Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
Arkane Studios
Major spoilers for the entire Dishonored series.
When the original Dishonored first came out, a lot of theories were swirling around about the setting. Who was the Outsider? Who was Daud? What does the rest of the Empire look like? What was the Void, and what did the whales have to do with it? Over the years, Arkane would reveal more and more about their setting, from an in-depth exploration of Daud as a character in The Knife of Dunwall, the two-part DLC expansion, to a look at the southern reaches of the Empire in Dishonored 2. The Outsider, previously a neutral figure, took a more active hand in these stories, particularly Dishonored 2, but details about him and the nature of the Void remained frustratingly scant. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, an expand-alone built off of Dishonored 2, serves two functions: to lay bare the truth of the Void and the Outsider, and to bring an end to a saga that started with the murder of an Empress.
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An Empress. An Empire. That's really what these games have been about, haven't they? In the world of Dishonored, the Empire of the Isles is the whole of civilization (at least outside of theorized tribal societies on the distant, lethal continent of Pandyssia.) And each of its stories are about empire, and the restoration of it, and the desire for power at any cost. Death of the Outsider is a different beast entirely; it's much more intrinsically queer. Not just in the sense of LGBTQ representation (though the series has that too) but also in the sense that you play a queer woman of color*, who crawled out of the gutters of Dunwall to first become a trained killer then to live a quiet life on her own boat, now picking up her whaling knife to take down one of the most powerful figures them all. An outsider against the Outsider.
Death of the Outsider picks up several months after the end of Dishonored 2, albeit with the following assumptions: Emily was the protagonist (it's really her game, anyway), she kept the amount of chaos in Karnaca low complete with apparent non-lethal choices for her targets (this most matters in the case of Dr. Hypatia, who has been cured and is seeing patients again while also issuing a recall of her "Addermire Solution") and, most importantly, went back in time and prevented beloved mining boss Aramis Stilton from going to the fateful seance that ruined his mind, which subsequently prevents Meagan Foster, née Billie Lurk, from losing her arm and eye in a fight.
But time has a way of remembering things. Billie, who at this point has shed her Meagan identity, wakes up every night with nightmares and intense pain in her eye and her arm, and lingering memories of a childhood friend with whom she was very obviously in love with. Following the friend's cruel death in the streets of Dunwall, Billie has kept a rat totem in her memory. Other than being a part of Daud's "family," she has been utterly alone for most of her life. Daud has disappeared after the events in Dunwall, but Billie picks up a rumor that he's back in Karnaca. Rescuing him from a bathhouse owned by a criminal street gang with occult ties, he lays out his plan to kill the Outsider once and for all, blaming him for everything that's happened.
But how do you kill a god? Death of the Outsider is all about finding out. Over the course of just five missions, Billie, with a little help from Daud — aged, tired and sick though he may be — investigates a powerful, ancient cult that discovered something deep in a now-abandoned mine somewhere in Serkonos. While the rank and file are gangsters, the higher-ups are people in positions of power: bankers, extremely popular artists, government officials. They're vile people, with hands in all sorts of sick operations including kidnapping people of the street and using their blood to get high. While non-lethal options for primary targets have always been shockingly, deliciously mean-spirited in this franchise, they feel extra satisfying in Death of the Outsider, not merely a benevolent agent of the Empire rooting out corruption, but a forgotten member of the underclass kicking the pedestals that elevate the high and mighty out from under them.
You may be wondering, where is the Outsider in all this? Billie wasn't one of the people he ever chose to speak to; entire religions were built over getting his attention, but the choices of who to talk to and who to give his powers to have always been the Outsider's to make. He spoke to Corvo, to Emily (if you pick her to play in Dishonored 2) and of course to Daud. But one night, after bringing Daud back to her ship, Billie encounters the Outsider, who takes her eye and arm, and replaces them with magical simulacra; through these, she has powers similar to previous protagonists, but with a deep sense of loss. And it seems clear that he's empowering Billie for a reason, but what that reason may be is known only to him. Maybe after 4000 years, he's bored of life as a god trapped in the Void and ready to move on.
Death of the Outsider is about queerness. Not in the sense that it's Rent with assassinations (though there are a smattering of LGBTQ characters in the franchise) but in the sense that Billie's identity and background are the driving force for the choices she made in her life. Lonely and isolated, she made a living alone, with few allies and fewer friends. She told herself that she preferred it that way, but deep down, the ache never went away. Not in her arm or eye. Not in her heart. In many ways, she is a ghost; her societal alienation taught her how to be unseen, almost literally invisible. While Imperial society doesn't seem to look down on queer relationships (except for the Abbey of the Everyman, who represent the conservative religious faction in the dark mirror of the real world that Dishonored presents,) we can nevertheless see the implicit messaging: to be queer, to be Other, is to be invisible at best; and to the wrong people, an Outsider. Queerness, in the LGBTQ sense, is represented at various points throughout the Dishonored franchise, particularly in Dishonored 2. There is no inherent goodness or badness, either; the Brigmoore Witches are implied to all be canonically queer, with Delilah — the main antagonist of The Knife of Dunwall and Dishonored 2 — all but outright stated to be in a relationship with one of her chief subordinates; Stilton, who fights for workers' rights, is gay (and laments a woman trying to flirt with him "despite the obvious") and deeply misses the former Duke of Serkonos, father of the current Duke. But queerness, in the sense of otherness, is all over the Outsider, those who practice black magic, and those upon whom the Outsider bestows his gifts. The Outsider represents himself as a handsome lad with all-black eyes and a smooth voice; there's a mellifluous charm to him that's almost Satanic — yet there are those in the Abbey's highest offices who know that he is not eternal, and that there is a chance that he may one day be gone, and then where would the Abbey be? (As it turns out, victory looks a lot like losing, for the Abbey.)
