Dishonored 2 Guide

In Dishonored 2’s case this is both the dilapidated warren of Dunwall -all grime and Victorian industry- and the sun-kissed but no less dangerous streets of coastal Karnaca. The game begins in the former, re-joining magical assassin Corvo Attano 15 years after the events of the first game. His daughter Emily Kaldwin (rescued by Corvo after he was framed for her mother’s murder) sits on the throne as Empress of Dunwall, reigning over its rat-infested sprawl. That is until she is overthrown in a bloody coup masterminded by her twisted aunt Delilah and the tyrannical Duke Abele of Serkonos. You can choose to play as the deposed Emily or the grizzled father that secretly trained her as an assassin, each with their own suite of mystically-acquired powers. What follows is a simple, sparingly told tale of revenge and restitution, as you pursue Delilah’s cabal of miscreants to Karnaca and seek to take them down one-by-one in order to restore Emily to the throne. The game rattles through its narrative setup with barely a breath, shunting you through the streets of Dunwall without much care as to your well-being. It is a clumsily paced opening that comes to be at odds with the rest of the game’s elegance. Its pace can be excused as keenness to get you to the meat of the game, as you soon find yourself aboard The Dreadful Whale, a rickety steamboat that serves as your base and hub in between missions. Your ally Meagan (a melancholic Rosario Dawson) whisks you to your objectives on a skiff, slipping into coastal nooks on Karnaca’s edge before you venture further into the city. As ever, your main obstacles are the enemies that prowl the streets. The square-jawed Royal Guard are the most ubiquitous; buffonish pack animals always on the lookout for the missing rebel from Dunwall. But they are joined by even more dangerous foes; Delilah’s coven of screeching witches, the zealous Overseers and, most terrifyingly, Jindosh’s spindly clockwork soldiers. How you deal with these foes is down to you. Dishonored prides itself as a game that gives you choice both in mechanics and morality. You can role-play the game as a stealthy pacifist, not killing a soul, sneaking through each area’s peripheries to reach your target and administering the odd choke-hold or sleep dart to guards in your way. You can be the knife in the dark, silently slitting throats and setting traps as you make your way towards your quarry. Or you can go violence first, storming areas with pistol fire, explosives and reckless abandon.Both characters can teleport short distances, Corvo’s ‘Blink’ ability and Emily’s ‘Far Reach’ allowing you to whisk unseen between cover and hop across chandeliers, taking advantage of the splendid verticality of the game’s areas.

Corvo can inhabit the local fauna like rats and fish, infiltrating areas by scurrying through vents or swimming into sewer pipes. Emily can link together the fates of up to four people with her Domino power; when one dies or is knocked unconscious, the others follow suit. She can summon a Doppelganger to distract guards as the real Emily slips by unseen. Or she can combine the spells, Domino linking a group of foes to her doppelganger before slitting its throat in a queasily bleak act of aggression.Your choice of approach dictates the scale of the game’s challenge, which is tallest when tackled by a player hoping to roleplay exclusively as the silent interloper. Enemies are ceaselessly vigilant. Make a noise or cast an unexpected shadow and they’ll race to investigate. Unlike the buffoonish guards that patrol most video games, suspicion escalates to confrontation in a split second. Still, approach a guard with pad-foot calm (crouching quietens your movements, while stowing your weapons quickens them) and you’ll be able to lift the keys from their belt and pass on, spectrally. There is meaningful choice here, in these crammed parishes, but perhaps not as much as there first appears to be. To be seen or not to be seen: this is the fundamental question upon which your approach hinges. Less meaningful, but more engaging is the choice offered by these messy, complicated streets, which offer dozens of different pathways to each goal. Will you scale the building and steal through an open window, or possess a rat and squeeze through a sewer pipe? In literature, these would be the less interesting questions for the work to pose. But in Dishonored 2, herein lies that game’s true wonder  along with the gathering appreciation for how this exquisite clockwork world fits together.

