[Disco Elysium] did a drawing, painted it

dude that's amazing

the hazy color style is perfect for the game's feel, and you captured the ineffable disturbingness of The Expression

and the TIE, and the horrible pants

Pyrholidon Harry intrigues me because the other thoughts that double the effect of a drug (Boiadeiro, Revacholian Nationhood) make it clear that it's a delusional coping mechanism of some kind

but pyrholidon is doubled by Cop of the Apocalypse which doesn't even mention pyrholidon in the description

(speed doesn't have a double-effect thought, but it does have Lonesome Long Way Home which makes it boost your PSY too, and even that mentions speed - "where's the dealer? you have to get back to work")

all evidence is that Cop of the Apocalypse is true, and the weird shit Harry hallucinates if he's high PSY/high on pyrholidon is also suggested to be true

although Harry's/Electrochemistry's view of the drug itself is that it's something used to make the world feel warmer, e.g. a coping mechanism, all it actually seems to do is allow him to see the apocalypse

Half Light when inducting you into Cop of the Apocalypse: "it's totally also a coping mechanism"

some of this might be also because the thoughts often transform and curdle as you work on them

Finger on the Eject Button is clearest here, because when you start working on the thought it gives you two relatively powerful stat bonuses and the description makes it clear you are only contemplating suicide because of "how much they'd miss you", e.g. it's the normal, narcissistic non-pathological fantasy everyone experiences at times

if you then internalise Finger on the Eject Button you lose the bonus and all you get is the option to kill yourself every evening. the description points it out, like "you accidentally thought too hard about wanting to kill yourself and now you actually want to do it, and turns out you've constantly actually wanted to do it for most of your life!"

Apocalypse Cop probably also starts off as him having a coping mechanism but then he can actually feel it

Nancy Crawfish : thanks! one problem I had with drawing The Expression is that it's not possible to draw a face without doing that expression yourself, so I was basically stuck making The Expression for four hours

it honest to god gave me a headache. the spirit of Harry came to me

the specific line I was imagining him saying here was "the wolf is at the door, Kim. It will eat the sun."

wow I missed ALL of that, thanks to never doing drugs. I played this game through from beginning to end and have probably not seen like half of it, just due to the nature of it. I am really gonna have to replay when the extra stuff comes out and Acopalypse much harder

I love the idea of every single artist who draws Harry having that exact experience

i am still simultaneously waiting for and dreading doing a run as a gigantic fascist where I make Kim hate me

it's gonna fucking suck but there's stuff in there i need to see, it's not quite the same as the Undertale bad path where you objectively should not want to do it

uhh i also missed out on one of my fav scenes in the game by having my induction to pyrholidon when Kim wasn't there

i do find it interesting how you decided to just do the game clean on your first go through! i went for it and piled on the substances but i did manage to quit drinking

(there aren't any thoughts that allow you to quit the other drugs in particular. Opioid Receptor Antagonist covers some of it but it also specifically benefits you by giving you no negative stat effects from alcohol, which, yeah)

in terms of how the game portrays Harry's drug use it's clearly bad for him but i think it's unambiguous that the worst shit he does is alcohol, which is legal and plentiful and socially acceptable.

the amphetamines are specifically something he uses to self-medicate the effects of alcohol and to allow him to stay up all night to drink more. pyrholidon... his electrochemistry is clearly familiar with it, but it's played off like it's a new thing to him, I'm not sure he ever used it before (certainly not regularly)

we're told pyrholidon is rare to come across as well, so he'd have issues accessing it

i think the cigarettes are used least interestingly in the game, but cigarettes are inherently about the least interesting drug going

there is a casual mention buried deep in one conversation tree which doesn't even have to do with cigarettes that mentions how much smoking has wrecked his lungs, but there's no real indication of that in the rest of the game

the game also doesn't bother to simulate or analogise any of the potentially fun aspects of smoking either. no social smoking with kim, no cravings