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Aug. 4th, 2000 08:55 pmNOTE: Disco Elysium is a game that heavily deals with topics ranging from alcoholism, substance abuse, suicide, murder, bigotry (racism/xenophobia/misogyny), and the systems of policing/police violence. This application will touch on all these topics to some degree. I will provide content warnings before each bullet section.
Character Name: Harrier Du Bois (goes by Harry)
Age: 44
Canon: Disco Elysium
Canon point: Post-Game
History:
Wikia page for the character
Wiki page to give a general synopsis of the setting and the game.
Personality:
NEGATIVE - The ex-something
At the origin of Harry Du Bois, and the man he is today, is a break-up from six years prior to the start of the game. His fiancée, Dora Ingerlund, chose to leave him after a decade of being together. The exact details of the breakup and even the relationship are obfuscated through Harry's heartache, anger, and his perception of Dora being matched in his mind with a literal historic saint named Dolores Dei. Whatever the reason is, she left and he could not move on. Slowly, day by day, he chipped away at pieces of himself in torturous self-destruction. He became obsessed with his work, with disco music, with alcohol and drugs, and politics. The latter in particular manifested in absorbing conflicting ideological views, ranging from wanting workers to rise up against the bourgeois, thinking net worth is the most important judge of character, internalizing a hatred of women and foreigners, and longing to not have any opinion at all and forfeit control to higher powers above him. By putting so much of himself into his relationship, the loss of it damaged him so much that he can't move on. In game he can even call her and she makes clear she has moved on, while he is perpetually stuck. Worse so, she still makes nightly visits in his dreams as he replays the day she left him over and over to find a way to make her stay, to win her back. But she never will and he cannot accept that he can't solve his breakup the way he can solve a crime.
This goes on until the start of the game, when he loses all his memories.
NEUTRAL - Dedicated to his work
From a pure metrics standpoint, Harry is one of the best cops in the entire RCM (Revachol Citizen's Militia - the police force of Revachol). He averages two complex cases a week, which is considered a lot for any officer, and has solved over 200 cases in his eighteen years of service. To solve even 10 cases in a year puts an officer in the 90% percentile of the entire RCM. Within the game one of the main suspects in the murder case, Ruby the Instigator, gives the impression that Harry is well-known in the criminal underworld as "The Can Opener" because in time he will crack those he interviews open like a can. It's meant to allude to how gameplay is structured in dialogue trees both as a function of how you play the game and how Harry perceives conversation in general. He picks an option, goes down the trees, until he exhausts all he wants in a relentless fashion. Then there's his rank - Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor. Lieutenant is the highest rank an RCM officer can achieve while still doing field work, and Yefreitor is an honorary rank given to those who turn down a promotion to Captain. To be a Double-Yefreitor means Harry was offered the highest promotion twice and turned it down both times, showcasing a preference to being in the field rather than behind a desk. However this is a purely neutral trait because Harry's motivations for his policing have as much to do with "keeping the peace" as it does to drowning himself in work to think about anything else but his ex. It should also be noted that his motivation for joining the RCM was in part to impress his ex, as he was a gym teacher when they met.
NEGATIVE - Self-Destructive Behaviors (cw: alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide attempts, police violence)
Harry's self-destructive personality trait is well highlighted in actions he took in his past and actions he can take in the present day. He came to a crime scene and spent a whole week getting drunk instead of doing anything related to his job. His bender caused the woman working the front desk to quit her job, caused mass property damage with his car before driving it into the sea, and he got the pawn shop to buy his gun after he threatened to shoot himself with it. In addition, his room is trashed and he wakes up below a rotating ceiling fan... where his necktie hangs fashioned as a noose. Old case files even confirm he would come to work intoxicated and go out on patrol, which led to him attacking a suspect and busting his kneecaps to cause permanent disability. His addictions, suicide attempts and overall self-destructive behaviors all come to an origin point of being unable to cope with his breakup. Even one of Harry's skills - Electrochemistry - represents his self-destructive party animal. Electrochemistry is always prompting Harry to drink, or smoke, or take drugs, or lick spilled whiskey off a table in public, representing some of his worst coping mechanisms as a deranged little voice in his head. If he acts like a horrible piece of shit, then he will be treated as a horrible piece of shit, and that's what he thinks he deserves.
