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How Dishonored: Death of the Outsider makes rats of us all

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  • How Dishonored: Death of the Outsider makes rats of us all

    Editor's note: Once a month we invite the wonderful Gareth Damian Martin, editor of Heterotopias, to show us what proper writing about games looks like before we shoo him away for making the rest of us look bad. You can read Gareth's pieces on Dark Souls and Resident Evil - and you really should! - before settling into this month's piece about Dishonored and its rats.
    It was a rat that told me what was in the basement of the Taxidermist. It and it's beady-eyed allies were milling around the backstreet outside, the smell of blood presumably having brought them to this particular doorstep. In a surprisingly soft voice, the rodent whispered poetry in my ear, a song of gnawing teeth and matted fur. The rats, it seemed, were the ones who knew this city best of all, and as I listened they told me of its secrets. I won't go into specifics-I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise of that basement or the other hidden places I've visited-but as you might imagine, what I found down there wasn't something particularly pleasant.
    Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, a standalone addition to Dishonored 2 and the conclusion to the series' loose trilogy, is filled with these unpleasant discoveries. Seen through the deeply pessimistic eyes of assassin Billie Lurk, it often feels as if under every flagstone of Karnaca is some concealed atrocity. Gone is the southern light that gave Dishonored 2's depiction of the coastal city an edge of glimmering luxury, replaced instead by a flat grey glow that emanates from a veiled, milky sun, like the cataract of some dead god. Perhaps it's the removal of the so-called "chaos system" from the game-a kind of moral compass that the series carried, rewarding less murderous players with better outcomes-or the mutterings of the sardonic Billie-"the rich pay to poison themselves with this shit" she observes while skulking around an exclusive spa. "Wish they'd just finish the job"-but either way Death of the Outsider feels like it embraces corruption and inhumanity in a way the series has never quite managed before.
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