.
  • With Composure, Perception, and Empathy, you are able to quickly get a general read on people, and even at times intimate details about their personal history and emotional state, at a glance, noticing things from the way they carry and dress themselves, small details about their person, and what mood they are really in, despite their attempts to convey something else.
• Shoot Him, He Has a Wallet!: A specialty of Half-Light. When Half-Light is semi-high, it gets extremely paranoid whenever someone moves their hands suddenly (and it has a very loose definition of "suddenly"), or merely has their hands somewhere where you can't immediately see them, instantly jumping to the conclusion that the person in question are trying to pull a weapon on you, no matter how calm or innocuous the preceding conversation has been. Luckily, you lack both a gun and ammunition for most of the story, so you never really get much of a chance to act upon these impulses.
• Signature Sound Effect: Each class of skills has an associated sound effect for their skill checks. Intellect has a simple, matter-of-fact bleep to reflect its domain of intelligence; Psyche has a faded percussion sound to emphasise how it largely handles interpersonal connection; Physique's piano chord is deep and reverbating, indicating how it largely concerns feats of strength and endurance; and Motorics has a bassy, airy whoosh that starts almost-inaudibly, for it largely handles acts of subterfuge and dexterity.
• Slimeball: Level Suggestion high enough and it will make you feel like this, as it's the skill regarding manipulating and charming people.
• The Smart Guy: All the Intelligence attributes embody this to an extent.
• The Social Expert: Several Skills, when combined, help the Detective become a master of emotional intelligence and manipulation, such as Empathy, Suggestion and Rhetoric.
• Spider-Sense: Half Light, which serves as your fight-or-flight response. Too high and it turns you into paranoid wreck, fearing things that might not even come to harm you.
  Bird's Nest Roy: Tell you want... (he bends down and disappears behind the counter)
  Half-Light: What if he's grabbing a GUN?!
  Volition: Don't panic. I'm sure he's just doing his shoelaces up. Something like that.
  You: (ready our hands on your gun)
  Kim: (he catches your movement and meets your eyes with a look of confusion)
  Bird's Nest Roy: (he uprights himself back into view; there is no gun in his hands nor any where else on him, instead he holds out a piece of cardboard) Here we go.
  Half-Light: He's trying to cut you with its sharp edge!
  Volition: He's *really* not. Just take it off him.
• The Stoic: Higher levels of Composure allow you to pull this off, since it represents your emotional control (and knowledge of body language, and your fashion sense). Too high, however, and others can feel like you're being emotionless, since you're compelled to keep up your stoic nature all the time. Empathy inverts this, as if it's really high, it will make you extremely emotional, to a degree that makes it hard to make progress.
• Straw Misogynist: Endurance hates Wömen (men of Wö) and seems to think of them as some sort of hostile foreign invader.
• Strawman Political: Certain skills have political leanings. Endurance espouses Fascism, Savoir Faire is an Ultraliberal (Elysium's term for a libertarian), Rhetoric is all about rebuilding Communism, and Empathy generally favors Moralism (radical incremental centrism). Given their nature, their versions of political ideologies are basically a parody.
• Straw Vulcan: The INT skills tend to fall into this. In particular, Logic and Rhetoric often don't understand why a double negative or some blunder that would lose points in a formal debate aren't really equivalent to a full-pledged murder confession. Justified, as they're just representations of those aspects of your mind, they literally can't think of any other way but theirs.
• Success Through Insanity:
  • Raising your skills to high levels will turn you into an awful and very flawed person, but give you a higher chance at succeeding tricky skill checks, meaning you will have to embrace your failings to succeed.
  • Inverted with Volition into "Failure through Sanity" — its weakness is that it will make you lose by pushing you away from doing stupid things. In particular, in playthroughs where Kim gets shot, it tries to persuade you against bringing Cuno with you to confront the murderer — an extremely reasonable view considering Cuno is a Jerkass twelve year old with a speed addiction, but also an express ticket to the bad ending.
• Super-Reflexes: Reaction Speed and Hand-Eye Coordination govern your ability to respond fast to events and your agility with your body, respectively.
• Token Evil Teammate:
