Warning: This article contains mild spoilers for Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium is a game about wanting to be held tenderly by Kim Kitsuragi. 

Okay, it’s not really. Disco Elysium is a game about a lot of things. It’s about the ruin and resilience at war with each other in the depths of the human brain. It’s about a city overlooked, abandoned and run into the ground as a result of negligence. It’s about a hanged man, long-dead women with glowing lungs, and an alcoholic cop having a legendary midlife crisis. 

Disco Elysium, the role-playing game published in 2019 by ZA/UM, establishes you as an amnesiac. It’s not clear who you were, especially not at first. You weren’t well liked, or maybe you didn’t like yourself. Maybe you were liked once. Maybe you burned it all down. If you did, here is your blank slate: after going on a drunken, suicidal rampage and smashing up your hotel room, you have no memory of anything, not even your own name. You don’t even remember your own face! Your character icon is an amorphous, abstract idea until you look in the mirror. 

All the unknowing leaves the world wide open to be discovered and formed as you find the shape of your nameless detective. It turns out that having no memory is a get out of jail free card to becoming a better person, or a worse one, if you’d like. The one thing you can’t shake is impulsivity and chaos. Of course, you can try to deny it or choose to give into your worst ideas. Knock once on a door. Knock again, harder. You want to punch a hole in the door. You want to call the woman inside the room something violent, something accusatory. 

Denying weird, or even sinister, impulses is a cornerstone of humanity. Everybody has intrusive thoughts, though a much smaller percentage of people have intrusive thoughts that are violent or disturbing. The nature of them can be distressing, and can be behavior that we find abhorrent. In Disco Elysium, do you follow your impulses, let them wear you down, or refute them entirely? Do you punch the door or walk away?

Beyond the realm of just “do or do not”, lies the warm messy circle of humanity, and our nameless detective’s desperation to be included in it. It’s about the yearning, you know. In conversation with a lorry driver, you can ask him what it’s like to miss someone. “What’s it like? Good. And bad. An ache that brings you joy.” He smiles warmly. “I think of them a lot. I dream up these silly scenarios, in great detail. Of living with them… it comforts me.”

Yearning and its subsets of loss, grief, regret, and love, permeates the game. One of the earliest thoughts you can unlock is Lonesome Long Way Home, where wondering where your home is grants you +1 to Encyclopedia, determining the knowledge you have. The game describes completing this thought: “There, at the end of a street lined with pine trees: a small house, no larger than a matchbox. 11 Voyager Road. You no longer live there. Those times are gone, and so are those people. Why did you come here? Why are you still here?”

The first person you can talk to in game, Klaasje, is also the first person you can try hitting on. Off the bat, you’re more likely to fail (spectacularly) than not, and she’ll laugh at you and leave. If you succeed, you still won’t get anywhere, but she’ll tell you, “You seek comfort. It’s only natural.” 

In a later conversation with her, you can discuss sadness. “Something is bad,” you tell her, “in my head. In the past.” Klaasje will tell you that it sounds like an advanced form of what she has, “With a bit of old love sprinkled on top. Love is terror” You are afraid, detective. There is a sense of fear next to every other feeling.

Why would you tell Klaasje, a relative stranger, something so deep and sad and dour as that? In a world where everyone is a relative stranger, you can choose to open yourself up in a way that is nearly formidable. It an be foolish sometimes, and inappropriate. You can railroad a conversation in a grim fashion with a teenage girl until you come to a realization. You are “about to make a child cry. Are you proud of yourself?” 

You can engage openly and emotionally with a lorry driver, the same one who talks to you about what it’s like to miss people. However, if you then leverage speaking to him to find out too much about the case you’re working, he’ll become despondent. “Oh look,” he remarks, when you try to speak to him next. “It’s the cop who turned me into a bad person.” After getting close to him, you turned it foul and turned it into a stinging betrayal. I keep going back to this lorry driver in case he’s willing to forgive me. So far, no luck.

That longing in all its forms is readily apparent in the ways you can choose to interact with Kim Kitsuragi. At least, it is apparent in the ways I chose to interact with Kim in my playthrough. He’s the partner assigned to you from another police precinct. He has no answers for you. Kim doesn’t know your past, only your present and only the scant possibility of future.

He’s effortlessly calm, with round glasses, a bomber jacket and a habit of exactly one cigarette a day. He’s everything you’re not. In spite of a wealth of weirdness and bad habits, he’s constantly by your side, and trust deepens between the two of you as you afford him chances to speak or take his advice.

You can pester him repeatedly for a secret, and he can disarm you with only a quirk of his brow. You stand no chance against a man like that. Kim’s poise easily daunts you, even though you are taller, broader, and perfectly capable of throwing yourself backwards through the air whilst flipping the bird to a man you owe money to.