NEUTRAL - A Blank Slate
Harry begins the game as a retrograde amnesiac, and potentially has encephalopathy. He cannot remember his name, his job, his memories, or even basic concepts within reality. From a mechanical perspective this is to drop the player into the world on the same base level of understanding as the character. From within the writing, it is explained that Harry intentionally erased his memories with an extreme alcoholic bender and that he may have planned this out with previous experiments being noted by his colleagues at the end of the game. Whatever the case may be, the game is about Harry rediscovering and rebuilding himself as much as it is about solving the murder of the hanged man. He is excessively curious about everything around him, from people to places to ideologies to his job, and yet he also has to deal with the consequences of actions he does not remember. That week long bender mentioned up above continues to come back and haunt him like a bad ghost, fragments of the man he was being constantly brought back to surface for him to sort out and deal with. This is deeply disorienting and unsettling for him, and in the game he is liable to take morale/emotional damage as he learns more and more about the horrible things he did. However, it also gives him something of a new lease on life. Not an entire second chance, certainly not with the people he's hurt before that remember him well, but an opportunity to pick and choose the parts of himself he wants to keep and discard.
POSITIVE - The Best Version of Himself
None of this is to say the aforementioned traits are gone, but with the loss of his memory there is distance drawn. He can see himself, his past and his present, in an objective manner. He can also make better, healthier choices because he sees the fragments of the broken man he used to be and choose to be better. Throughout the game he has the option to help people, not out of obligation to his job but for obligation to his fellow man. If no one wants to give him sympathy because of how he acted toward them, then the least he believes he should do is be empathetic towards himself. In this way, he sees a hope that he can create a better future for himself. The dreams of his ex are largely gone because of his amnesia, but return as the game nears its conclusion. The dream hurts, it is intolerably bad, but now the old him is gone the same way she was. In experiencing a sort of death of the self, and in reconstructing who he was and rediscovering the reality he's in, he finds himself able to start moving forward. To try to be the best version of himself, still in pain, deeply so, but no longer stuck. No longer trying to solve the unsolvable. She is still there, a white mourning, but now he's ready to start taking the steps to move on.
Suitability: Much of Harry's motivation for sticking around with the ADI will boil down to wanting to solve "the case". Of the reasons he was chosen, of the apocalypse, and even the ADI itself. He is naturally driven by a combination of curiosity and duty to others, ready to help most anyone whether they want him to or not. Within Disco Elysium there is a sense that little prevents Harry from quitting his job and leaving Martinaise as an amnesiac with no connection to his past, yet he is driven to stay and solve the mysteries of the district, the murder, and himself. This is what manifests all the side quests he does in the game too. All this can carry over easily into the setting of this game.
Powers/Abilities:
Harry is a normal human being. He is trained for police work by the RCM, which involves conducting crime scene analysis, witness interviews, ballistics review, first aid, and performing autopsies. How much of this he remembers how to do is dependent on his skills and passing checks. Speaking of which:
The Skills: Disco Elysium is an RPG and thus there are attributes and skills that Harry has brewed into his character. The four main attributes are Intellect (intelligence/capacity to reason), Psyche (sensitivity/emotional intelligence), Physique (his strength/body build), and Motorics (senses/agility). Between these four attributes are six skills, with a total of 24 skills. These skills define how good or how bad he is in a certain area that relates to his police work and general state of being.
They are his cop skills combined with attributes of his personality, split into 24 distinct inner voices. These voices will talk to him throughout the game as a mix of his internal monologue, intrusive thoughts, and viewpoint on a given situation they are activated in. Skills will persuade him to take certain actions, which he has to decide if he wants to agree with or not. They neither lie nor tell the truth, only interpret the situation for what it is in that moment with the information Harry has at his disposal.
There is a lot that goes into skills in terms of building out Harry as a character and what he is good at, so I'm going to provide two links:
Skill list from the Wikia, which quickly breaks down in a couple sentences what every skill does.
My skill build for the version of Harry I plan to play, which includes an explanation on skills and shows the numerical value of the skills he can utilize in game.
