Tear Jerker / Disco Elysium

You: It's an expression of pain.
Mirror: You are correct.

— One of the possible dialogue choices to answer the question of what "The Expression" is supposed to represent when you look in the mirror at the very beginning of the game, potently establishing Harry's character, and setting the bar for the level of sadness you're in for going forward.

WARNING: Spoilers are off on Tear Jerker pages!

Never thought you'd find yourself ugly-crying at a wacky isometric detective RPG? No, us neither.

---

• On the third day, you can embark on an exuberant sidequest to discover the identity of a traffic hooligan who drove their car through a fence, across Martinaise, and ultimately into the frozen water. Once you find the submerged car, you can decide to wait on a nearby swing for the water to recede and hopefully lead you to your next clue. Kim will sit beside you in silence on the swing, waiting for you to realize the truth — the sunken car is yours, and you drove it into the water while drunk. Your character's sadness is palpable as you begin to understand just how badly you've screwed up your life — and how unlikely it is that your precinct will take you back after all of this mayhem.
  Kim: I'm sorry, Harry. I'm so sorry.
• Most of the interactions with Cuno are purely comedic in nature, but they get surprisingly depressing the more you get to know him. If you pass the Empathy check, he reveals some sad and disturbing facts about himself and Cunoesse. First we discover that Cuno is actually more laid-back and sensitive than he lets on, and that his aggression is something he does out of a need to protect Cunoesse from the mean streets of Martinaise. It's revealed that Cunoesse was homeless before she turned up at Cuno's door and that she likely had lots of traumatic experiences that resulted in her becoming so disturbed. The most worrying part is when the skills suggest that she murdered another child while she was living on the streets based on her grandiose claim about having supposedly killed a police officer.
  • Cuno's side-quest involving his dad is also quite depressing the further you get into it. Before you go to his apartment, Cuno hypes up his dad as being a fearsome, muscle-bound drug fiend. It seems like there's going to be some kind of physical altercation between him and the detectives, but when you find him it's rather underwhelming. He's just a slovenly drunk who's lying on the floor in a catatonic stupor. After you return to Cuno with the speed, he sounds downright crestfallen as you explain to him that his dad isn't nearly as impressive or cool as he made him out to be.
• At the Tribunal, when lying wounded and bleeding out, you can whisper several desperately sad last words to Kim. One of the dialogue options simply states, 'I lied. I remember it all.' Your partner will simply urge you to keep talking and remain conscious — but later, once you're recovered, he'll calmly state that he heard you confess that you'd been faking your amnesia.
  • All the other dialogue options are downers in their own right.
    You: I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore.
    
    You: There's a white shadow that smells like apricots, it's... always there.
    Kim: Stay with me!
    You: It said I have a vast soul. Do I have a... vast soul?
  • It's hard to notice because of the audio mixing, but at multiple points during this sequence you can hear the faint sound of Dora whispering Harry's name.
• A lot of thoughts are a mixture between tearjerking and inspirational. But Rigorous Self-Critique takes the cake:
  "All the gifts your parents gave you, all the love and patience of your friends, you drowned in a neurotoxin. You let misery win. And it will keep on winning till you die — or overcome it."
• The Mazovian Socio-Economics thought starts off humorously enough, but the solution text is rather somber and downbeat.
  '0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself *sad*. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov *fucked him over* personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.'
• If you succeed the Drama check when attempting to sing karaoke, you'll growl out The Smallest Church In Saint-Saëns in a wounded, spoken-word voice that comes straight from the Ancient Reptilian Brain. Appropriately, it's a sad, sad song about ruination, loss and memory:
  I would often go there.
  To the tiny church there.
  The smallest church in Saint-Saëns —
  Though it once was larger.
  
  How the rill may rest there.
  Down through the mist there.
  Towards the seven sisters —
  Towards those pale cliffs there.
  
  I would often stay there.
  In their tiny yard there.
  I have been so glad here.
  Looking forward to the past here.
  
