IN ONE ROOM, I FIND
A CORPSE
PIN-CUSHIONED BY
SLEEP DARTS
I try to be careful, precise, thinking every movement
through, but it never seems to be enough. I’m too slow to
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 different
objective. As I suspected, it comes up with little in the
way of redemptive insight. I let one witch go because she
“struggles to hold on to who she was” while another
“misses the younger brothers she left behind”. Small
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 spring razors
halfway through the level. At one point I spot a witch
stood on the statue of a turtle, performing a mock scene of
Delilah’s usurpation of Emily. The Heart whispers, “Her
spirit is as black and distorted as the
void. She takes delight in slaughter.” She burns.
In the end, I leave the conservatory with 22 more
souls on my list, most of them witches. Ashworth is
somewhere amongst them, shot in the head as I carved
my way through her underlings. It’s going to take a
miracle to avoid High Chaos now, but at this point, with
everything I’ve seen, I’m struggling to believe Karnaca
is even worth saving.EXTRA LIFE
Ashworth goes back to the ashes.