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Dishonored: Death of the Outsider review

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  • Dishonored: Death of the Outsider review

    Deicide is one of gaming's more popular pastimes - not quite as popular as smashing pots for herbs but easily on par with say, fishing or amateur photography. Pretty much every JRPG worth its salt concludes with the party nobbling either a vengeful god or somebody who's on the verge of becoming one. Kratos can't get through brunch without beating some Olympian cousin to death with the waffle iron, and Bayonetta signs off by kicking the Creator squarely into the sun. Death of the Outsider is one of the subtler variations on the theme: Dishonored's take on divinity is, after all, more embroiled in the role divinity actually plays in society, a question of psychic archetypes and community bonding rituals, rather than multi-stage health bars and the ability to squirt thunder from your pinkie. To murder the Outsider, representative of the Void that yawns beneath the surface of Dishonored's tortured steampunk universe, isn't just to leave this realm without a king - it's to alter the very structure of the game's reality irrevocably, to the point of throwing the prospect of a threequel into enormous doubt.
    It takes a certain sort of person to cut down a god. Voiced with steely menace by Rosario Dawson, Billie Lurk is just the right fit. She's been there from the beginning, an accomplice to regicide in the first game and its expansion, a reclusive and guilt-tormented onlooker in the second, and as Death of the Outsider opens, it's clear that she's had quite enough. Where Emily Kaldwin was a sophomore in both the art of assassination and the ethical quandaries of using violence to correct violence, Billie has slit hundreds of throats and been through the whole moral-choice dog-and-pony show multiple times over. Having plunged one city into darkness and helped salvage another, she's less bothered about who, in particular, is screwing over who and more with the underlying mythos that abets Dishonored's cycle of downfall and insurrection, of tyrants overthrowing tyrants. Even before a reunification with old mentor Daud, star of the Knife of Dunwall, sets her on the Outsider's trail, she comes across as a woman ready to leave this world behind. "It's quiet out here," Billie muses during the intro to the fifth and final mission. "Nothing but me and my thoughts." The Outsider, too, seems ready to wash his hands of the whole enterprise, appearing in visions before each mission to offer desultory commentary and suggest that, just possibly, killing him isn't the only way to bring this tale to a close.
    From Billie's ruthless detachment as much as the expansion's smaller scope proceeds the decision to retire Dishonored's old Chaos/Order system, whereby wreaking havoc in each chapter would degrade the ambience and alter the challenge in subsequent areas. The consequence of the system's absence is, firstly, that you feel more free to let rip with Billie's arsenal of murderous traps, projectiles and sorcerous abilities - there's no longer a persistent world state to worry about, though in-game newspaper articles do keep track of your antics from level to level. Some of the secondary objectives you can accept from black market notice boards actively nudge you towards outright mayhem. There's the option of killing all but one enemy in the fourth mission to earn a special bonecharm, a task I undertook with relish, using the new hook mine to yank enemies into each other before immolating them with incendiary rounds from Billie's wristgun. But as you go on, the absence of Chaos/Order ultimately lends what decisions you do make about the fates of other characters more weight, because your interpretation arises purely from narrative context and detailing - from what NPCs write in diaries or letters, what they mutter when they think they're alone - rather than some over-arching, gamey contrivance.
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