  But now you are alone.
  None of this matters —
  No, none of this matters —
  At all...
• At various points during the game, you can dial phone numbers apparently at random, letting your fingers pick out the dials — and find yourself calling your ex, Dora. The full extent of your relationship and its tragedy won't be clear yet, but your character's distress and confusion (as well as Dora's own fear and hurt) are an immensely upsetting moment.
  • Even before she picks up the phone, there's an immediate sense of impending tragedy. Your knees go weak and you become intensely scared without understanding why. All your skills beseech you to hang up. You yourself know on some instinctual level that this is a bad idea. And yet your fingers won't stop. Your hand won't put the phone down. And if you persist after she hangs up on you, again and again, you begin punching the phone booth to the point of repeatedly badly hurting your hand and your health meter.
    Shivers: Run. To the church. Home. Anywhere but here. *Anything but calling her again.*"
  • At hearing the calling tone suspensefully repeat, your skills have this to say:
    Empathy: The saddest sound in the world.
    Half Light: Both pitiful and terrifying. You feel your pulse rising with each ring...
    Endurance: The handset starts slipping from your sweaty palm... your breathing is heavy.
  • With enough Perception, you can notice that someone else is in her bed. Volition begs you not to notice.
    Volition: Don't react. Whatever you do, don't react to that last thing.
    • And if you bring it up...
    Perception: No answer. You're not sure but you think you hear a *man's* voice in the background. It's covered in pain and white noise...
• The final dream sequence:
  • The final dream stands up to any of the great "dialogue battles" in the game's spiritual predecessor Planescape: Torment, as you attempt to prevent Dora — in the guise of sacred figure Dolores Dei — from leaving you. The tragic thing is that there's no way of winning the battle — no matter how you navigate the conversation, you'll only end up hurting yourself more, and Dora will always leave.
    • Just the fact that your mind renders Dora as Dolores. It is essentially your mind's last ditch effort to soften the blow just a little bit. Seeing the actual figure of Dora would simply have been too sad for you to process.
  • At one point during the sequence, you have an opportunity to roll a Suggestion check to kiss Dora passionately. But even if you "succeed", she'll remain quite still, refusing to kiss you back — and Suggestion itself will ruefully tell you that there can be no winning here.
    Suggestion: This was not about failure or success. This was always going to be horror. I should not have suggested it, and you should not have listened to me.
  • After your kiss fails to do anything to change her mind, she will reveal information about your child with her.
    You: "That's it then?"
    Dolores Dei: "No, Harry. Not yet. There is one more thing you have to see..." She slides her hands down her chest, and onto her lower stomach. And smiles. "I'm pregnant."
    You: "It's not mine."
    Dolores Dei: "Of course not." She looks down at her belly, then up into your old eyes... "I terminated yours. Don't you remember, you *poor* fuck? You poverty-stricken fuck."
  • Your skills are no use, but whereas before it's often played for laughs, their utter helplessness here is just depressing. The Suggestion check is utterly useless, and the skill itself tells you you should just kill it for failing you like this. Volition wisely advises you to let her leave, that she's only hurting you, but upon trying to do just that, you find that you simply cannot. Volition admits to being just as helpless as you, that there is not a single part of you that is ready to let her go, to accept that she is lost to you for good.
    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.
  • Conceptualization suggest you try to say something poetic; it too despairs when it doesn't work:
    Conceptualization I'm sorry. I'm foam. All I can do is foam, it's meaningless.
  • Her last words to you also reveal that this isn't the first time you've gone through this: you were having this exact dream for weeks prior to your blackout, stuck in a cycle of trying and failing to convince her to stay:
    You: How will I see you *again* then?
    Dolores Dei: Right here. Tomorrow night. Once this dream starts happening it keeps happening — three times a week. At least, And Harry, it really really looks like it's started *happening* again. There's the video rental... I'm suffocatingly beautiful. And young. And I smell of tutti frutti chewing gum — like I did that time when I asked you for forgiveness. After leaving you the first time, so long ago..."
    You: But this is intolerably bad.
    Dolores Dei: Oh yes. This is real darkness. It's not death, or war, or child molestation. Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart, Harry... See you tomorrow.