Generally the higher a skill is, the more useful it is and the more pushy and arrogant it is prone to being in his headspace. The lower it is, the less useful it is to the point of Harry never hearing its thoughts. Generally as long as a skill is 4+ it will have an active voice in his headspace. Skills lower than that will be quieter, only chiming in when explicitly called upon. Skills can be raised within the game if Harry gains experience to raise them, or if he internalizes thoughts that boost them. I won't get too into the weeds of Thoughts because they don't play an active role in power/ability other than boosting skills, but here is a link explaining them if you want to glance at the basic concept. They more exist as clues to his past, random mind projects, and exploration of ideologies he can think on for hours and internalize.
Skills also have a second purpose as DnD-style checks. This functions as a dice roll in the game. If a skill is high the check is more likely to pass, although certain actions Harry has done in the game can make success more likely by adding bonus modifiers. Conversely Harry's actions can also decrease success with negative modifiers if he did something stupid. Here is a good visual example. If there's a time when Harry will apply his skills to investigate something major in game, I'll check with the mods to see what he is capable of doing.
Para-natural/Supra-natural Detecting: This is a somewhat dubious power within the game, but one I want to make note of because it is brought up so much -- Harry is capable of psychic communication, maybe.
The majority of these psychic communications are done through his skill Inland Empire, described as "animates the inanimate" and "enables you to grope your way through invisible dimensions of reality, gaining insight into that which sight can’t see." It is also stated to be cool for "Para-Natural Investigators". Inland Empire lets him speak to the corpse of the dead man hanging from the tree, who tells him "love did me in" and that statement turns out to be true by the end of the game. Likewise Harry can make friends with his horrific tie, which has its own distinct voice, who will chime in mentally on his conversations and suggest that Harry make a Molotov cocktail with it to kill a mercenary in one of the game's climatic scenes.
There is also Shivers, a skill which lets Harry speak to the city - literally. The city's voice is feminine (contrast to his masculine narrative) and declares herself La Revacholiere, the spirit of Revachol itself, and the skill denotes it is cool for "The Genuinely Supra-Natural". She will give him insights into scenes playing out around Revachol that he cannot see, and these scenes are interpreted in the narrative to be actually happening and not just part of Harry's imagination. At the end of one side quest she will even directly tell him of a foreboding end of the world to come in twenty-two years.
There is a level of dubiousness to all this because Harry is possibly (almost certainly) insane and erased his entire being through heavy binge drinking and drugs, but the game does make a case for him being insane and having these powers if you invest in these two skills. The question if this is all in his head or legitimate is raised but never clarified one way or the other. There is also a case to be made for this given the world of Disco Elysium isn't a normal mundane setting as it first appears. This is a setting where cryptids are real (despite people thinking they are fake) and an encroaching tissue called Pale covering 72% of the known world that can over-radiate people into experiencing memories not their own. For that reason I think it's only fair to include Harry's para-natural capabilities as a real power he may have but isn't fully in control of.
How this power will be utilized will largely depend on how he investigates things in the game he is presented with, because this ability is less about intent and more about feeling. He reaches out for that feeling, tries to grasp it, and if he does then that's how his talks begin. Giving the tie a life and voice of its own, for example, only happens if you pass an Inland Empire check and wear it. The same goes for when he talks directly to the corpse and to the city spirit. I will defer to mods when he employs this power to see if he can get any para-natural insights, and whenever he does he will have to feed his entity.
Entity Affinity:
(cw: mentions of suicide attempts, police violence, misogyny, bigotry)
Corruption
This could be a fitting entity for Harry given both his obsessive and unhealthy relationship to his ex, and how he straddles the line between corrupt and moral within the game. As detailed, Harry's policing can be ethical and unethical and that both these modes of operating are 'canon' shows how he isn't immune to corruption. This is a man who, canonically, can aim his gun at a child and shoot her if the player really wants to push him to that point. In addition he has clearly developed a deep internalized misogyny over his ex leaving him, his mind pushing thoughts of how women are inferior. There's even a check that, if you fail it, lets him convince another man that women are just whores looking to ride the "cock carousel". He is also an alcoholic and drug user and his recovery is dependent on player action more than anything else, the threat of relapse always present. Not to mention his penchant for threatening suicide as a pathetic means of exerting authority and control, as there is a whole game over screen if Harry kills himself to own the social democrats mocking him.
