Dishonored: Mission 8, "The Loyalists"

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 and around the pub and its environs may make quick Blink-based escapes necessary.

It is pretty neat to have the area recontextualised and think about how the designers made it with its eventual function as a 'level" in the more traditional sense in mind. The long staircase winding up through the tenement building where the pub is located is a pretty good place to set up ambushes and work through the guards prowling the place, especially as there's lots of side rooms to lurk in and retreat to.

It is also a clever reversal of a pacing mechanism the game has relied upon so far, where the need to exfiltrate each location requires Corvo to re-traverse at least part of a level back to Samuel and escape. In those instances the familiarity you've developed with the area and enemy arrangements allows you to get back much quicker in most cases, and to be more confident in how you engage with the level. In this mission however you have to treat a formerly non-threatening area with care and move slowly through it. Good stuff.

Non-lethal solution:
Get into Piero's workshop, then get the blueprints from Havelock's chamber
The arc pylon can then be used to take out the guards without killing them

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