• During the dance-off at the church, you can attempt to cajole Kim into dancing with an Authority check. Fail the check, however, and your character will instead call Kim something extremely racist, causing Kim to storm out and wait outside. When you exit, he will be waiting there to tell you how hurt he is and that he will be taking the rest of the day off to deal with "personal matters". This is made especially worse by the fact that Kim never loses his cool around the various random racists who target him.
  • You can soften the blow and even entirely salvage the situation, turning it around into a Heartwarming Moment if you sincerely apologize to Kim for your racist outburst. Kim will then ask you what you see when you look at him. Answer that you see him as "a true Revacholian", and Kim will briefly be at a loss for words. Your skills will inform you, that despite both the circumstances that up lead to this point and himself, he is truly elated to hear those words.
• Kim's reactions to a Sorry Cop protagonist's constant self put-downs. While it looks like he's doing it ostensibly to ensure the player doesn't undermine their own authority as an RCM officer too severely, if your Empathy is high enough it'll note it also just saddens him to see you so depressed over how badly you've screwed things up.
• Failing to warn Kim during the Tribunal:
  • You're on the ground, on the verge of blacking out, and Kim is trying to stop your bleeding, when you see one of the mercs behind Kim's back raising a gun. Reaction Speed is urging you to scream, but you only manage to mumble incoherently. A gunshot rings out, and you see a red circle spreading quickly over Kim's jacket. The last thing you hear is his glasses falling on the pavement.
  • While unconscious, you have a conversation with Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System. One of the things you can say to them is that you have to get back into the fight and save Kim.
    Limbic System: Kim? There is no Kim. There is no fight, it's over — it *was...*
  • When you finally wake up, the very first thing Cuno says is that Kim's dead. Thankfully, he immediately admits that he's kidding and that Kim is in the hospital... but you still won't hear from Kim for the rest of the game.
    • By passing a passive Esprit de Corps check, you will get a short flash away to a nearby hospital where Kim is being debriefed by your squad while being treated for gunshot wounds. Kim begs them to just leave him be for now and focus on getting back to Martinaise as quickly as possible and help you, as he fears what the ordeal you just have been through might have done to your mental health.
  • The particularly painful variation of the check:
    +1 The lieutenant trusts you.
    +2 Kim *truly* trusts you.
  • And even during the encounter with the Insulindian Phasmid — the event equal parts awesome and heartwarming — you can get this bit:
    You: "Kim, can *you* see it?!"
    The Deserter: ... but Lieutenant Kitsuragi is not here. There is only the old straddler. He turns his black eyes to you and says: "Kim who? There's no Kim here either."
• René's death, and how hard it hit Gaston. Rene, being his stubborn self, wanted to prove that he didn't need hand-outs and pushed himself too hard on the job, leading to heart failure from overexertion. While telling you this, Gaston keeps referring to René as an "angry prick" and "old cunt", but prod him just a little, and he will admit that he loved René despite everything. Your Rhetoric will even note that Gaston somehow makes "old cunt" sound almost gentle. You can then give Gaston the old photo of René and Jeannie, the girl they fought over for their whole life, leading to a different kind of tear jerker.
• The fleeting moment during the Fascist Vision Quest, where you realize that René is actually in love with Gaston, but his own self-repression is too great for him to be ever able to confess this to anyone, let alone himself:
  You: I *know* I can get history back on the right track.
  René: The "right track"? This *is* the right track! The only track. (he gets visibly annoyed) This is the world we shaped, a reflection of what we are: cowardly, ugly, and numb. And there are no second chances. We don't deserve them! You just can't go back and restart — that would make everything *MEANINGLESS*! (a shadow of pain comes over his face)
  Empathy: There's something *substantial* moving in him, trying to get out.
  Volition: He would sooner die than let it surface.
  You: What is it?
  Empathy: Regret.
  You: Regret about what?
  Pain Threshold: (as the camera zooms in on Gaston) Him.
  You: Him?
  Pain Threshold: There's tenderness in the carabineer's look. Tenderness that's curdled into pain or something darker.
  You: Ex-love, ex-tenderness...
  Pain Threshold: Even worse, a love aborted and smothered, stamped beneath his brilliant boot heel.
  René: (you catch the old carabineer's gaze slowly leaving his opponent's wrinkled face as his dark eyes meet yours — whatever turmoil raged in him a moment ago is quelled for now)
