The time-travelling mansion level is the game at its creepiest - guards long since departed can be seen walking once-plush halls through the lens of your timepiece. Or just conjure a hypnotic phantasm from the ether and drop spring-razor traps in all the doorways while her victims are enthralled. If there's no convenient bystander available, Emily can also summon a doppelgänger, Domino-chain it to the target and assassinate her clone for the same payoff.
You might eliminate a well-protected bigwig, for instance, by tethering his destiny to that of a cook, labouring over a stove in the next room along. The chance to bag four scalps for the price of one aside, I love this ability for how it sidesteps the question of rank or station, insisting that all lives are interchangeable however fine your clothing or expansive your retinue. Emily's Domino spell links the fates of up to four characters within a certain range to create opportunities for savage poetic justice - you can arrange for a guard to indirectly kill himself, for instance, by taking a careless swing at you while you're using his friend as a human shield. Many of the game's supernatural powers are as much social or political metaphors as they are instruments of play. Each is designed to be an agent of corruption or salvation, a viral entity eating its way to the centre of an area and either plunging it further into chaos or quietly setting it on the road to recovery. The game's two leads aren't just infiltrators and assassins in the Sam Fisher vein, sidling out from under a table to hurl a flask of chloroform or litter a patrol route with traps. But what sets Dishonored 2's universe apart, the subtlety of its incidental writing and location design aside, is how all this shapes and colours the tools at your disposal. Moral ambiguity is, of course, a familiar touchstone for games that pride themselves on the sophistication of their storytelling. You can practically feel the warmth sinking into the marble.
Dishonored 2's feel for the quality of light across stone or wood is simply unmatched in any recent AAA graphics extravaganza. It's just as compelling, and nauseating, a means of delivering backstory as ever, though its power is diluted by a plot that too directly answers the question of the Heart's origin. A band of thuggish zealots or an army of lost souls, clinging to the reassuring iron of an oppressive creed? The key prop here is once again the Heart of Dunwall, an artefact from the original Dishonored that whispers melancholy insights about those around you (including your allies, all of whom have demons of their own to wrestle with). Similarly, at a glance you may despise the xenophobic Overseers who hold court in a later chapter, but sneak into their fortress - perhaps using the area's periodic dust storms as cover - and you may be surprised by how much you warm to them. It's a ghastly sight, but step closer and you'll discover something precious, a minor victory plucked quite literally from the jaws of defeat. Whether you choose to play as Emily Kaldwin, deposed empress, or her grizzled father Corvo Attano, among the first things you'll see when you get off the boat to Karnaca is a river of blood, blazing a path along the dockfront to the body of a slaughtered whale. Gleaning hope amid squalor is, for me, as much the point of Dishonored 2 as wresting back control of the Empire of the Isles, from whose seat of government in Dunwall you are rudely toppled during the prologue level.
The PC version is currently experiencing technical problems which Arkane is investigating.
Availability: Out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.Providing, that is, you are patient and attentive, and providing you resist the siren song of the game's more spectacular and corrosive abilities. All of them deserve a second chance, and in a handful of cases, you're able to give them that chance. Each villain in the game harbours a few, fitful sparks of virtue, a glimmer of promise you may detect while eavesdropping from a windowbox or rifling through diaries for hints about routes and hazards. If the strongmen, aristocrats, crooks and paupers of balmy Karnaca have anything in common, besides leathery complexions and comically oversized hands, it's that none of them are beyond redemption. Not just from death - though during my first 25 hour playthrough I did, indeed, try to leave as many people upright as possible - but from themselves. I wanted to save everybody in Dishonored 2. Arkane manages to better the already exceptional Dishonored in nearly every way, creating a masterpiece of open-ended design.