Political corruption is also in the realm of possibility, as it is 100% possible to make choices in the game that turn Harry into an actively racist, misogynistic, xenophobic bigot, who belittles anyone that doesn't fit his image of "Revacholian". The potential to become the worst version of himself is well and alive and he has to actively choose to not be that person. Questions surrounding corruption, both within Harry and within the scope of his work, are at the core of Disco Elysium - a game that asks what kind of cop you will be and impose onto Harry.
(note: my build of Harry is one where he rejects bigotry, but it cannot be ignored that internalized bigotry is a part of him that can either be rejected or accepted depending on player choice)
All this said, if the mods have other suggestions I'm open to them. I'm most interested in Corruption, but think The Hunt could also work with his obsession of solving cases and chasing after satisfying resolutions to all his problems to the point of self-destruction. The Web could also work due to his addictions, as he could feed it by indulging in those vices or trying to convince others to.
Inventory:
Disco Elysium employs a pocket-universe inventory system, where Harry can carry a seemingly unlimited amount of items at any time and just pull them out whenever needed. This applies to clothing, interactable items, weapons, and yes even booze and drugs. In that sense, everything you gain in the game is on his person. For the sake of the game I'm going to limit him to:
-The same clothes he starts the game with (green disco blazer, yellow jeans, snake-skin shoes, white collar shirt) excluding his horrific tie due to using it for a Molotov cocktail
-His RCM patrol cloak and uniform cap for heavy weather conditions
-His gun (with one bullet loaded) and police badge
-A flashlight borrowed from his colleague
Samples:
Dialogue: Text thread and Another one
Log: TDM Toplevel and A PSL thread
Regarding log/action threads: As skills in the game chime in with their viewpoint, I incorporate that into my action tags because they are functionally equivalent to his thought process. The success/failure rate is more flavor text, taking in how difficult it is for the skill to add their interpretation to a given moment. I don't use them in text threads because Harry can't see the person he's interacting with and pick up on things with his detective skills.
Character Name: Harrier Du Bois (goes by Harry)
Age: 44
Canon: Disco Elysium
Canon point: Post-Game
History:
Wikia page for the character
Wiki page to give a general synopsis of the setting and the game.
Personality:
NEGATIVE - The ex-something
At the origin of Harry Du Bois, and the man he is today, is a break-up from six years prior to the start of the game. His fiancée, Dora Ingerlund, chose to leave him after a decade of being together. The exact details of the breakup and even the relationship are obfuscated through Harry's heartache, anger, and his perception of Dora being matched in his mind with a literal historic saint named Dolores Dei. Whatever the reason is, she left and he could not move on. Slowly, day by day, he chipped away at pieces of himself in torturous self-destruction. He became obsessed with his work, with disco music, with alcohol and drugs, and politics. The latter in particular manifested in absorbing conflicting ideological views, ranging from wanting workers to rise up against the bourgeois, thinking net worth is the most important judge of character, internalizing a hatred of women and foreigners, and longing to not have any opinion at all and forfeit control to higher powers above him. By putting so much of himself into his relationship, the loss of it damaged him so much that he can't move on. In game he can even call her and she makes clear she has moved on, while he is perpetually stuck. Worse so, she still makes nightly visits in his dreams as he replays the day she left him over and over to find a way to make her stay, to win her back. But she never will and he cannot accept that he can't solve his breakup the way he can solve a crime.
This goes on until the start of the game, when he loses all his memories.
