Dunwall Diaries

The Loyalists is such a short mission I just had to wrap up this playthrough. Half an hour of Dishonored in a week is such a meagre amount, after all. Everything has been building up to this final, real rescue of Emily, and this involves scaling one of the most striking lighthouses in media. The lighthouse on Kingsparrow Island is a brutalist, steampunk horror, a utilitarian fist of steel looming impossible high overhead. In a game enamoured with vertical level design this is the tallest edifice Corvo will ascend. "Maybe after all this is settled, we'll see each other again." This level seems to be built in an extremely inviting way regardless of your playstyle. My first time ineptly bumbling through, this was nowhere the difficulty wall that The Royal Physician 's bridge was, though I certainly recall spending a lot of time by all that cargo piled up by the beach. Returning to it I feel as if it is just crammed with hiding places, lots of security systems that ...

Following the lengthy trip back from The Flooded District, Dishonored's penultimate mission is very short - not least because it takes place entirely in an area that has functioned as your hub and pre-mission downtime area until recently. Corvo returns to The Hounds Pits pub, which is crawling with guardsmen as well as three Tall Boys. Havelock, Pendleton and Martin have murdered everyone and left, although Samuel, Piero and Sokolov have managed to survive. All you need to do is get up to Emily's room - if you're in low chaos, Callista will have been spared and will let you in. In high chaos you have to get the key from her body. You can also work with Piero and Sokolov to upgrade the arc pylon and non-lethally stun the guards in one go. There isn't much to say about the level itself. Its verticality favours the player now that it is hostile, as getting above the Tall Boys is key to taking them out if you want to do so, and a reasonably dense number of guards in a...

Having been betrayed by the loyalists, Corvo finds himself poisoned and left for dead, eventually retrieved by the assassins of Daud, who deposit him in a boarded over pit. You begin with your assassin's blade, crossbows, pistol and traps and so on taken away. This is probably one of my favourite versions of the old trope in games where you get captured and all your stuff is gone. Reason being, Corvo can still use his powers, so if you've been finding runs you are a pretty big problem even without your gear. This could go two ways. If you have an arsenal of powers, you might end up having a lot of fun finding new ways to use them. If you haven't been diligent in finding runes, this is going to be a challenging area. I remember the first time I played this mission it took me a long time to get my gear, for exactly that reason. This time it was done very quickly by possessing first Daud's assassins and then some hagfish to get past everything. However, it is a pre...

Return to the Tower is a pure infiltration level. It is also testing the player on how they are using their powers or at least engaging with the systems, and seen in another way is giving you an excuse to have fun with what you've learned to do so far. You are immediately presented with a highly fortified location, crawling with guards and tallboys, that you need to scale and enter to perform the hit. And this is the hit it's all been leading up to - as far as Corvo is aware at this point in the story, once he takes down the Lord Regent everything will go back to "normal" and Emily can be installed as Empress. So there's big climactic energy here from both the stakes and the design, almost as if this was a version of a final level the team eventually decided to put at the end of the story's second act instead. This is also a level where planning will help you a lot. There aren't many corridors where you don't have a clearly telegraphed option o...

Lady Boyle's Last Party, The Clockwork Mansion, A Crack in the Slab, The Bank Job. It's the canon of talked-about, acclaimed Dishonored series levels, the moments where ingenious design, absorbing environments and great stories are considered to come together strongest in already consistently rock-solid games. In this level Corvo has to infiltrate a fancy party, find out which of three wealthy scions is in conspiracy with his enemies, and assassinate them. The clever complication is that the sisters are all in masks for the party, and that the level randomises which of them is the real target each time you play. Because the guests think your mask is a costume in poor taste (much to their delight) and you freely walk around the party, this feels like a Hitman 2 mission that you can still play like a Dishonored level if you want. Once inside, you can do everything by talking. Anyway, despite the fact Sokolov's extraction had been highly chaotic on my first r...