A year-and-some-change ago I played Disco Elysium to completion for the first time. As I typically do in games with a wide array of choices, I played it completely straight, answering everything as po’ faced and honest as I would in real life. I quickly earned the “Sorry Cop” copotype (as I was sorry that I even had to play as a cop in the first place), trended towards Communism with a little bit of that dreaded Ultraliberalism in there, and tried to be as straight-edge as was possible for a severely-alcohol-poisoned drug-using cop to be. The result was a story that felt like a lost season of True Detective, if that show featured a 12-year-old child who screamed homophobia at random passersby.
Since then I’ve read about a few different Harry builds that make the game more fun/funnier. There’s the Mediocre Cop, where all your starting character stats – Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics – were set at 3 across the board. The funniest part about mediocrity is that you’re not weak enough to die to most trivial dice rolls, but you will still have a high chance to fail at the most random of times. There’s a kind of spice to this version of Harry, because his inherent volatility as a character is more than enough to explain these random moments of success or failure. Then you have the Nuzlocke Cop, a version of Harry with all 1’s. This version was funny because he could (and did!) die extremely early on from shit like “turn the light on” or “grab the tie while the ceiling fan is going (or even while it’s off).” A version a friend showed me in our group chat was the Galaxy Brain Geniouse version, where Harry had a 6 in intellect, ones for Psyche and Physique, and a 4 in Motorics – aka, extremely smart and fairly limber but unable to do anything that required strength of body or mind. I actually played around with that one for a bit and it… honestly kind of felt nice. Definitely did die because I got sad tho.
The thing about Disco Elysium is that it is a game about flaws. Across all the possible (intended) versions of Harry DuBois that exist, there will be things he’s capable of and things he can’t do; paths opened where others become inaccessible. It is a game that says “failure is interesting; watch what happens next.” It defies the idea that game protagonists should be infallible or exceptional. If Harry believes he is the true center of the universe, Disco Elysium says, that is an electrochemical misfire in his brain, not the baked-in truth of the world.
Except… wouldn’t it be funny if we made Harry a… I don’t know… some kind of super-cop?
This is the thought I’ve had for literal months: what would happen if you maxed out all of Harry DuBois’s stats? How would the game behave? How would Harry react? Would he suddenly become more like a typical insufferably powerful and capable video game protagonist? Would the game fail to recognize his prowess and just start failing him whenever it wanted? Would I unlock some cursed future where nothing I did would prevent Harry from just, like, becoming a fascist? I had to find out.
Playing God
I poked around online until I found a guide that described exactly what I wanted to do. In order to make Harry into a super-cop, I first had to find his character sheet in the game’s back-end files, edit it, re-insert it back into its home folder and re-zip it without fucking the whole game up irrevocably. I also had to do it when Steam’s cloud save was turned off or not working, so that normalcy didn’t just reassert itself halfway through my playthrough and suddenly I had an exceedingly normal cop on my hands yet again. Actually finding the sheet was probably the most difficult part, as I initially resisted playing on Windows. I looked for hours through library files on my Mac and then my Steam Deck for anything resembling the character sheet .json file I needed, and honestly I probably could have kept looking for several hours more. None of the guides were helpful in this regard; they just said, “this is where it is on Windows; if you’re using other systems, uh, godbless I guess.”
When I finally did capitulate and open the shit up on my crummy Windows laptop from like seven years ago, I was worried that even if I successfully made the edit, the game would somehow find a reason not to run. You should hear this thing y’all, its fan fucking howls even when it’s not running anything graphically-intensive or processor resource-heavy. It takes me so long to do anything. But it was also the surest bet I had at actually getting this experiment in game fuckery to work.
I found my character sheet, and decided to go big-but-not-too-big: 20 points in Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics, plus a pool of 50 skill points to put in whatever I wanted, just for fun. I giggled, as this would almost assuredly zoom past whatever in-game limits there were. I also didn’t go higher because I figured that at a certain point, the skill numbers would mete out diminishing returns. Like what’s the difference between 20 and 50 points per skill when the game likely stopped counting at 13? I saved my work and, with crossed fingers, went to open the game.
