Dishonored Death of the Outsider: Mission 4, "The Stolen Archive"

The Dishonored series has a great track record of reusing levels and adding fresh context, challenge and narrative import. We've seen Corvo go back to Dunwall Tower and find it has become a darkly brooding hulk of militarised authoritarianism rather than the stately venue for painters and courtiers it was on his visit at the beginning of the original game, despite it being the same architecture. We've then seen it become a raucous house party for the Brigmore Witches, who moved in and treated it with the respect a horde of teenagers would their hapless friends' parents' house the weekend after finishing their GCSEs. But I don't think there is another example in the series of a location feeling as defiled, as violated as the Royal Conservatory does here.

To be fair, it was already in a state of takeover when Emily Kaldwin visited and eliminated Breanna Ashworth in Dishonored 2. But the witches had made it a sort of home and hangout, after a fashion. As bloodthirsty and ritual-obsessed as they were, they were also a weird family, arguably less dysfunctional than the one that hunted them down. They sat on chandeliers drinking tea and lounging around with the familiarity of siblings. 

Now this environment is desolate. This is, along with A Hole in the World, one of the loneliest feeling levels in the series. Daud is gone, Billie is alone. Both levels are largely bereft of non-hostile NPCs - here you can't actually access the rest of Cyria Gardens, with Billie having already set up a temporary camp in one of the abandoned apartments overlooking the charnel devastation around the Conservatory.

The Overseers have torn through the Conservatory like a force of nature. We've seen the culture and headquarters of the Abbey of the Everyman throughout the series, including plentiful examples of how they interact with the public at large, but never this scale of vicious, gleeful brutality. Billie walks into the aftermath of a massacre. And they're talking about it, revelling in what they deem to be righteous behaviour, comparing notes on what degree of torture was necessary to agonise these women into "confessing". 

This is where my largely non-lethal approach was abandoned on my first playthrough. If there is a one-mission justification for the removal of the Chaos System it's this one. The world, and Billie by extension, shouldn't be punished for these people being taken out. There is a Contract rewarding you for doing exactly that - and placing Brother Cardoza in his own torture chair - so the game itself is guiding you toward what would previously have been a "High Chaos" approach.

The fact that the Abbey, on a surface level, shares Billie's enemy is meaningless. This mission feels like a cathartic outburst of rage. Billie Lurk was born an urchin, lived as an outsider and criminal, sustained herself in poverty and hardship to escape her past - but has now embraced her old self, her real name, the person and name that Deirdre loved, and is in the perfect position to strike a blow against the people and structures that have oppressed her.

The geography and pathing of the level is now changed significantly as the Abbey has boarded up the rooms, so that rather than one immense space you flit about in - with line of sight between you and most of your adversaries - you now have a series of floors and corridors. These intertwine and loop back on one another providing ample opportunities to ambush or be ambushed. The thing is, the Overseers and the Oracular Sisters don't have Foresight - they're trapped in here with Billie, in other words. A higher number than usual have their backs turned as they see to their business as well - another invitation. 

And on a meta level players of Dishonored 2 will know the layout, where the best places to slip in unseen are (despite the fact that, paranoid, the Overseers have shuttered some of these). In fact you can still almost immediately get to the level's highest point above Ashworth's old office, putting you in a very good position to complete your mission and then descend through your foes like a shower of razors.

The timing is good, as despite the fact some might feel there are less powers to play with in this game the creative player will find ample ways to execute this lethal game of cat and mouse. Beyond the bread and butter methods of using Foresight to plan Displaces past or (messily) into enemies and using Semblance to walk unchallenged into a room full of enemies before unleashing chaos, you also have Void Strike which allows you to render foes helplessly airborne while you deal with their allies before sundering them in mid-air, any number of Bonecharms which provide extra wrinkles to the tactics you can employ and a bristling range of new gadgets. Stealing the face of Brother Cardoza and then walking into the meeting with the Oracular Sisters like a Mission Story from the Hitman reboots, before planting an upgraded springrazor in the middle of proceedings and Displacing away is a particular highlight.

I feel it's significant this is happening in bright daylight. Billie spent the rest of the night of the bank heist watching Daud's funeral pyre aboard The Dreadful Wale, but it's clear she has slept since then based on her room so this could have been at night. Instead, the ugliness of the Abbey's strictures put into grisly practice is seen in broad, bright daylight.

This final intense clash with the ever-present Overseers takes place shortly before Billie removes their very reason for existence. It got me thinking about the nature of the Abbey, their raison d'etre. They exist, supposedly, to guard against the Outsider. They are fundamentally oppositional, and the only things they stand for are negatives - bans, censorship, contradiction. There's no message of peace or love at the heart of this so-called abbey, even a complicated one. It's like people who only know a religion or a culture through negative portrayals of it, so they form a totally adversarial - and totally inaccurate - image of it. But this is that writ large, institutionalised. Without the Outsider the Abbey is about to lose its scapegoat and central antagonistic figure, the thin justification for its horrific acts of violence, but really they never stood for anything anyway. 

Dismantle this hollow, oppressive organisation and let it be a bad memory, I say. Its continued existence alone morally complicates even the canonically happiest ending for Empress Kaldwin in Dishonored 2. 

Will I ever play this through non-lethally and get that Merciful achievement? After three playthroughs and counting, that very much remains to be seen. Emily officially dissolves the Abbey and the Oracular Order in this game's follow-up novel The Veiled Terror, and it feels appropriate for Billie to help send both organisations deservedly into oblivion here.