  • The FYS skills in general, and Electrochemistry in particular, become this as they become a more dominant voice in your head. Electrochemistry will urge you to impulsively take drugs and alcohol in plain view, even from the most unsanitary of surfaces, and push you to embarrass yourself by aggressively making a pass at women at inappropriate times. Meanwhile, Half-Light is an impulsively violent and extremely paranoid personality when listened to, Endurance's fascist tendencies, misogyny, and associated thoughts will make you resort to violence as a first option (preferably toward women while drunk), Physical Instrument will make you despise the "weak" and disabled, and Pain Threshold (eventually) wants you to do nothing but suffer. This makes Shivers the Token Good Teammate amongst the FYS skills, as it mostly gives you atmospheric details about the environment, and occasionally even hunches and advice that proves surprisingly helpful.
  • Authority is this to the PSY skills. Volition is your moral compass and your willpower, and will only make you boring if it is too strong. Inland Empire governs your lateral thinking, which can cause you to become a bit too spacey and weird at higher levels. Empathy is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and can bog you down from identifying too much with the struggles and feelings of others. Esprit de Corps allows you to get glimpses into the lives of other cops, which can at worst be somewhat distracting. Suggestion is, essentially, the power of inception (i.e. using subtle flattery or criticisms to make people do as you want, while also making them believe that it was their own idea to begin with), and it can turn you into quite the slimy weasel, even if you're only one who notices. High Authority, however, will make you become a raging, power-mad asshole who likes to abuse the power his badge gives him in extremely petty ways for fun and profit, making it something to avoid letting overtake the rest of your skills.
• Token Good Teammate:
  • While it is overprotective of you to a fault and is capable of leading you to making bad calls if overly relied upon, Volition is probably the one skill that never wants to mislead you or harm you, which is probably because it's the embodiment of your desire for self-control. Having high Volition will keep you motivated during critical moments, and it's notably the only skill whose checks never involve anything bad happening directly to you.
  • While all of the skills are said to have at least a few negative qualities, Visual Calculus is one of the few that could be uncontroversially described as having no drawbacks. It points out important details in the world around you and never tries to mislead you. The description for it says that high Visual Calculus will make you oblivious to stuff happening around you because you're overly-focused on whatever you're looking at. This never manifests in the game proper. The worst thing Visual Calculus could be said to do is that it sometimes highlights details that aren't as important as they might appear, although it doesn't impair the investigation at any point. If anything, that should be expected because it's just being as thorough as possible and accounting for all factors in a situation.
• Those Two Guys: If Conceptualization and Inland Empire both are relatively strong, they start developing a friendly relationship with each other, often egging each other on to make their already weird and very high-concept ideas even crazier and more out there.
  • Half-Light and Hand-Eye Coordination also fits, as Half-Light will often spot trouble for Hand-Eye, who then encourages one option: Violence.
  • Apparently, Electrochemistry and Hand-Eye Coordination would often get together to masturbate. Your character is too depressed and wrecked to do that during the game proper.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: At moderate and high levels, some Skills will give the player self-destructive quests that will lead to their satisfaction at the Detective's expense. Electrochemistry in particular doesn't even need to be at an especially high level to do this. Even with a point or two put into it, it will attempt to nudge you into substance abuse or hit on women who are not particularly interested in you.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: Conceptualization certainly seems to think so. It doesn't matter if it's true or even if it makes sense, just that it feels suitably dramatic.
• Visual Calculus: Trope namer! The stat shows it off prominantly when reconstructing bullet trajectories.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Drama expresses itself this way, with unnecessary haths and dosts and addressing you as "sire".
  Drama: She isth a laedy most fair and juste!
• You Were Trying Too Hard: All of your Skills, should they get too high, will begin to influence you in different ways, but Conceptualization takes the cake. Passing an astonishingly difficult check with Cindy when asking for her paintbrush will make you go on a rant where you describe painting the outline of an ancient bird in fuel oil and then lighting it on fire, transforming it into a phoenix. Cindy is properly impressed, but refuses to give you her paintbrush as "she doesn't need this kind of competition in her neighborhood" and that you do not have the technical experience to pull it off. Here, Conceptualization butts in, apologizes for trying too hard, and remarks that the idea was "too strong." By contrast, failing the check persuades Cindy to give up the paintbrush in mere seconds.

