Dishonored 2

Arkane Studios

Not too long ago I played through Dishonored. In a lot of ways that game was the pinnacle of immersive sims, combining a bunch of the crazy ideas developers have had in the years since Ultima VI. I sometimes liken it to Thief, but with the superpowers of Deus Ex, with a touch of Half-Life 2's aesthetics to keep it interesting. As I wrote in my review of the game, that Thief connection is stronger than at first blush, with deep roots in the fan community. But Arkane weren't done with Dishonored after the Knife of Dunwall expansion. Dishonored 2 was a chance to explore some of the fresh ideas the first game brought to the table.

It wouldn't have been a good idea to continue the bleak world of the first game, with its ongoing rat plague and tale of betrayal, madness and death in a society falling apart at the seams. Stuff like that, while compelling, can have the tendency to alienate audiences if dragged on too long. (Not me, though, I love that shit.) A thematic change was called for. Everyone had seen plenty of Dunwall, but what about the rest of the Empire of the Isles? And so we pick up fifteen years from where the first game had left off, assuming you'd gotten the best ending for both the main game and the DLC. Emily Kaldwin is now Empress, but her rule has been a bit lackluster, the bored Empress preferring to delegate her official duties and often sneaking out at night; when Delilah Copperspoon, a one-time poor servant girl turned magic-wielding artist, stages a coup, claiming to be the long-lost bastard daughter of the late Emperor, most of the Empire seemingly takes the news with a shrug. (How she escaped the Void after Daud imprisoned her at the end of The Knife of Dunwall is a mystery that gets explained late in the game.) Playing as either Corvo or Emily (whoever you don't choose gets turned into stone) you'll travel to Karnaca, the capital of Serkonos, the southernmost country in the Empire, looking for clues to Delilah's coup.

Karnaca is very much not Dunwall; Serkonos is a bright, sunkissed country, resembling Italy, Greece and Spain, though what I most thought of was the Caribbean. Under the rule of Duke Luca Abele, who aided the coup and is the royal consort to the new Empress, Karnaca is a police state, where people are forced to work in the silver mines for low pay and minimal safety measures. Bloodflies, a perennial pest, have reached almost disastrous levels; the enormous, almost bird-like insects build their huge paper nests in the unattended areas of buildings, stinging to death anyone who gets too close and using the corpses to lay their eggs. With the Duke spending most of the country's money on vanity projects and lavish parties there's a lot less cash for the bloodfly removal process, and so the state's response to a bloodfly infestation is to seize the entire building and hope for the best. The city's main hospital has gone mysteriously silent, the local genius inventor is building an army of murderous robots for the Duke, and the miners' biggest advocate has been missing for years. Meanwhile, the Howler gang owns the streets, with token opposition from the Serkonos branch of the Abbey of the Everyman, who suspect the gang's charismatic leader of witchcraft. While things aren't quite as bad as they were in Dunwall during the Rat Plague, the situation is deteriorating fast.

Into this complex soup enters the player character, aided by a vanishing few allies. Some of them you'll recognize, others are new. As a representative of the true Empress in exile, your actions in Karnaca will have wide-ranging effects on the Empire at large, and Serkonos' place in it.

For all the complexity of the plot, though, a lot of it is surface level, because Dishonored 2 was built the same way Thief II: The Metal Age was: the levels were designed first, with the story shaped to serve the missions, rather than the other way around. The story manages to be coherent nonetheless, but all that says is Arkane's writers deserve credit for managing to wrangle it all together. It's clear that Arkane had a lot of ideas they wanted to play with; one of the more famous missions is "The Clockwork Mansion," a cleverly-designed puzzle box that almost evokes Portal with its "backstage" areas the player can slip into amidst the mansion's constantly-moving parts and the master of the house being a snarky, too-smart jerk.

Dishonored 2, as mentioned before, gives you the opportunity to play Corvo, now pushing 50 and this time having a voice of his own (the one and only Stephen Russell!) or Emily, now an adult. In both cases, you'll be visited by the Outsider, who in contrast to his previous aloofness seems to have taken a personal interest in the fate of the Empire. While the game is designed around you taking his mark (for Corvo, it'd be a second time, because Delilah stole his magic) you have the option of declining it, and playing the game as a perfectly normal human. If you choose to take the mark, your actual powerset differs tremendously based on who you play. Corvo's powerset largely resembles what he had in the first game with some tweaks. Emily's, meanwhile, allows for a rather different kind of gameplay; instead of the quick teleportation of Blink, Emily gets something called Long Reach, which effectively works like Spiderman's webslinging in that you reach out for a spot and effectively throw yourself towards it. You are in fact affected by physics, meaning that it's entirely possible to overshoot your destination and fling yourself into danger by accident.

The chaos system and the Heart both return, but each have been refined a bit. The Heart now has a purpose in the storyline beyond simply hunting down runes and charms and reading minds; more than that, it refuses to repeat itself. You can still point it at people and learn their secrets; these secrets play a role into the chaos system, in that the chaos system now functions much more like a morality system where you get fewer chaos points for killing someone in self-defense, particularly if they were wicked according to the Heart. This allows for a little more leeway in how you deal with situations, which is good because unlike the first game there is no way to lower chaos.

Dishonored 2 is a gorgeous game, in part due to the Void Engine, a modified idTech 6 that allows for some beautiful vistas but has some performance issues that for some people persist to this day. When I first played, it took forever to load anything; even reloading my save took upwards of a minute. These days it loads faster, but it's nowhere near the responsiveness of the original game.

