IN ONE ROOM, I FIND
ACORPSE
PIN-CUSHIONED BY
SLEEP DARTS
stop a grand guard officer pushing a servant girl off a roof.
I give the poor wretch the best justice I can, but it feels
hollow. In an alley near the district’s black market, I bump
into another group of
Howlers. I manage to take
them out non-lethally, yet
as I walk away I hear a
crunching sound. I turn to
find a swarm of rats
devouring one of the
unconscious Howlers. I kill
the rats before they can
move on to the main
course, but the starter is
well and truly consumed.
By the time I enter the conservatory, my mood has
turned black, and unlike when I arrived at Addermire,
Dishonored II provides no ray of hope.
Quite the opposite really, as the conservatory is
overrun by Empress Delilah’s coven of witches.
In a world that is filled with nasty people, the witches
still manage to stand out. They kill for fun and use magic
to torture their victims in truly horrific ways. This isn’t
abstract lore, either, evidence of their depravity litters the
conservatory. There are bodies everywhere, sprawled on
the floor and dangling from the ceiling.
In one room, I find a
corpse pin-cushioned by
sleep darts. In another, a
literal pile of dead
half-charred from a clear
attempt to burn them.
It’s at this point I decide
to break my own rules.
There’s no point looking
for guilt here. I’m
surrounded by it.
It literally paints the
walls. Instead, I’m going to look for innocence, and if I
don’t find it, then to hell with them all.
I set the heart to work, only now with a differen
objective. As I suspected, it comes up with little in
way of redemptive insight. I let one witch go becau
“struggles to hold on to who she was” while anoth
“misses the younger brothers she left behind”. Sm
hope for change, but at least it’s some hope.
The rest, though? Ugh. I stalk through the halls
no longer even trying to sneak, fighting and killing
almost every witch I come across. I run out of spri
razors halfway through the level. At one point I sp
witch stood on the statue of a turtle, performing a
scene of Delilah’s usurpation of Emily. The Heart
whispers, “Her spirit is as black and distorted as th
void. She takes delight in slaughter.” She burns.
In the end, I leave the conservatory with 22 mo
souls on my list, most of them witches. Ashworth i
somewhere amongst them, shot in the head as I ca
my way through her underlings. It’s going to take a
miracle to avoid High Chaos now, but at this point
everything I’ve seen, I’m struggling to believe Karn
is even worth saving.EXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY (^) I REINSTALL I WHY I LOVE I M U S T P L A Y
Ashworth goes back to the ashes.
nt
the
use she
her
mall
s,
g
ing
ot a
mock
he
ore
is
arved
a
, with
naca