Your Subconscious

The Paleo-Mammalian Cortex; Ancient Reptilian Brain, Limbic System, and Spinal Cord

Voiced by: Mikee Goodman

"There is nothing. Only warm, primordial blackness. Your consciousness ferments in it — no larger than a single grain of malt. You don't have to do anything anymore. Ever."

Your Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System represent the darkest, most primal recesses of your nervous system, the pre-conscious depths of your mind and self, and the first voices you hear at the very beginning of the game. Speaking to you in sleep and through dreams, they serve as narrators and critics for each day's events.

Your Spinal Cord rarely communicates with you directly but is able to take over when your conscious thoughts fail you, with unpredictable results.

---

• Anti-Villain: While the Limbic System and Ancient Reptilian Brain are both ruthlessly critical of the protagonist and constantly hound his attempts to get a peaceful sleep, by the end its revealed that they are doing this primarily to protect the player from their own memories, in particular the recurring dream of the moment the ex-something left you, which is all but stated to have been the cause of your mental breakdown that lead to the events of the game.
  Ancient Reptilian Brain: It is foolish of you to resurface to the loss. Not after all the damage you suffered to get here, some of it irreversible.
• Book Ends: Each day begins and ends with a conversation between you and the two of them. Other than the very last, in which your final conversation with them occurs when you rest up in the sea fort, making it potentially missable.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: They do ultimately want your suffering to end, it's just that their idea of doing this is to constantly remind you of your torment and failings to encourage you to completely wall yourself off from the world, kill yourself, or otherwise embrace death without resistance in order to make the pain stop.
• Cessation of Existence: In the opening moments of the game, the Ancient Reptilian Brain describes you to be in a state of nonexistence and tries to convince you to stay that way. In reality, it's just the tail-end of an alcohol-induced blackout.
• Cloudcuckoolander: The Spinal Cord literally doesn't have any direct connection to reality, buried as it is under the rest of your conscious and subconscious brain. During the little direct contact you have with each other, you find out it has some strange ideas about the workings of the body:
  Spinal Cord: Psst. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. Every vertebrae in your spine is an unformed skull ready to pop up and replace the old one. Like shark teeth. The one you're currently in has a little brain forming in it. Waiting for its turn...
• Death Seeker: The Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System want you to die, believing that you are too far gone to turn your life around and that it's the only way to end your suffering. The Ancient Reptilian Brain in particular will react to your being mortally wounded at the Tribunal with pity, relief... and barely contained, spiteful glee:
  Ancient Reptilian Brain: This is death. One more door, baby. One more door.
  You: Will I be a... ghost?
  Ancient Reptilian Brain: Brother, you already *were* a ghost. Up there, screaming — along with all of them. Scaring each other. Haunting each other. It's the living who are ghosts. The dead are silent. They don't rattle windows or write letters in blood. The living do. Leave them behind. Rest.
• Evil Counterpart: To your Skills — both want to help you, in their own unorthodox ways, but while your Skills are attempting to get you to engage with life again and are often divided by their individual predilections, your Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System are very much united in getting you to sink into oblivion to escape the pain of living. Your Skills are represented visually by colorful and abstract artworks; your Subconscious has nothing to accompany it, save for the cold, empty darkness of unconciousness. The contrast between the two is most evident in your dreams, where your Skills, for all their faults, will still often try to counter your Subconscious's nihilistic chidings by pointing out all the things about life that are still worth pursuing.
• In Touch with His Feminine Side: Though played by a male actor and part of your (male) brain, Limbic System is female, and the ultra-masculine Ancient Reptilian Brain calls her "sister". Since she is the part of your brain which processes emotions, if you are sexist, you presumably view her influence on your consciousness as a feminine touch. (She, herself, is not hysterical. But she definitely will make you hysterical.)
• Misanthrope Supreme: The Limbic System, in the introduction, describes the Detective's existence as an endless struggle on a big ball, where apes kill each other over resources.
• Organ Autonomy: Two-thirds of the triune brain plus the Spinal Cord.
  • In brief and non-comprehensive terms, the Limbic System wants to protect you from pain and the Spinal Cord seeks immediate pleasure. The Ancient Reptilian Brain, meanwhile, acts as a kind of gatekeeper for conscious memory, motivation, and decision-making, though yours seems to want to stop you from doing much of anything. All of them wish to guide you away from conscious thought, one way or another.
  • The reptilian complex and limbic system are alternate names for the basal ganglia and paleo-mammalian cortex, respectively. Yours have seemingly turned against you: your Ancient Reptilian Brain narrates your deepest sleep, and tempts you with the comfort of oblivion, free from higher thought. As you start to regain consciousness, the Limbic System takes over, warning you of fear and pain that awaits you should you wake up. (The neocortex does not have a voice, presumably as it encompasses all of your various Skills.) In actuality, the Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System are working to protect you — from yourself, knowing that those same "higher thoughts" are destroying you, causing you to inevitably remember her over and over, through the very cycle of self-destructive impulses, drugs, violence, and bad life decisions your Skills are using to try and forget.