Dunwall, the briny, whale oil-guzzling capital of the first Dishonored game was a city defined by Dickensian hardship. This suited Corvo Attano, bodyguard to the empress, for whose murder he was framed, allowing him to squeeze through society’s cracks and skulk unseen among the plague rats. For this sequel the setting has changed to the sun-bronzed (and in later stages, dust-blasted) Karnaca, an archipelago whose ports might offer an enviable holiday destination were it not for an infestation of murderous insects. You play again as Attano or alternatively, the newly monarched Emily Kaldwin, a choice that must be made in the game’s opening moments and adhered to until the final credits. Both are wrongfully accused of murder (although by the game’s end, all but the most patient players will have blood on their hands). Both must flee the charges and pursue their accusers in the dark. At least Karnaca’s high sun casts long shadows to hide in. Whale oil continues to flow through the city’s veins (your base is now the Dreadful Wale, a paddle steamer helmed by Meagan Foster, a muted, laconic one-armed whaler, who ferries you between land and sea on a handsome skiff), powering its lamps and tramways. But Karnaca is a place that runs on clockwork as much as mammal-fuels. Lumbering human guards still present the most immediate menace to your safety. But the most deadly threat are the clockwork soldiers, progeny of the eccentric inventor Kirin Jindosh, who patrol the streets in service to the coup-masterminding Duke Luca Abele of Serkonos. Clockwork is an appropriate theme for this meticulous sequel its mechanical parts interlock with a grand, delightful intricacy.You then have a big decision to make. This is a series renowned for its level of choice and its various branching narratives, but your most important choice is your first: who do you want to play as? You can be Corvo once again, if you please this time he’s fully voiced, which gives him far more personality, but his path is not where Dishonored 2’s most original ideas lie. For those, Emily is your best choice – she comes complete with an awesome taste for revenge and entirely new, powerful abilities that, while comparable to Corvo’s, feel unique.

From there, the story follows many of the same beats as the original – that aforementioned royal betrayal, your fall from grace before a lengthy climb back up for revenge, and the twists and turns along the way. It’s not quite as well paced as its predecessor, but despite the thematic similarities, Dishonored 2 never feels overly familiar. Its new faces are all excellent – whether they’re on your side on out for your head and they’re seamlessly interwoven with familiar characters such as the scientist and genius, Anton Sokolov. It all serves to flesh out even more of the lore behind Dishonored’s incredible fantasy world. The greatest change is the city itself. Dishonored 2 may start in the now-less-grimey Dunwall, but it soon moves to the Duke of Serkonos’s home, the sprawling metropolis of Karnaca, a southern city with warmer climes and entirely new challenges to contend with. In place of the rat plague, Karnaca has been subjected to infestations of blood flies huge glowing carnivorous flies that make their nests in dead bodies and abandoned apartments. In lieu of Dunwall’s towering bipedal walkers, Karnaca’s greatest mind, the inventor Kirin Jindosh, has created an army of clockwork soldiers huge imposing robots with four blades for arms, which pursue you with terrifying determination.

Dishonored 2 is a first-person stealth-ish game set in the Empire of the Isles, a Dickensian steampunk fiction full of wonders and nightmares alike, where technology and science are powered by oil harvested from a whale population being driven to extinction. Sitting next to a miraculous era of industrial revolution is a shadow world of dark, ritual magic and mysterious, godlike powers. Amid this unstable collision of progress and the past sits the Empress of the Isles, Emily Kaldwin, daughter of the murdered Jessamine Kaldwin and the disgraced-then-redeemed Royal Protector, Corvo Attano. As whispers and rumors seek to undermine the throne, the empire is thrown into chaos as the Duke of the island of Serkonos and a powerful witch named Delilah stage a violent coup. This all happens almost immediately, and at this point, Dishonored 2 gives you a choice — to play as Dishonored's protagonist, the Royal Protector Corvo, or as his daughter, the Empress Emily. Once you make your call, things happen quickly, and your chosen character must escape Dunwall, unravel the conspiracy at hand, retake the throne and save their only remaining family. The combat system has been improved and refined somewhat since Dishonored, if you don't really care about how the empire fares. But, Corvo and Emily's swordsmanship notwithstanding, the game's unforgiving difficulty, and the sheer number of guards and their propensity to call in help, makes direct conflict a Pretty Bad Idea until you've leveled up some of your abilities.