  Conceptualization: Like the last rays of the evening sun gently kissing the day goodbye, before giving way to unfathomable darkness.
  Volition: Willed back into the darkest unexplored depths of his mind — never meant to be shared, seen or confronted.
  Composure: A true master of his emotions.
  Inland Empire: Hopelessly alone behind the unbreakable walls he spent a lifetime erecting. No one will ever know him.
• Even though he's a contemptible murderer, the Deserter is shown to be a tragic figure in many ways. His bad experiences as a teenager during the war prevented him from ever being at peace with himself. He feels extremely guilty over having run away even though he was understandably afraid of the impending destruction of the sea fortress by Coalition shelling, which was mere minutes away and ended up killing his entire unit. It's clear that deep down he's still that scared kid who was all alone in a bunker while Martinaise burnt to the ground. His vengeful, decades-long crusade was his way of making up for his past failings, but at the sunset of his life he realizes the blood he spilled was all for nothing.
  "I had to, I *had* to fight it. I had to never stop..." The old man falls silent. His black eyes keep piercing your skin as he looks to some great distance behind you, shaking his head slowly — retreating from it.
• Cuno's life is pretty sad as it is — a 12-year-old drug addict with an abusive alcoholic of a father — but when he says that he will go out like his dad, "West Revachol style" — that is, turning into a vegetable from substance overdose, even Cunoesse asks him to "stop saying all this sad shit" in a small voice.
• Later in the game you can find a dead body of a man on the pier, with evidence pointing to him having gotten drunk, falling through the rotting boardwalk and fatally hitting his head. Going through the routine of arranging a pickup for the body from the city morgue you find the address of his wife so you can inform her of his death... only to find out that it's a working class woman you may have had a humorous interaction with at the start of the game.
  • The death in and of itself is extremely sad: there is no culprit to apprehend, no grander meaning to the case you're investigating, and nobody to really blame: it's a horrible accident that could have happened to anyone, just like countless deaths in the real world every day.
  • It's possible, during the earlier humorous interaction with the working class woman, to convince her that her husband might actually be missing and that you should be looking for him. She admits to worrying about him and describes his favorite jacket that she lovingly customised for him with hand-sewn, bright blue inner lining — to keep him just a little bit warmer. When you come upon the body on the boardwalk, you can take a closer look...revealing a jacket with bright blue lining. It's a particularly heartbreaking turn of events for something that started with you randomly bothering the woman about a missing husband, seemingly for no reason.
  • Having to break the news of his death is so difficult that the normally unflappable Kim asks you to do it instead of him:
    You: "Ma'am, I'm very sorry to say, but your husband Victor Méjean was found dead on the Martinaise Boardwalk."
    Working Class Woman: She blinks. "What-did-you-say?"
    Pain Threshold: A great and terrible spike. The blood freezes in her veins.
    You: "Your husband, Victor Méjean, is dead. I'm very sorry for your loss, ma'am."
    Working Class Woman: "Oh." She touches her neck, eyes pale like pearls in seawater.
    "Oh," she says again, "But he was just..." She looks at the kitchen table, where two cigarette butts are still in the tray.
    Empathy: But he was just here. Alive.
  • From your previous interactions, you can establish that her husband was often away for long periods and that she didn't worry about it much. So when she eventually asks how long he had been there lying dead in the cold before you found him, your empathy gives you a warning of the damage that can done with a carelessly worded response:
    Empathy: If you say 'Two days, maybe', it will be etched in her mind forever.
• The Pigs is ultimately just a confused, senile, old woman who was abandoned by her children and mostly forgotten by everyone else, left with only a police radio for company.
  The Pigs: As you turn to leave, the faintest of voices comes from the old lady. It's but a reflex — nothing else. "Please leave the radio on... Mr. Morrand is on Channel 8..."
  Logic: Reflex to what? Being left alone?
  Empathy: Exactly. With only the voice of Gareth Morrand to accompany her on Channel 8.
• By all accounts, Lely was an utterly repulsive and murderous human being, but his field autopsy is still treated with a great degree of tenderness, as the player has the option to stroke his face and treat the body with dignity. This goes further as Harry begins to hallucinate the corpse's voice mournfully and pitifully lamenting his fate.
  The Hanged Man: I'm a joke. Look at me.
  You: There's nothing funny about you.
  The Hanged Man: There is nothing funny about jokes, either.

---