• The Quiet One: Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System only rarely chime in when you're awake — fitting, as they represent your subconscious. The Spinal Cord, meanwhile, speaks up directly one time only: when you succeed on the Composure check to break down your inhibitions and dance after helping found the world's first anodic dance club in the abandoned church.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Pretty much all their dialogue, reflecting the voice of your libidinal self-loathing.
• Soprano and Gravel: Ancient Reptilian Brain has about the gruffest voice ever, with a truly impressive amount of raspy gravel, and Limbic System talks in a gasping, high-pitched voice. If Ancient Reptilian Brain sings through you at karaoke, he does it as a growling spoken word piece, as a sort of pastiche of Tom Waits. If Limbic System sings through you at karaoke, she does it in a wheedling, off-key falsetto.
• Snake Talk: The Limbic System, the somewhat more advanced part of your brain between the parts that govern conscious thought and the Ancient Reptilian Brain, speaks in a Creepy High-Pitched Voice with a piercing, sibilant edge. Because it governs physical sensation and primitive emotions like fear, you hear it describe the worst parts of your hangover (physical and mental agony) before finally waking.
  Limbic System: Time to get those clothes on, Harry! Time to go to work in the shit factory!
• Toxic Friend Influence:
  • In theory all your Reptilian Brain and Limbic System want to do is protect you from the world that's hurt you so badly, but acting on their advice would just lead to you walling yourself off from the world with your own misery.
    Ancient Reptilian Brain: Stay, sail with me through the Abyssopelagic Zone!
  • The Spinal Cord is all impulse and implied to be the source of some of your more bizarre actions in the real world — like, for example, when you fail the Savoir Faire check to duck out of the Whirling-in-Rags without paying your room bill, which causes you to bolt across the room and leap backwards through the air Flipping the Bird with both hands (and crash headlong into Lena and her wheelchair).

Your Horrific Necktie

Horrific Necktie / Beautiful Necktie

Everything on the damn crime scene fits like a glove, you should get *SHITFACED* on this *DAMN CRIME SCENE*!

Voiced by: Mikee Goodman (Final Cut)

"You and I are going to dance in the moonlight under a billion stars."

For all intents and purposes, it's "just" a paisley necktie adorned with a very garish and disturbingly vivid pattern. But with a high enough Inland Empire skill, it has the potential to become your friend. In that case, you will betray it if you change it for some boring scarf.