NEUTRAL - Dedicated to his work
From a pure metrics standpoint, Harry is one of the best cops in the entire RCM (Revachol Citizen's Militia - the police force of Revachol). He averages two complex cases a week, which is considered a lot for any officer, and has solved over 200 cases in his eighteen years of service. To solve even 10 cases in a year puts an officer in the 90% percentile of the entire RCM. Within the game one of the main suspects in the murder case, Ruby the Instigator, gives the impression that Harry is well-known in the criminal underworld as "The Can Opener" because in time he will crack those he interviews open like a can. It's meant to allude to how gameplay is structured in dialogue trees both as a function of how you play the game and how Harry perceives conversation in general. He picks an option, goes down the trees, until he exhausts all he wants in a relentless fashion. Then there's his rank - Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor. Lieutenant is the highest rank an RCM officer can achieve while still doing field work, and Yefreitor is an honorary rank given to those who turn down a promotion to Captain. To be a Double-Yefreitor means Harry was offered the highest promotion twice and turned it down both times, showcasing a preference to being in the field rather than behind a desk. However this is a purely neutral trait because Harry's motivations for his policing have as much to do with "keeping the peace" as it does to drowning himself in work to think about anything else but his ex. It should also be noted that his motivation for joining the RCM was in part to impress his ex, as he was a gym teacher when they met.
NEGATIVE - Self-Destructive Behaviors (cw: alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide attempts, police violence)
Harry's self-destructive personality trait is well highlighted in actions he took in his past and actions he can take in the present day. He came to a crime scene and spent a whole week getting drunk instead of doing anything related to his job. His bender caused the woman working the front desk to quit her job, caused mass property damage with his car before driving it into the sea, and he got the pawn shop to buy his gun after he threatened to shoot himself with it. In addition, his room is trashed and he wakes up below a rotating ceiling fan... where his necktie hangs fashioned as a noose. Old case files even confirm he would come to work intoxicated and go out on patrol, which led to him attacking a suspect and busting his kneecaps to cause permanent disability. His addictions, suicide attempts and overall self-destructive behaviors all come to an origin point of being unable to cope with his breakup. Even one of Harry's skills - Electrochemistry - represents his self-destructive party animal. Electrochemistry is always prompting Harry to drink, or smoke, or take drugs, or lick spilled whiskey off a table in public, representing some of his worst coping mechanisms as a deranged little voice in his head. If he acts like a horrible piece of shit, then he will be treated as a horrible piece of shit, and that's what he thinks he deserves.
NEUTRAL - A Blank Slate
Harry begins the game as a retrograde amnesiac, and potentially has encephalopathy. He cannot remember his name, his job, his memories, or even basic concepts within reality. From a mechanical perspective this is to drop the player into the world on the same base level of understanding as the character. From within the writing, it is explained that Harry intentionally erased his memories with an extreme alcoholic bender and that he may have planned this out with previous experiments being noted by his colleagues at the end of the game. Whatever the case may be, the game is about Harry rediscovering and rebuilding himself as much as it is about solving the murder of the hanged man. He is excessively curious about everything around him, from people to places to ideologies to his job, and yet he also has to deal with the consequences of actions he does not remember. That week long bender mentioned up above continues to come back and haunt him like a bad ghost, fragments of the man he was being constantly brought back to surface for him to sort out and deal with. This is deeply disorienting and unsettling for him, and in the game he is liable to take morale/emotional damage as he learns more and more about the horrible things he did. However, it also gives him something of a new lease on life. Not an entire second chance, certainly not with the people he's hurt before that remember him well, but an opportunity to pick and choose the parts of himself he wants to keep and discard.
POSITIVE - The Best Version of Himself
None of this is to say the aforementioned traits are gone, but with the loss of his memory there is distance drawn. He can see himself, his past and his present, in an objective manner. He can also make better, healthier choices because he sees the fragments of the broken man he used to be and choose to be better. Throughout the game he has the option to help people, not out of obligation to his job but for obligation to his fellow man. If no one wants to give him sympathy because of how he acted toward them, then the least he believes he should do is be empathetic towards himself. In this way, he sees a hope that he can create a better future for himself. The dreams of his ex are largely gone because of his amnesia, but return as the game nears its conclusion. The dream hurts, it is intolerably bad, but now the old him is gone the same way she was. In experiencing a sort of death of the self, and in reconstructing who he was and rediscovering the reality he's in, he finds himself able to start moving forward. To try to be the best version of himself, still in pain, deeply so, but no longer stuck. No longer trying to solve the unsolvable. She is still there, a white mourning, but now he's ready to start taking the steps to move on.