You can build for fighting, though, if you want to, and there are some pretty awesome combat abilities, most of which make their return from the original game. But for every kill you land, you're adding to the overall level of resistance you'll meet later in the game, per the aforementioned Chaos system not to mention the passive-aggressive nagging of the Outsider and his dislike for excessive murder. In general, this isn't that big a hardship, because for all of Dishonored 2's gameplay options, it feels most geared toward stealthy play. Many of the combat powers are cool, it's true, and there are many environmental means of disposing of enemies. But the coolest abilities are traversal-oriented. The meat and potatoes of Dishonored 2's movement toolset is a short-range teleport, which both Corvo and Emily have a version of — a phantom pair of arms pulling her forward for Emily, and a more conventional dash forward for Corvo. These help you navigate upward and around conflict, as well as providing a means of accessing all manner of apartments and shops and other places you're maybe not supposed to be in, legally speaking. Complementing this is intelligent level design that encourages the player to find their own solutions to obstacles. Karnaca is a fitting playground, full of hidden pathways and devious shortcuts that invite experimentation.

The game sits in the tradition of the so-called “immersive sim”, games that emphasise player choice over directorial control. As such, each of the nine, expansive chapters offers a playpen for personal expression. Fundamentally, this means choosing whether you want to play as the lethal assassin, leaping from ramparts to deliver killing blows to those who stand in the way of your immediate goals, or that of a stealthily merciful outlaw, thoughtfully putting guards to sleep with a well-aimed dart to the neck. Will you, in other words, lock up your enemies, or bury them? The more murderous your approach, the greater the “chaos” you bring to Karnaca and the more messy the story’s conclusion (a non-lethal approach, meanwhile, invites a more “optimistic” conclusion, in the game’s phrase).

The grain of the fiction therefore encourages a quiet, gracious approach, even though, for players who want to make it to the ending without ever being spotted by a guard, this will mean frequent and boring loads from backup saves in order to undo indiscretions.Attano and Kaldwin share a talent for athleticism and a sense of style (black on black, generally) but play differently enough to invite a second playthrough. Attano has the power, if you invest the runes you find hidden in the nooks of each chapter’s labyrinthine layout, to freeze time and rig a room before unfreezing it. These runes, along with bonecharms  which offer slight improvements to your character, such as allowing you to hold your breath for longer underwater or to survive higher falls  litter each chapter. A contraption known as the eavesdropper heart  part muscle, part clockwork  offers clues to their locations and also allows you to tune in to people’s inner monologue and in this way gain a sense of their morality. Kaldwin, meanwhile, can link enemies together so that any misfortunes that befall one are simultaneously inflicted upon the others. She can create doppelgangers to use as decoys. Your choice of protagonist won’t force your hand one way or the other in terms of how you approach the story but it will alter, in the fine details, the telling. The jewel in Dishonored 2’s crown, and one that exemplifies its game design philosophy is set at its midway point in a chapter dubbed The Clockwork Mansion, a reference to Jindosh’s Rubick’s cube of a stately home, which you must infiltrate. The mansion’s rooms can be rearranged into all manner of configurations, while its architect watches and comments sarcastically on your progress as you move to confront him (unless, that is, you manage to slip into its hollow walls, and make your way unseen up and over its cogs and pulleys). As well as providing a vivid scene, a delightful contraption and a character-deepening look at one of the game’s stand-out antagonists, The Clockwork Mansion holds a mirror up to the craft and obsessions of game designers themselves, and the standoffish relationship they often have with the players who attempt to crack their puzzles. The intricate world-crafting extends far beyond Jindosh’s domain. Dishonored 2 is both luxurious and consistent in its set dressing. Every virtual item demonstrates its own kind of wondrous craftsmanship: the taut leather, the sunny brass. Each room is a varnished memorial to some hollowed-out forest. Dishonored 2 has the scent of a high-class antique shop, a world of forgotten elegance filled with more props and trinkets than even the best-funded film production could ever muster. In most cases these aren’t mere set-dressing either. The misty glass tumblers can be thrown to distract enemies momentarily; the creaking carriages can be commandeered to whisk you between districts; the gleaming pistols can be lifted from the holster’s of oblivious guards then turned against them.