I liked Dishonored 2, but something about it also leaves me cold. It's hard to pin down why; I think it's the pervasive, if perhaps irrational, feeling that the plot doesn't really matter. Or maybe it's just the engine; when it comes to games like Dishonored I prefer an engine that's quicker and more responsive; I don't need fancy graphics when I'm just trying to sneak up on people. Nevertheless, it's still a great game, a refinement of the best parts of the original.

And I'm always happy to see Stephen Russell getting work.

Memories of Training

A simple training run in the streets of Dunwall at night, in the role of an adult Emily on one of her nightly sojourns into the city. There's no danger, just Corvo teaching you the basics of moving around, stealth and fighting. It's so good to hear Stephen Russell again.

A Long Day in Dunwall

Bad things tend to happen at Dunwall Tower, it seems. Starting from Emily's office, you'll have to find your way out of the Tower down to the street. The tower interior is pretty easy, lightly guarded, and you'll have ample opportunity to do whatever you like with your target, a traitorous Watch officer who helped spearhead the coup. The second part is trickier as you'll need to make your way down the street, which is littered with soldiers, but if you don't mind waiting you can catch a ride.

Edge of the World

After a strange, but consequential dream aboard the Dreadful Wale, you'll sortie out for Karnaca. It's a vibrant city, bright and colorful, with lots of people in the streets despite the ongoing police state and a massive bloodfly infestation in one of the nearby apartment buildings. Your ultimate goal is to find a way to Addermire Station; to that end you can find a variety of ways around (or over) security, and if you're willing to do a little body theft, the local street gang will open another path for you to the station. There is a lot of verticality here, more than even the first game ever offered.

The Good Doctor

This and "Edge of the World" form a two-parter. While it's still sunny out, an evening storm is starting to roll in as you arrive at this defunct sanitarium. Something sinister is afoot; despite the fact that there are no patients, the guards aren't just here to keep people out, but also keep someone in. The hospital is made up of multiple levels, two wings split by a central tower. There's fewer ways to move between floors than you'd think, but it's a big place and there's plenty of places to hide. Somewhere in here you can find notes on a certain Dishonored 1 character's stay here as a younger woman.

The Clockwork Mansion

This is the showcase mission, the one they showed off first to promote the game, and no shocker as to why: it's a twisty, complex little jaunt with a really cool gimmick and a neat aesthetic. While the first portion of the mission has you working your way up through another neighborhood, the meat of the mission is the titular Clockwork Mansion, a sprawling labyrinth capable of reconfiguring itself. Levers here and there allow you to switch rooms around, but if you're very clever you'll find that there are many ways "backstage." The big danger are the Clockwork Soldiers, who are hard to get the jump on.

The Royal Conservatory

Time for a night at the museum. Compared to previous missions this one is actually pretty small, a nighttime jaunt to a conservatory that's been occupied by witches. Lots of ways in and out, lots of verticality, lots of corridors and turns, it's a Blink/Long Reach user's dream. The streets are pretty easily navigated too, though actually getting onto the Conservatory property unseen might be a bit difficult, especially if you don't have powers.

The Dust District

This one can be either really short or a bit long. The Dust District is, as the name implies, a dust-choked neighborhood, most of which is in ruins, and every few minutes a storm of dust, grey as death, rips through the streets, lowering visibility. The area been largely abandoned by the state due to its relative uninhabitability and the ongoing war between the Howlers street gang — led by a man with borrowed magical powers — and the Overseers, neither of whom particularly like you. But you're not here for them; you're here to break into the sealed-up mansion of a popular mine boss, who disappeared three years ago under mysterious circumstances. If you can figure out the puzzle on the front door, you can get in without having to do anything else, but it might take longer than just finding out who's got the solution written down somewhere.

A Crack in the Slab

While "Clockwork Mansion" is one of the more creative missions in Dishonored 2, I personally think "A Crack in the Slab" is the real showcase of what this game and the franchise at large can do. You arrive at the dilapidated mansion of a one-time mining industry leader, beloved by his workers but now a sad wreck, kept prisoner in his own home, which is host to wild dogs and massive bloodfly infestations. In a startling twist, you have no access to your active powers; fortunately, your passive powers (including agility) still work. But the real surprise is that you're given a device that allows you to travel back in time to the mansion's glory days, the night something terrible happened. It's a lot of flipping back and forth, but the good news is, the timepiece lets you see what the other timeline looks like before you jump. Very cool mission, it reminds me a little of that episode of The X-Files with the ghost ship. It was apparently inspired by BioShock 2, which Arkane helped work on, so that's cool.

The Grand Palace

Your last morning in Karnaca has you infiltrating the home of the Duke himself. The street part isn't the most well-patrolled, but the interior of the Palace, which looks like a megachurch or something from the outside, doesn't have a lot of nooks and crannies, though fortunately lots of hanging lights and planters give you room to hide. Your job is to deal with the Duke however you see fit and also find your way into the vault, which is easier said than done. 

Death to the Empress

Welcome back to Dunwall. From the outset you'll be retracing your steps back up the street you took to leave, way back in "A Long Day in Dunwall." The secret exit from Dunwall Tower is blocked off, so you'll have to find another way in. The bulk of the mission resembles that of "Return to the Tower" from the first game, but the city is somehow in even worse shape than it was during the Rat Plague. Gangsters and wild dogs prowl the streets, witches dominate the Tower grounds. Bodies are piled up everywhere, and not all of them are Overseers either. While things have changed over the years — and not just during Delilah's reign! — much of the place should still be recognizable in terms of layout. Delilah staged an incredible trick to take power; this is your chance to trick her right back.

-june❤