‘There Is a Darkness At The Centre of All Things’ — Why I Love Dishonored’s Perfect Atmosphere
I think it’s fair to say that the Dishonored games are perfect in terms of their atmosphere. Each tight, contained level bursts at the seams with the close attention paid to every inch of it. The way the NPC’s are dressed, the conversations they have when they think no one is listening, the decoration of the apartments you slip in and out of, the slight tick of the wobbly metal fan above your head — all of it works to put you in that room with that character, as if Corvo, Daud, Emily or Billie’s very chic boots clunking on the polished wood are your own.
I don’t think any games have lodged in my head as successfully as Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, and if they have, it certainly hasn’t been in the same way. They’re incredibly immersive, but that immersion doesn’t feel the same as it does in a doggedly realistic world like the ones we see in games from Rockstar or Naughty Dog (who also make games I can get entirely lost in). I think it’s because Arkane has figured out the perfect mix of reality and fantasy that makes the world feel tactile and recognisable but ‘not quite right.’ It’s the detailed reality that draws me in, and the strange irreality that lodges it in my mind and makes me dream of being in these places (literally).
I’m not the first person to point out how incredibly artful these games are, they’re wonderful to look at and extremely distinctive, most of the characters craggy-faced and big-handed and it’s hard to look in any direction and not see the potential for a pretty screenshot. The game uses art and musicality so deliberately, (it’s often part of the story like with Delilah and Sokolov, the Ancient Music, the way the Eye of the Dead God sings to you), and it makes the world feel like a rich, real place with real people and real customs that you can live in for a little bit if you’re in the mood to surrender to some fiction.
What I’m trying to articulate in this piece is how I feel playing these games, particularly the first time around, when I was fully immersed, undistracted, not chasing any trophies. I’ve found that you’re potentially making a rod for your own back when you try to articulate how a piece of art makes you feel and why it makes you feel that way. I think this is particularly the case in Dishonored games, especially Death of the Outsider because the atmosphere is made up of so many little details that it’s difficult to take a full accounting of them. I wouldn’t struggle so much with other games to explain why I feel that they’re so impactful. Dragon Age Inquisition is one of my other favourite games, but I remember it less for its atmosphere than I do for its characters, dialogue and that perfect swell of music that is designed to make you feel triumphant when you raise your sword and take on the position of Inquisitor. Red Dead Redemption 2’s world is meticulous in its every detail and so committed to immersing you in Arthur Morgan’s world, America, 1899, which is far away, but real. America does exist, some of the landscapes that you ride around you could find a pretty close match for in real life. Dishonored’s Empire takes some of its cues from real life, especially in the first game where they’re really leaning into the smoggy old London vibe, but in the two sequels, the reference points for location are more mixed. It’s another way where it feels real, but, not quite right. It is the undercurrent of wrongness that makes it so memorable.
You can probably tell from me mentioning a couple of my favourite games that I’m a character person. I like to be emotionally invested in the story like I was for Ezio when his family were killed in Assassin’s Creed 2 like I was when I was desperately trying to take care of Clementine in a zombified world in Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Funny, then, that I love the Dishonored games so much even though the characters don’t massively do a lot for me emotionally. I don’t say this in a critical way, either. I really think that this is one of the few places where it doesn’t really matter that I don’t have a huge emotional investment in Corvo and Emily or even Billie and Daud. I like Corvo and Emily, for better or worse, I’m mostly on their side all the way when I’m either rescuing my daughter from capture or getting my empire out of the hands of a violent, despotic witch. I’m with them, but, I’m not going to cry, you know? I’m not going to feel that much actual joy at sitting back down on the throne, because, even if the Outsider’s neat epilogue tells me I did good and I’ll continue to do good and my people are happy now - why weren’t they before? Why wasn’t I doing good before? There’s lip service paid to the fact that Emily ignored the plight of her people and propped up the evil duke but there’s never any real reckoning with it. I think the implication is that she is better for being among and seeing her people throughout this journey, but did she really not know or care what was going on in the silver mines? That people were starving? And Corvo too, he could have said something, he was right there, The Royal Protector.
I know I sound a bit more game critique-y here, and I guess I am being, but I honestly don’t think it really matters to the thing as a whole. I think they are valid criticisms but none of these things really negatively impact what I get out of these games. Narratively, I think the writers kind of have to acknowledge that it’s pretty messed up that the protagonist I’m playing as is the ruler of this really unjust and often violent empire. But I understand that is how this particular world is. There’s a coldness to it, it’s as real and rough and dirty as it is strange and macabre and decadent. You can say that things are going to go on and be good, Mr Strangely-Upbeat-Epilogue-Outsider, but, will it? I just don’t see how Emily up in Dunwall Tower can possibly change the very nature of this world. People don’t generally have that many kind words for you, they’re certainly not going to be sweet and saccharin in any way — that’s not how things are done here. This world feels set in stone, not only because it’s so industrial that people are always going to have to do these dirty jobs, but because the Void is still always going to be there, right at the edge of everyone’s vision, the deeper kind of darkness that the dirty world of the living has to contend with. The darkness at the centre of all things.