Bupkis.
It didn’t run from Steam. Okay. I tried the desktop alias. Nope. I tried running it in administrator mode. Didn’t work the first time. Didn’t work the second time. Game finally opened on try three, but then it froze on the ZA/UM animated logo. So I quit Steam. Reopened it. Tried again. Video games, am I right? Computers, we love to see them.
Finally after an interminable amount of time, the game booted up normally. Moment of truth.
Loading save…
Loading save…
There it was. And there he was, the Henry DuBois, the amnesiac super-cop in all his pathetic mostly-nude glory.
Defeating the Expression, and Other Feats of Unearned Prowess
The first thing you notice is that your character sheet is fucked up. It was never meant to go this high. As you can see from the above screenshot, admittedly taken on the Steam Deck, the base stat numbers are bleeding into the stats below them. I opened the character sheet screen on my windows PC and got the same result, though. Shit’s fucked up and it’s not the display resolution’s fault.
The second thing you notice is… nothing else has apparently changed. Of course it hasn’t. This game isn’t built to notice or care about your starting stats like this, and anyway, this is a cheat. This is playing the game outside of its intended use. Why would it comment on the fact that I am apparently simultaneously a human wreck and a hypercapable hero protagonist? And of course the skill checks in the hostel room start small. I could turn on the light. I could grab the tie while the fan was spinning. I could do visual calculus on the hole in my room’s window. But there are two checks in the bathroom that are not meant to be completed right away – or at least, they’re supposed to be really hard to get successes in early on.
The first check is an encyclopedia check, meant to tell us about the disco era of Revachol and its de facto leader, Guillaume le Million. When you pass this check, you unlock the “Guillaume Le Million” thought. The second check, however, is infamous: The Expression. Related to le Million, the “Expression” is a rictus grin on Harry’s face that he is physically incapable of stopping. You have to have a heroic amount of points poured into Electrochemistry, or else you’ve put Harry into a series of horrendous situations that make it less easy to keep smiling. Because it’s baked into Harry’s nervous system, the Expression is meant to follow you throughout the game and open up situations for him to do pathetic shit with it.
I broke it in two consecutive attempts.
The first time I failed, despite having a 97-percent chance of success. I then just put another skill point into Electrochemistry, unlocked the white check and tried again. Easy success. This is when I realized I may have fucked the game up irrevocably. Aside from the narrow margin of error and the occasional mandatory story-critical fail, success on every check was all but guaranteed.
And here I have to admit, reader, that I immediately lost my nerve a little bit. I walked out of Harry’s room at the Whirling-in-Rags and realized immediately that there was a red check with Klassje involving the Expression that I realized I could pass. I found myself vapor locked. So much of the early game in Disco Elysium hinges on the fact that Harry is disoriented and pathetic. Failure is the point here. But this is what I wanted! I wanted to see what would happen when I made Harry into a super-cop!! Still, I’m kind of ashamed to say I didn’t follow improv’s first law: I did not say yes to using the Expression on Klassje. I let her go to her room without being a creep, and importantly, without finding out whether I would have succeeded. It wouldn’t be the last time.
I didn’t vomit when approaching the dead mercenary; I shot the buckle of his industrial-strength noose and watched the body fall before lunchtime. I punched Measurehead and did a flying spin-kick with grace to finish him off. I talked to Cuno and managed to get him to crack in front of Cunoesse almost immediately. I bonded with the smoking lorry driver. I stared Evrart Claire down. I met the reality-bending billionaire and got him to give me 10 reàl. Everywhere I went, doors opened for me. I had over 20 health and 20 morale; I was invincible. And all the while, I was experiencing a new kind of extrasensory hell.
