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Dishonored: Mission 6, "Return to the Tower"

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 of bypassing encounters somehow, or at least taking vantage to formulate a way to best handle the enemies. The maps are mostly comprised of large open spaces with tributarial passages and hiding spaces as well as the chandeliers which are an ideal place to blink up to in an emergency. The biggest hurdle, and the place I remember having a lot of trouble first time round, is the big setpiece encounter around the doors of the tower. The level is throwing every problem you've faced so far at you simultaneously - guards, tallboys, a mortar tower and a wall of light. You might see it as an exam on what you've learned so far, before Corvo hits some unexpected snags in the final third of the game. I mean, unexpected to Corvo and anyone who didn't anticipate being betrayed by an inscrutable ex-military leader, a mercurial fanatic you rescued, and a posh bloke who sent you into a duel to the death after you got his brothers killed.

I have been playing Thief 2, and Return to the Tower reminded me strongly of Life of the Party as well. It is no secret that the Thief games are maybe the biggest influence on the Dishonored series' infiltration-based and stealth-ready level design, with the avatar enhancement of Deus Ex and System Shock clearly significant as well. There was a good article years back about levels in the Dishonored games that essentially quote missions from Thief, and Thief 2's Life of the Party is usually mentioned as the wider inspiration for the two-stage template of Dishonored missions, where you explore streets or rooftops before reaching the key location. However I felt like I was progressing and exploring within the tower in a similiar way to LotP's main building, as well.

The imposing Machinist tower, Angelport, which Thief's main character Garrett arrives at after traversing the rooftops of The City, has a lot in common with Dunwall Tower. Both are steampunk marvels, brutalist architectural statements glaring down at their respective cities. Both Corvo and Garrett must make their way up floor by floor, overcoming tight guard encounters and security systems while listening for information. Crawlspaces and side rooms can be ducked into in a pinch, and both characters have a key antagonist in their sights. There's even a similiarity in how you can communicate with said antagonist - Garrett hears recordings by Thief 2's reedy villain Karras as he ascends, and is ultimately surprised to find a recording addressing him directly once he reaches Karras' office. Meanwhile Corvo will be hearing Lord Regent Hiram's words as he closes in, and can also choose to speak to Hiram via some kind of whalepunk video-conferencing system in the main hall. Here however the power dynamic is shifted slightly, as the player can choose not to remove their mask, leaving Hiram to wonder for the rest of his (soon to be seriously truncated) life who it was that stalked and taunted him.

Both levels use an imposing building facade to build up an antagonist, and present a series of tough encounters that the player is by now more than equipped to handle with their knowledge of the systems and controls.

Dishonored is an immersive sim that often gets marketed and as a stealth game, but a couple of its greatest moments involve revealing yourself to your target and how you deal with the consequences. If you choose to talk to Hiram on whalepunk Skype, he calls the guards and sets off an alarm (if you haven't disabled it shortly before). So you can end up surrounded in the main hall, and all you have are a knife, grenades, springrazors, a crossbow, a gun, and the ability to stop time. In a genre where the most fun question you can ponder is often "how am I going to get out of this one?", it is quite a fun, scripted version of something that often happens organically. If you know what is going to happen, you can either disable the alarm and have Blink ready to zap up to the chandeliers and escape, or you can place springrazor traps down the stairs and be ready with your arsenal of powers and weapons when the guards arrive. 

I completed this on Low Chaos since that's the idea this run but couldn't help reloading a couple of moments just to cause bedlam. 

Non-lethal solution:
Shut down the arc pylon on the third floor or at least get to the Propaganda Officer and talk to him
Using the code he gives you take the recordings from Hiram's bedroom safe
Play them over the loudspeaker


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