If you've played Dishonored 2, you should be pretty familiar with how Death of the Outsider works. As before, your powerset has similarities to previous games, but far from total overlap. In Death of the Outsider, you actually have a very limited set of powers and cannot gain more (outside of bone charms, which confer passive benefits.) But that's okay, because in a first for the franchise, Death of the Outsider has no chaos system. You should feel free to spill as much or as little blood as you want, because the ending you get really boils down to your choices in the final mission. If you've been playing low chaos through the series for story reasons, Death of the Outsider is your chance to let loose, especially on those pesky Overseers whose every appearance involves them spreading death and misery in the name of their religion. Your mana meter automatically refills, unlike previous games which needed the appropriate potion to top them off. You won't have the heart this time, but Billie's rat totem allows her to talk to the rats, who reveal clues about the world and your mission.
Otherwise, the game plays a lot like Dishonored 2, complete with black market shops and other features introduced in that game. It runs a little better, too; the Void engine has been optimized a bit, and load times are slightly reduced compared to the main game. It might be tempting to say that there's little to really differentiate it from Dishonored 2, and maybe that's true, but if you liked Dishonored 2, you'll like Death of the Outsider. For me, Dishonored 2 left me a little cold, but Death of the Outsider seemed to have that nameless missing something that Dishonored 2 lacked.
This review turned out to be less of a straightforward account of the game and more a ramble about queerness in Dishonored; I think, perhaps, that's probably a more truthful telling of what the game is about than hard details. Billie is middle-aged, disabled, and looking for purpose. She had it with Daud's gang of killers, only to be forced out when she betrayed him all those years ago, an act she regrets. Her purpose now is to kill the ultimate symbol of power, a genuine god. The Outsider is treated as a Satanic figure that lurks behind the world's worst nightmares, but in a supreme irony, is just the ghost of a young boy murdered by a cult of the powerful thousands of years ago in the search for even more power. Daud says the Outsider had no right to give his gifts to anyone, knowing what they'd do with it; but is it really his fault that most people, given power, will abuse it? Daud included? Who's to blame, really?
Death of the Outsider looks at the stories of the previous games, about restoring the status quo in the name of empire, for good or bad, and says, perhaps nobody should have that kind of power.
One Last Fight
For your introductory mission you'll have no powers; conversely, there's very little security to worry about, even in the places you're not supposed to be. It's otherwise a Dishonored 2 mission in miniature, with a surprisingly short trip to the bathhouse, which itself is not very large. The bathhouse, now converted into a fight club, is where the local cult is keeping Daud. The bathhouse must have been nice once, but now it's dirty, filthy and home to what has to be the worst cocktail in the Isles. You'll see.
Follow the Ink
Rare for Dishonored, this mission is set almost entirely on the streets (with only a character's mansion serving as a separate map, and it's only one of your goals.) You're tasked with investigating two separate individuals associated with the local cult; it's a bright, sunny day, and you'll have the opportunity to do everything from giving yourself a tattoo to exposing a public figure as a cultist. You won't have much reason to visit the local bank, but don't worry, you'll be back...
The Bank Job
You're back in the same neighborhood you visited last mission, only this time the sun's going down, clouds gather overhead, and your target is the bank. You have multiple ways in, but your best bet is to find out how to put everyone inside to sleep; you'll have pretty much the run of the place, though you'll need to be careful since making too much noise will wake folks up. The bank itself is composed of two different sections, with the front area being the main bank and the back hosting the special vault you're trying to get into. The back area is patrolled by robots, though they're a lot less annoying than they were in Dishonored 2. It's not as sprawling as, say, the bank mission from Thief II, but it's pretty fun.
The Stolen Archive
Remember the Royal Conservatory mission? Yeah, you're going back. In the aftermath of the events of Dishonored 2, the Abbey of the Everyman have taken over the place and are performing an inquisition top to bottom. Mission-wise, the map is only half of what we saw in the main game, with Billie starting in a squatted apartment overlooking the Conservatory directly. (You might have wandered through it looking for a way into the conservatory last time.) Some of the same entry points still work, but the place is crawling with Overseers and the blindfolded Oracles, who don't need eyes to see or kick your ass. Other than the Overseers throwing up tarps and setting up research tents, the place is largely unchanged. One of the contracts involves killing every Overseer and Oracle (over 50 of them!) in the place except for one specific guy; if you're going to do this one, I'd suggest starting right away so you don't lose track of anyone like I did.
A Hole in the World
If you've been playing through the franchise from the start, this will be your last mission in the world of Dishonored. It's an abandoned mine; up front it's quiet, spooky, desolate; further in, however, you'll discover that cultists have been living here amidst the tunnels. The mine itself seems weirdly linear, almost truncated, stairs and walkways going to nowhere. But somewhere deep within are the secrets of the Void — dare you seek the truth for yourself?
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