Hail, Discordia
Players of Disco Elysium are familiar with the little thought bubbles that appear over Harry’s head as he walks around. They provide context for what we’re seeing, feeling and hearing, or key us in on details we might have overlooked. Different thought bubbles are written for a given area or event and only show up when or if you’ve reached a particular skill point threshold in something. Hey did you know that when you turn up all the fucking skills to 20 THEY ALL SHOW UP AT ONCE?
I was having a constant rolling argument with myself, with the various skills under intellect, physique, psyche and motorics all chiming in to quip about shit happening around us, getting into little tiffs, and essentially acting as Harry’s own demonic 24/7 twitch stream commentators. They would butt into my conversations with Kim and others, make dialogue “suggestions” on a constant basis, and get me to do random wild shit. Like I sat there and hugged the working class woman in front of the bookstore until I had a seizure(…?) and had to let go. I would get hit with random pains and morale hits, and even though nothing could outright kill me (or threaten to do so), it wasn’t for the world’s lack of trying. Frankenstein’s monster shambles through the streets of Martenaise, beset upon on all sides by the scared and violent townsfolk, impervious to their torches and pitchforks; he has a case to solve.
The only force powerful enough to stop Harry’s bullish charge was time itself, that is to say: there is no way to beat a time gate. I could be god’s perfect soldier here, no-selling every single skill check I encountered, but the moment someone said “check back later,” that was it. And the passage of time did me no favors here, either. People would start to disperse at night, businesses would lock up, and even though I realistically needed no rest and could detect on the fumes of my own defeated chemical stupor for what felt like forever, going to sleep every night was still necessary.
I felt like I was reaching the limits of what this game could do – or more realistically, what I could do in this game.
Falling Back In Line
From Day 3 onward, I found my playthrough becoming more normal. The cacophonous Greek chorus of my personality was more or less sliding into a comfortable – and familiar – cadence. I was still passing every skill check except for the ones the game needed me to fail. I once again became a Sorry Cop; I once again stayed straight-edge, tried to think about Communism, and did my best to solve the mystery of who actually killed the hanged man.
Making Harry into a super-cop does not radically shift the entire game around you. It was a game already designed to bend in certain ways, but it would never break under this kind of pressure. Harry doesn’t change, here, simply because I edited his stats. He is still just some guy having a crisis in the middle of a world that is falling apart. He is always just a few failed skill checks away from falling into the same dark hole as The Pigs, only he’s buoyed along by an institution that begrudgingly supports him and some pretty good luck. All I managed to do was change the way that crisis manifested. I couldn’t beat time, or other people’s impressions of me, or the way the narrative shook out. Finding some side shit early on that I wasn’t capable of perceiving before was not, in itself, a major difference from a game where my stats were come by honestly. At its core, Disco Elysium is indifferent to Harry. It is focused more on Martenaise. You can’t optimize your way into shifting that focus.
Would I cheat like this in a game like Disco Elysium again? Maybe, but the question I think is more important to ask is, why was I so compelled to do so in the first place? What did I really expect to find?
The End
Skill checks don’t matter at the end of Disco Elysium. Your weeklong diabolical party in Martenaise is over when you return from the island, whether you had shit to do or not. There in the decrepit fishing village, you face your own tribunal: a jury of your peers—your squadmates at Precinct 41, an outside consultant, and Kim, all gathered to remind you of the things you have done throughout the week. You can’t roll for initiative here. You simply have to answer for your actions.
Your mind is as quiet as it’s possible to get. The horrible necktie contributed to the death of at least one more mercenary in the confrontation earlier that week, and is gone. It’s cold out here. You found a hole in reality that might have been the true cause of your amnesia. You found the Insulindian Phasmid. You found a man, embittered by the unearned decades of existence he has been afforded in the wake of the Coalition’s obliteration of the Communards, addled by a psychic bug, guilty of murder. you found your ex, deified. un jour je serai de retour près de toi – one day I will be back with you.
your squadmate helps you back to the Coupris. you are battered, but not broken.
it’s time to go back to Jamrock.