Suitability: Much of Harry's motivation for sticking around with the ADI will boil down to wanting to solve "the case". Of the reasons he was chosen, of the apocalypse, and even the ADI itself. He is naturally driven by a combination of curiosity and duty to others, ready to help most anyone whether they want him to or not. Within Disco Elysium there is a sense that little prevents Harry from quitting his job and leaving Martinaise as an amnesiac with no connection to his past, yet he is driven to stay and solve the mysteries of the district, the murder, and himself. This is what manifests all the side quests he does in the game too. All this can carry over easily into the setting of this game.
Powers/Abilities:
Harry is a normal human being. He is trained for police work by the RCM, which involves conducting crime scene analysis, witness interviews, ballistics review, first aid, and performing autopsies. How much of this he remembers how to do is dependent on his skills and passing checks. Speaking of which:
The Skills: Disco Elysium is an RPG and thus there are attributes and skills that Harry has brewed into his character. The four main attributes are Intellect (intelligence/capacity to reason), Psyche (sensitivity/emotional intelligence), Physique (his strength/body build), and Motorics (senses/agility). Between these four attributes are six skills, with a total of 24 skills. These skills define how good or how bad he is in a certain area that relates to his police work and general state of being.
They are his cop skills combined with attributes of his personality, split into 24 distinct inner voices. These voices will talk to him throughout the game as a mix of his internal monologue, intrusive thoughts, and viewpoint on a given situation they are activated in. Skills will persuade him to take certain actions, which he has to decide if he wants to agree with or not. They neither lie nor tell the truth, only interpret the situation for what it is in that moment with the information Harry has at his disposal.
There is a lot that goes into skills in terms of building out Harry as a character and what he is good at, so I'm going to provide two links:
Skill list from the Wikia, which quickly breaks down in a couple sentences what every skill does.
My skill build for the version of Harry I plan to play, which includes an explanation on skills and shows the numerical value of the skills he can utilize in game.
Generally the higher a skill is, the more useful it is and the more pushy and arrogant it is prone to being in his headspace. The lower it is, the less useful it is to the point of Harry never hearing its thoughts. Generally as long as a skill is 4+ it will have an active voice in his headspace. Skills lower than that will be quieter, only chiming in when explicitly called upon. Skills can be raised within the game if Harry gains experience to raise them, or if he internalizes thoughts that boost them. I won't get too into the weeds of Thoughts because they don't play an active role in power/ability other than boosting skills, but here is a link explaining them if you want to glance at the basic concept. They more exist as clues to his past, random mind projects, and exploration of ideologies he can think on for hours and internalize.
Skills also have a second purpose as DnD-style checks. This functions as a dice roll in the game. If a skill is high the check is more likely to pass, although certain actions Harry has done in the game can make success more likely by adding bonus modifiers. Conversely Harry's actions can also decrease success with negative modifiers if he did something stupid. Here is a good visual example. If there's a time when Harry will apply his skills to investigate something major in game, I'll check with the mods to see what he is capable of doing.
Para-natural/Supra-natural Detecting: This is a somewhat dubious power within the game, but one I want to make note of because it is brought up so much -- Harry is capable of psychic communication, maybe.
The majority of these psychic communications are done through his skill Inland Empire, described as "animates the inanimate" and "enables you to grope your way through invisible dimensions of reality, gaining insight into that which sight can’t see." It is also stated to be cool for "Para-Natural Investigators". Inland Empire lets him speak to the corpse of the dead man hanging from the tree, who tells him "love did me in" and that statement turns out to be true by the end of the game. Likewise Harry can make friends with his horrific tie, which has its own distinct voice, who will chime in mentally on his conversations and suggest that Harry make a Molotov cocktail with it to kill a mercenary in one of the game's climatic scenes.
There is also Shivers, a skill which lets Harry speak to the city - literally. The city's voice is feminine (contrast to his masculine narrative) and declares herself La Revacholiere, the spirit of Revachol itself, and the skill denotes it is cool for "The Genuinely Supra-Natural". She will give him insights into scenes playing out around Revachol that he cannot see, and these scenes are interpreted in the narrative to be actually happening and not just part of Harry's imagination. At the end of one side quest she will even directly tell him of a foreboding end of the world to come in twenty-two years.