Before really talking about the Void, it’s worth mentioning the way that these games play with religiosity as a concept. Among the people in this world, there seems to be some acceptance that the Void and the Outsider are real but are things best not to obsess over. The Abbey of the Everyman is a pious, religious organisation that outwardly accepts that these things exist, but preaches rejection of them, they seem to exist in large part just to reject these things. They don’t worship a deity, because there is no benevolent force overseeing this world. The Outsider exists, we know this for a fact, he is the only kind of God in this world and is perceived as a dark, malignant presence who will only bring death and destruction to your life. That fits this world quite nicely, I think. The existence of the Abbey and their female equivalent the Oracular Order makes sense to me; the dark mystery of this world simmers just beneath the surface and sometimes a normal person might glimpse it through shrines, runes or witches — I can understand why big, organised groups might rise up and make it a big part of their mission to look away from it.
The existence of the Void and the suggestion that ‘the Outsider is always watching’ works so well to add this unsettling undercurrent to anything. Unsettling to me, the player, not most of the people who live in this world — they’re too busy working, trying to feed their families, trying not to get eaten by bloodflies to give into the creeping feeling up their necks.
Shinderey North Quarry is a location in Death of the Outsider, and, comparatively, a pretty small area of the games, but this area was the one that solidified I had to get my thoughts about these games down on paper. It’s such a fascinating place because it best exemplifies the fine line between the Void and the real world. Literally, it exists on that fine line. There’s something about Void, as the immortal plane, heaven or hell, or limbo, actually being reachable that’s honestly fascinating. Some of my favourite pieces of lore are the accounts that you can read by the miners and their families who lived and worked at the quarry. We, the player, see it warp and change around us, and we see the way the Cultists, obsessing over the Void and the Outsider, are warped by it too. They are creepily serene for people living in such a deeply unsettling place. Unlike the society well-to-do that have found themselves here, the miners and their families were normal people confronted by the extreme strangeness of this world. Fall down a crack in this mine and you might find yourself in the infinite abyss.
“It started with hallucinations: Juana Gallardo screaming when her house vanished as she unlocked her front door. Miners returning from the depths with hair-raising tales of tunnels appearing, already quarried and cleared, beneath their pickaxes. But soon the entire town was awash in the unexplainable.
The first time I hallucinated, I was working in the Shindaery Mining Company’s store, distributing supplies to prospectors fresh off the carriages from Karnaca. I pulled a head-lantern from the shelf and turned to hand it to a customer, but he was gone. The shop was gone. I was standing alone in a dust-swept street, amid tumbled ruins. It was North Quarry Town, but different, as if decades had pressed it into the earth. I blinked, and the vision dissipated. I was left befuddled, staring at a curious customer.
Soon, all of North Quarry started flickering in and out of existence. Talk to a friend and they’d disappear mid-sentence. Roll over in your bedroom and wake up under starry skies. We lost sense of what was real and what was illusory. And it worsened, the town disappearing for days while we camped in caves and spoke in hushed voices. It became unbearable. One by one, my neighbours fled to Cullero, Bastillion [sic] — anywhere but Shindaery. Soon, I was the only one left, wandering deserted streets alone.
I’d gone half-mad with loneliness, roaming mineshafts deep into the mountains, when I stumbled upon a giant Eye. It seemed to hum with power, beckoning me. And when I touched the Eye, understanding exploded within me. The invisible layers of the universe were laid bare to me. I left the mines a wiser woman, Shindaery’s secrets a mystery no more. I witnessed no more vanishings. Forever after, the town remained stone solid for me.” (From Lost Days at Shindaery: A Memoir codex, Death of the Outsider)
I love this piece of lore because not only do I think it’s a pretty great short story in and of itself, but mostly because it suggests that the Void isn’t this ethereal netherworld, it is the world, stone solid, and the one we’ve run around for the last three games is just a veil over the top. The Void is hard, black stone, perhaps metal, it’s hard to tell. It is jagged and unforgiving with big, ugly, but beautiful leviathans floating past great black columns. The world overlaying it is different, more colourful, but just as hard and unforgiving as that endless abyss where souls sob out the misdeeds of their lives. Perhaps that’s why the two worlds can exist together; if the Empire was kinder, less brutal in its day-to-day, how would anyone be strong enough to contest with the horrors on the edge of their vision?
Of course, when the strangeness of the quarry reveals itself, the miners all leave, because they don’t have the self-importance of the formerly upper-class cultists that now inhabit this place to think that the Void was meant for them. Their hardhats and walkways remain, and because I’m familiar with the rest of the world, I wonder how they went on with their lives. I wonder if any of them became one of these people making shrines to the Outsider and scribbling on walls, I wonder how many never speak of this again and how many become the crazy old uncle because they do speak about what they saw. I have these thoughts because the game world is so successful in making me view NPC’s as people and so committed to leaving these little tidbits for me to find tucked away in impeccable little apartments, if this isn’t a running down the street and chopping people in half kind of playthrough.
While I would say that Dishonored 2 is still my favourite to actually play over and over, Death of the Outsider is definitely my favourite atmospherically. It perfectly exemplifies what Dishonored as a series is best at doing, putting you right in this odd, intoxicating world, giving you the desire to pick through every part of it, and then singing for you to come back to it whenever you leave.
