Editor's Note: The following article appears in Game Informer Australia and is written by David Milner. You can follow him on Twitter here.
A lot can happen in 15 years. After supernatural assassin Corvo Attano vanquished the treasonous Lord Regent, restoring Emily Kaldwin to her murdered mother’s throne, Dunwall saw a new era of peace and prosperity.
Young Emily grew into her royal responsibilities. Her reign brought about the end of the deadly rat plague. The city’s whale oil industry churned on, vat after volatile vat, carcass after harpooned carcass. The realm’s poorest denizens no longer felt crushed beneath the boots of a paranoid, illegitimate regime. Times were good.
But nothing lasts forever, and being usurped happens to run in the family...
Making Dunwall Great Again
At a recent media event in Sydney, I had the chance to go hands-on with Dishonored 2, a sequel that feels more assured than its predecessor. Arkane has doubled down on what worked last time – the rich lore, the creative assassination scenarios, the fun supernatural abilities – and addressed many of the issues I had with the first game: primarily, that playing non-lethally wasn’t as enjoyable as the more murderous approach.
At the risk of history repeating, Dishonored 2 begins as Emily Kaldwin is violently overthrown by a mysterious foe known only as an “otherworldly usurper.” Corvo and Emily – both now marked by The Outsider, gifting them unique abilities in the ways of the stabby arts – head for the coastal city of Karnaca, which holds the key to restoring Emily to her throne.
My demo drops me into the game’s fourth mission, The Clockwork Mansion. In the three hours I have, I manage to complete it three times, once with Corvo and twice with Emily, utilizing different approaches and powers, prodding and bending Arkane’s sandbox to see what it will let me get away with. Although I’ve only scratched the surface of possible ability combinations, the game happily went along with every dastardly kill I tried to dream up using its deadly tools.
The Clockwork Mansion is the home of Kirin Jindosh, the creator of the Clockwork Soldiers that patrol Karnaca, enforcing the rule of the new oppressive regime. Nestled atop a pale rocky mountain, the structure towers above the seaside town below.
My visit to the compound has two objectives: rescue Anton Sokolov – the eccentric Rasputin-esque inventor from the first game who has again found himself imprisoned – and eliminate Jindosh as a threat. Lethally or otherwise.
Naturally, I begin as the new playable character Emily Kaldwin. Upon completing the trolley-car ascent up the mountain and arriving at the mansion’s entrance, Emily mutters that the building “has a strange beauty.” The same can be said for the game itself.
I appreciate that the first Dishonored carved out a unique art style – but it would be hard to describe it as beautiful. The exaggerated character models often came across as low-res rather than painterly; the washed-out color palette felt stylized, but also a little on the drab side.
Without abandoning its signature style, Dishonored 2 is a far prettier game: people still have caricatured features, but they’re now coated in the textures and the minute details you would expect of a triple-A release in 2016. Lighting casts impressive shadows, and animations are fluid. If the last game saw the invention of a visual style, this game is its necessary refinement.
“Maybe I can find a way to end this without killing Kirin Jindosh,” Emily ponders as she enters his mansion. Thankfully, the silent-protagonist trope of the original game has been replaced with fully voiced parts for both Emily and Corvo, adding yet another subtle reason to play the game multiple times.
Although the footprint of the multi-story mansion isn’t huge, there’s a lot to get my head around. Jindosh has crafted his home with the same madness that led to his Clockwork Soldiers. Walls rotate at the flick of a switch; staircases unfold out of nowhere; harmless pianos are replaced with deadly concealed Arc Pylons. Think of The Riddler’s traps for Batman, crossed with the shifting layout of Hogwarts, then add an industrial, clockwork nerve centre and an opulent, gaudy motif and you’ve got the picture.
As each transformation is triggered, new routes become available to the player. Sometimes it’s even necessary to slip between the walls while they’re reconfiguring, giving you access to the mechanical heart of the mansion, allowing you to disable a pesky Wall of Light or creep around an encounter. But be careful: on numerous occasions I found myself squished between the moving masonry with a poorly timed Blink or leap.
The creative level design of the Clockwork Mansion is hands-down the highlight of my time with the game. In its short life, Arkane already has a history of crafting memorable stages – Lady Boyle’s Last Party from the first Dishonored stands up as an all-time classic video game sandbox – and that deft touch is on display here.
Although the Clockwork Mansion isn’t as sprawling and open to multiple routes as some of the largest stages from the first game, this can likely be attributed to the fact that it’s an early-game mission and the necessary handholding hasn’t abated just yet. If this inspired level design extends to the rest of the game, Dishonored 2 is going to provide us with some fantastic scenarios in which to deal out death from the shadows.
The Face Of Madness
Upon flicking a switch in the entrance, the dead end before me transforms into a grand foyer with two flights of stairs. Unfortunately, Jindosh knows I’m coming. “Welcome, visitor,” his voice sneers across a loudspeaker. “My home is always open. It’s one of my great curiosities, seeing how the common mind navigates these shifting rooms.”
A Clockwork Soldier rises before me from a panel in the floor. Using Emily’s Shadow Walk ability, which transforms her into a dark crawling mist, making her harder to detect, I’m able to sneak behind it and trigger an instant kill with the right trigger. Emily jams her knife into the machine’s knee before moving her blade up to its mechanical spine, severing it in a shower of sparks and metal.
As far as I can tell, there’s no nonlethal way to get past Clockwork Soldiers other than to avoid them entirely. As with the original game, sneaking behind a human enemy offers you two prompts: RT/R2 to kill and RB/R1 to render unconscious. Given that this doesn’t happen with the Clockwork Soldiers, it’s likely that destroying them doesn’t affect your chaos rating negatively – a nice touch, allowing pacifist players the chance to deal out some satisfying destruction without starting down the darker path.
“Most unexpected and truly impressive. Not many people would still be standing after that,” Jindosh asserts, anger sneaking into his tone. Before long we’re face to face with each other, an unbreakable glass door the only thing keeping Jindosh safe.
He sizes me up, judging my clothes and appearance, correctly identifying me as the deposed Empress (during my Corvo playthrough, Jindosh’s lines are almost identical, only replacing the name right at the end). Jindosh queries whether I’m there to kill him or to rescue Sokolov – it apparently hasn’t occurred to him that I intend to do both.
“Either way... if you fall, I’ll have your body carried to my lab for dissection and study,” he says, before walking away and setting more Clockwork Soldiers after me.
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