There is a level of dubiousness to all this because Harry is possibly (almost certainly) insane and erased his entire being through heavy binge drinking and drugs, but the game does make a case for him being insane and having these powers if you invest in these two skills. The question if this is all in his head or legitimate is raised but never clarified one way or the other. There is also a case to be made for this given the world of Disco Elysium isn't a normal mundane setting as it first appears. This is a setting where cryptids are real (despite people thinking they are fake) and an encroaching tissue called Pale covering 72% of the known world that can over-radiate people into experiencing memories not their own. For that reason I think it's only fair to include Harry's para-natural capabilities as a real power he may have but isn't fully in control of.
How this power will be utilized will largely depend on how he investigates things in the game he is presented with, because this ability is less about intent and more about feeling. He reaches out for that feeling, tries to grasp it, and if he does then that's how his talks begin. Giving the tie a life and voice of its own, for example, only happens if you pass an Inland Empire check and wear it. The same goes for when he talks directly to the corpse and to the city spirit. I will defer to mods when he employs this power to see if he can get any para-natural insights, and whenever he does he will have to feed his entity.
Entity Affinity:
(cw: mentions of suicide attempts, police violence, misogyny, bigotry)
Corruption
This could be a fitting entity for Harry given both his obsessive and unhealthy relationship to his ex, and how he straddles the line between corrupt and moral within the game. As detailed, Harry's policing can be ethical and unethical and that both these modes of operating are 'canon' shows how he isn't immune to corruption. This is a man who, canonically, can aim his gun at a child and shoot her if the player really wants to push him to that point. In addition he has clearly developed a deep internalized misogyny over his ex leaving him, his mind pushing thoughts of how women are inferior. There's even a check that, if you fail it, lets him convince another man that women are just whores looking to ride the "cock carousel". He is also an alcoholic and drug user and his recovery is dependent on player action more than anything else, the threat of relapse always present. Not to mention his penchant for threatening suicide as a pathetic means of exerting authority and control, as there is a whole game over screen if Harry kills himself to own the social democrats mocking him.
Political corruption is also in the realm of possibility, as it is 100% possible to make choices in the game that turn Harry into an actively racist, misogynistic, xenophobic bigot, who belittles anyone that doesn't fit his image of "Revacholian". The potential to become the worst version of himself is well and alive and he has to actively choose to not be that person. Questions surrounding corruption, both within Harry and within the scope of his work, are at the core of Disco Elysium - a game that asks what kind of cop you will be and impose onto Harry.
(note: my build of Harry is one where he rejects bigotry, but it cannot be ignored that internalized bigotry is a part of him that can either be rejected or accepted depending on player choice)
All this said, if the mods have other suggestions I'm open to them. I'm most interested in Corruption, but think The Hunt could also work with his obsession of solving cases and chasing after satisfying resolutions to all his problems to the point of self-destruction. The Web could also work due to his addictions, as he could feed it by indulging in those vices or trying to convince others to.
Inventory:
Disco Elysium employs a pocket-universe inventory system, where Harry can carry a seemingly unlimited amount of items at any time and just pull them out whenever needed. This applies to clothing, interactable items, weapons, and yes even booze and drugs. In that sense, everything you gain in the game is on his person. For the sake of the game I'm going to limit him to:
-The same clothes he starts the game with (green disco blazer, yellow jeans, snake-skin shoes, white collar shirt) excluding his horrific tie due to using it for a Molotov cocktail
-His RCM patrol cloak and uniform cap for heavy weather conditions
-His gun (with one bullet loaded) and police badge
-A flashlight borrowed from his colleague
Samples:
Dialogue: Text thread and Another one
Log: TDM Toplevel and A PSL thread
Regarding log/action threads: As skills in the game chime in with their viewpoint, I incorporate that into my action tags because they are functionally equivalent to his thought process. The success/failure rate is more flavor text, taking in how difficult it is for the skill to add their interpretation to a given moment. I don't use them in text threads because Harry can't see the person he's interacting with and pick up on things with his detective skills.