Doing good deeds will put you in Kim’s good books. It matters little the person you were before, only the person you are now. You can warm to him (and vice versa), and he’ll smile as he tells you that he likes your horrible green snakeskin shoes. He’ll tell you that you’re his kind of police officer, and make fun of you for kicking a mailbox. As he stands on the balcony of your hotel smoking, you think, “Oh man, he looks so devastatingly cool with that cigarette.”

Kim Kitsuragi is also gay. This is a fact of very little note, in-game. The earliest hint I found of it was if you question why the lady driver has posters of lots of women in her cabin. Kim’s response of, “Yes, well…” felt like Kim was saying “she’s gay, you idiot.” It’s the first of a scant handful of times that you can follow threads of queer sexuality. 

What is of interest to me, is that yearning can be seen by some as intrinsic to the queer experience. “It’s the yearning,” people will often comment, on images that depict same-sex couples looking at each other longingly. The yearning is what draws people, they’re not wrong. The yearning is borne of loneliness, which hits LGBTQ+ people harder than most. We often begin our journeys by hiding our authentic selves. We disguise them from family and colleagues, we alter our language in vague terms like my partner, my other half, my friend. 

Often, fear drives these decisions more than shame. It can take a lot of work to relieve yourself of that burden and exist in safe, open ways. To be queer is to be part of a large, disparate family. It is common to have to seek out niches that mitigate for loneliness when straight or cis people can more easily turn to each other. Pride has nothing to do with the things that drive that loneliness. We can feel alone in crowded rooms, whether it’s from being single, being new, or from simply not having found our exact place in the world yet.

That’s not to make being queer sound like a bad experience. Even in terms of loneliness, things are getting better. Increased visibility and learning means that fewer and fewer queer youth have to grapple with the isolation that comes from not understanding one’s self. It’s not even to say that being lonely is an exclusively queer experience, it is not, at all. That is also, however, a different topic. Disco Elysium speaks to loneliness. Perhaps unintentionally, with the amnesia you play through, it speaks directly to the loneliness that comes from not knowing. 

In large part, explorations of queer sexuality happen when you come across the Smoker on the Balcony, he’s encountered doing exactly what his name implies. Although reluctant, he agrees to help you learn more about the murder you’re solving. Though not before the game luxuriates in descriptions of him. It mentions his feline eyes, his compassion, the snow gathering in his hair, his oversized shirt, and his slender cheekbones.

When you meet him up-close, later, you think “his shirt is still unbuttoned.” It has clearly been on your mind. As he leaves, you think: “He’s going to leave you alone again.” You can complain how you only just found him again. You ask him to promise that you’ll talk again, that it’s important. “We’ll talk,” he assures you, “Just not tonight.” With that, he’s gone, into the night, off to the city where the game suggests he’ll be going to a queer club.

At this point, Kim’s mouth twitches. You realize he’s trying not to laugh at you. Kim humors you as you moon over the Smoker to him, telling him that the Smoker is so different, that he’s a good listener. You mention that you liked talking to him, that he’s mysterious, that he smells good.

It’s not subtle. The Smoker is a gay man, and he has the nameless detective falling head-over-heels for him with barely any effort. You are clearly confused, unsure why you feel so strongly, but you feel it anyway. You lament his leaving loudly, vocally, and you want him back. In other words, you yearn. 

If a composure check is passed, you’re able to ask the Smoker if he’s gay. This will unlock Homo-Sexual Underground. It’s a thought that requires you to spend eight hours of in-game time obsessing over your sexuality. You then tell yourself to stop obsessing over your sexuality, at which point naturally, you can badger Kim into telling you if he’s gay instead. Kim responds with a fond but admonishing answer “I’ll spare you another *20 hour mind-project* – yes, I am.”

Kim, the man we’re so close with and can admire so much. The one who recognized and found amusement in watching you flounder hopelessly and romantically after the Smoker. Kim who, by the way, also smokes on a balcony. He is diligent in helping you, in trying to be your moral compass, in comforting you that mistakes that you’ve made aren’t insurmountable. Patient and loyal, the game establishes when first meeting Kim that he would hurl himself in death’s way to save you. The detective wonders, “But why?”

There aren’t more explorations of sexuality beyond this to my knowledge, but the yearning that the game encompasses is so neatly distilled through this sequence of interactions. You are enamored, suppressed, dense, open and unknown, impulsive and chaotic. It’s… well, it’s all very queer, or at least, it’s very relatable from a queer perspective.

The detective answers many questions about himself over the course of Disco Elysium, learning plenty. The game is, in part, about the person you choose to be. To that extent, I find that the potential question of sexuality is an unanswered one. Where does all the detective’s new yearning go? Does he simply stow it away, like so many other habits and intrusive thoughts? As he discovers his past, can he not move forward toward something? Toward Kim, maybe. I’ll reiterate: Disco Elysium is not actually a game about wanting to be held tenderly by Kim Kitsuragi. Maybe it should be.

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