---

• Anti-Climax: Whether the ultimate act of Spirit is Eternal is flunked or not, you can ask the Necktie how you met it. It simply explains that you bought it at a clothing store because you were sad and its garish colors and patterns caught your eye and brightened your day with how "funny" they were.
• Companion Cube: When it gains a voice of its own, the Necktie addresses you as an old friend, and will sometimes try to make you try to stand up for yourself, though at rather inappropriate moments.
• Deadly Upgrade: Parodied. When added to the vial of medicinal-grade alcohol and eventually lit on fire as the fuse for a Molotov cocktail — the spirit bomb — during the endgame, the Horrific Necktie briefly becomes the Beautiful Necktie, its colors scintillating in the moment in which Time Stands Still before it explodes all over Raul Kortenaer.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: At multiple points, you have the opportunity to shut off the Necktie's "advice", thereby rendering it "dead" and averting the Heroic Sacrifice it is trying to set up for itself, instead ending that plotline on an Anti-Climax.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The Necktie is effectively an unofficial 25th skill voice in your head, but any time one of your actual Skills acknowledge the Necktie's existence, they treat it with skepticism at best and derision at worst. Its relationship with Inland Empire is the one that is explored the most, as it is the skill that facilities your communication with the Necktie after all, but it is notably afraid of the Necktie, because, as it reasons, an article of clothing shouldn't be able to talk in the first place and its a bad sign that it somehow does.
• Good All Along: Upon purchasing the medical-grade alcoholic spirits, the Necktie urges you to hold on to them until a critical moment, whereupon you will receive the signal to imbibe them up your ass. Since drinking the liquid any time before it signals you is lethal, you might be inclined to think that it's trying to make you commit suicide at a time of its choosing. It's not. It's only ever wanted to help you have fun and be happy. And if turning itself into an improvised explosive can possibly make that happen, it doesn't mind going out in a blaze of glory.
• Gratuitous Russian: For unknown reasons, it frequently calls the Detective "bratán" (a slang term which literally means 'brother' but is roughly equal to "bro" or "mate"). Made even more bizarre in the Final Cut, where its speaking voice has a somewhat posh English accent.
• Helpful Hallucination: The Detective is very aware that his clothing should not be giving him hints about the case, and understands that it is a "stupid drunk idea[s] that I'm attributing to my own necktie", and also a symptom of some pretty bad mental illness. Regardless, Necktie seems to know more about the situation than you do.
• Heroic Sacrifice: If you keep it on until the endgame, the Necktie will sense that something is up and subtly prepare you for the trouble that lies ahead by advising you to buy the bottle of medical spirits from Rosemary, and then later ask you to fashion a Molotov cocktail out of the bottle and itself. When the Tribunal happens, it will insist that you light it on fire and throw it into Major Kortenaer's face as a way of atonement for trying to kill you during your blackout.
  Horrific Necktie: This is the climax. The mystery. The virginal sigh.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: In an already pretty tacky wardrobe it is the crowning tacky article, being adorned in no less than five patterns of various clashing colors. When it transforms into the Beautiful Necktie, it tells you that you actually used to be a pretty conservative dresser before you found the tie in a shop one day, and that buying the tie was the beginning of your clothing style becoming gradually more tacky/disco.
  Beautiful Necktie: The rest of your clothes were still normal back then. But we took care of that soon enough.
  Composure: Normal police officer clothes just don't go well with a multi-patterned disco tie made of 98.7% pure flammable polyester.
• Incendiary Exponent: Its Big Damn Heroes moment comes when you light it on fire as the fuse for the spirit bomb and throw it at the scab leader/Major Kortenaer.
• Licked by the Dog: It's the only voice in your head — the rest of which urge you to be great, creative, strong, well-read, political, tactile, and even dead — that believes you to be and tells you that you are a good man.
• Large Ham: He’s really loud and has a weird accent… on top of being nothing but a necktie. “OK! WOW! BRATOOSHKA! LET’S BUY THE SPIRIT!”
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: The platonic, nominally male version, as a deconstruction, subversion, and wisecracking necktie. The necktie broke you out of the Boring Cop funk into which you'd fallen, but then went too far in the other direction, remaking you into an over-the-top Disco Dan with a whole host of addictions.
• No Indoor Voice: In The Final Cut, the Necktie practically screams all its lines in a braying and shrill voice. Subverted with the cryptic whisper in which Mikee Goodman delivers the tie's narration of itself, and the calmer voice it uses during the tribunal.
• Redemption Equals Death: The Necktie seems to give a voice to all your most horrible and self-destructive intrusive thoughts, and everything seems to indicate that you were planning to hang yourself in it, but if you keep around until the end and allow it to perform its Heroic Sacrifice, it becomes the Beautiful Necktie in its moment of "death", as it saves your life at the cost of its own existence. As it burns along with Major Kortenaer, it wistfully reflects on all the good times you two spent together, telling you that You Are Better Than You Think You Are.
  Beautiful Necktie: It's good to see you still have capacity for compassion, my friend. Deep down you are a good man.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Mostly absent during what can be construed as the third act of the mainline quest before making a potentially triumphant return after Ruby is confronted.
• Snarky Inanimate Object: It's pretty uncompromising in its mockery of you if it thinks you deserve it, and also savages other characters for not treating you with respect.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Zigzagged. The Necktie wasn't there quite from the moment the Detective first fell into despair, or even your breakup with the ex-something, but it did accompany you through your downward spiral into addiction and Alcohol-Induced Idiocy — the Necktie is not the root of your bad behavior, merely the sartorial gateway which allowed you to cut loose, run wild, and dress up in even wackier disco clothes, because only the most extreme sensations even seemed to register through your depression. The Necktie is doing this, however, because the alternative was marinating in your own misery and never having any fun at all. In its final moments, it admits it failed you... but hopes you'll still remember the good times, fleeting though they were.
  Beautiful Necktie: One day a sad man walked into a clothing store. He looked really down. Like he hadn't had fun in years. He needed someone to show him how to rock and roll again.
• Your Mother: When Roy expresses dislike of the tie by calling it a "necrotic object", it takes offense, indignantly replying with "Your mother is a necrotic object!"

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