I'm re-playing Dishonored because I'm stoked for the sequel and I forgot how sad this game makes me
me too. like - okay, i think one of the worst things a story can be is ānumbā: hereās a horrifying thing, and another one, and another one, do you get it yet, do you get it, everything is fucking terrible
whereas dishonored has a kind of sadness thatās pervasive and understated, and requires you to unearth it. the worst thing you can be in this game is numb and violent. while youāre escaping the sewers in the prologue, you can find two corpses curled up in each otherās arms; and nearby thereās a journal, which tells you a story about two people who could only afford to buy half the elixir they needed, and are waiting to die as the watch break into houses and drag the sick away. hereās the ending; you can, if you want, scavenge up the rest. people dying of plague are erased by it - canāt speak, only weep; but sometimes their stories are left for you to find. the game is full of stuff thatās easy to miss if you donāt look, if you donāt read the books and notes and bits of paper, find the shrines, listen to the heart talk, pay attention
ā¦which is, basically, one ofĀ dishonoredās core ideas: the story you have to unearth because itās been buried. like, literally buried: itās not just the plague conspiracy and all the dead - dunwall is built on the ruins of another city, the charms and items corvo uses are relics from a prior civilisation. and sometime in the past people realised the flesh and bones of whales were powerful, and started butchering them en masse. dunwall is built on layer after layer of state-sanctioned butchery, itās blood and whalebones all the way down
(dishonored shares this concept with dragon age, thereās a bunch of parallels with, particularly, inquisition re: ethics, original sins, an invisible history of structural violence, complicity, breaking chains, old religion, and narratively circling a popular uprising of the oppressed against their oppressors inspired by a weird ancient marginalised chaos god associated with an animal who takes you on hot dates to the (gravitationally dubious; metaphorically overdetermined) void while you sleep, which is. a very specific thing for two games to have.Ā but thatās for some other time)
probably the best example of the deep and strange sadness in dishonored is in the knife of dunwall dlc, where you break into a whale slaughterhouse and find a whale being kept alive to extract the very last whale-oil from it. itās huge, bloody, monstrous, and weird. it looks very old. whales in dishonored donāt look like our whales: theyāre likeĀ livyatan melvillei, an ancient species of sperm whale, now extinct; and sometimes called by its original scientific name, āleviathanā. the slaughter is happening on an industrial scale (ātheyāre burning the whales tonightā); itās just one whale. so you can ignore it, get what you came for, leave; or you can look it in the eye and kill it with the same device thatās kept it alive, as an act of mercy. dishonoredĀ is about a world thatās pretty much blood and rot all the way down, but you get to choose whether you play the game as ethically awake and compassionate, or just numb, brutal, and complicit
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