The Reading Room

Gameplay: 

The first thing this DLC does right, is that it allows you to import a save from KoD. That way, you get to keep all your powers, upgrades, weapons, runes, charms and money, as well as your chaos level and body count.

Next, there are 3 new things in this DLC. 

The first, is Daud’s new power: Pull, which allows Daud to pull objects towards him. It’s the same power the witches have, and it’s especially useful if you are playing non-lethally or doing a Ghost challenge-run. 

The second, is a new weapon, or rather a formula change. The chokedust canisters now confuse, disorient and give their targets amnesia, making them forget they were ever hit. In theory, this is a great new addition; in practice, you get the blueprint for this formula in the second to last level of the DLC, so there really isn’t much time to use it.

The third is a new enemy: the witches. The witches are the first female enemies in the game, and they have a very similar set of powers to Daud and the Whalers: they can use Blink, Pull and a version of Windblast which activates with a scream. They also have a power you don’t, called Thorn in which they deploy vine-like extrusions from their hands.  

The witches are not the only new enemy in the gang; we also have the Dead Eels, a rival gang to the Hatters, who fight with fishhooks. The Dead Eels are a mixed gender gang, the first in the series, but they won’t be the last. 

Outside them, we also have Hatters, Overseers, City Watch and Guards. Weepers likewise make a return in this DLC. 

Characters:

The most interesting new character that we get in this game is Delilah Copperspoon. Throughout the series, her backstory is revised three times: first by Thalia Timsh, then by the Dressmaker, and later in the sequel by Delilah herself. 

Delilah is the main antagonist of this DLC, and like Daud she too is marked, although curiously, she doesn’t have the mark on her hand. While in KoD she took a rather passive role, here she is, front and centre, and her witches will hunt Daud down and attempt to stop him from reaching the manor. 

Other important characters are: 

Lizzy Stride

Edgar Wakefield

Mortimer Hat (the Old Geezer)

Nurse Trimble

Thomas

Not the best gender balance, but it’s not felt as acutely here, because the witches and the Dead Eels have a strong presence in the story. 

Level Breakdown:

BW has 4 levels, though the first one has no enemies and no targets. Once again, we have a mix of city levels and single location levels, and like in the first DLC, one of the locations is repeated from the base game.  

Choose your Mark:

Calling this a level is a bit of a stretch; it’s very short, there are no missions or targets, and no hostels to fight. It’s the closest Daud ever gets to having his own version of the Hound Pits Pub, an area where he can gear up, get info, and explore. 

The area is the Whaler base in the Flooded District, where we pick up a few days after the Overseer attack. 

Daud wakes up to find things are strange in his base. Corvo has arrived and you engage him in combat. Of course this is not real; it’s a dream Daud is having in which he realizes that Corvo is coming after him, and he doesn’t have a lot of time.  

I love how much Daud’s decisions from the previous DLC inform what happens in this level; it really feels like you have been sent onto a journey, and the world is responding to your actions. If you played on low-chaos, Corvo will knock out the Whaler in front of him instead of killing him. Daud’s own words to Corvo change as well, mirroring what he said to him in the Flooded District level (you understand I can’t make this easy on you). 

The second thing is how easy the fight is. Yes, it’s a dream, but Corvo barely puts in any effort to win, and the only power he uses is Blink. 

Another thing that changes is Daud’s reaction to being awoken from the dream. On low chaos, you simply speak to the Whaler who wakes you; on high chaos Daud attacks and almost kills the man. The Whaler tells Daud that Thomas is back. 

Thomas is Daud’s new point man, replacing Billie. His dialogue makes him come off younger than Billie, and he has much more of a student-teacher relationship with Daud. He doesn’t banter with Daud like Billie did; he calls him sir, and is very apologetic if he thinks he’s failed, or doesn’t know the answer to Daud’s questions. I believe he has more lines than Billie, and yet we never learn much about him. 

Thomas gives Daud the rundown: Lizzy Stride, leader of the Dead Eels owns a smuggling ship called the Undine. However, she was recently betrayed by her second, Edgar Wakefield, and is currently in Coldridge Prison. With everything the City Watch has on her, she might stay there forever. Because of this, Daud knows that if he breaks her out, she will owe him. 

That’s the level. All that’s left to do is gear up, wander the upper floor of the building listening to Whalers talk and read notes. You can find a letter from Billie’s where she hints that she knows Daud is also planning on leaving Dunwall and encourages him to do it. 

If you let Billie live, a lot of the Whalers are worried Daud is going soft. Others are worried about the trip to Brigmore; they have been boarding up windows and walkways to keep the base safe. The Overseers, (dead or alive) are being placed into the Refinery, which explains how they ended up there when you found them as Corvo in the Flooded District.

When you are done, it’s time for a little jailbreak

A Stay of Execution for Lizzy:

Like always, Daud narrates the level’s opening. Lizzy is a really good smuggler, and she knows the river very well. She can take Daud and his Whalers past the quarantine line and to the mansion. The tone Daud has when talking about her always makes me laugh; he sounds like the father of an unruly child.  

There is a pattern with the levels in this DLC, especially this and the next one, and that’s that on first playthrough they are very hard, but the moment you know what you’re doing, they become incredibly easy. Case in point, this level reuses a single location from the base game: Coldridge Prison. Like always, there are several ways in, the easiest being purchased with a favour. 

The drawbridge into Coleridge is blasting the Overseer music box, so Daud can’t use his powers until he enters the prison. If Daud purchases the favour that gives him an Overseer mask and uniform, he can waltz right into the prison with the pylon turned off and actually investigate what happened.  

During the torture, I mean interrogation of a witch, something went wrong, and she and her inquisitors suffered an explosive death. The Guards have called an Overseer to investigate and if Daud goes to the interrogation room, he can find an audiograph of the ‘questioning’ through which he learns that the witch committed fiery suicide, taking her captives with her. 

Now that you’re in the prison, you can rescue the 3 guards who helped Corvo escape. They are about to be executed, and it helps immensely to know that you can just use a well placed chokedust or Bend Time and sleep darts to set them free.

Finding Lizzy is also easier if you know what to do. The proper way is to break into the security room, read the log and learn which sector and cell she’s in. The easier way is to simply blink into the control bridge, and from there blink on the third floor of the cell section. It’s guarded by a single guard, and you can easily just physically look for her, starting from the top down. Once you find her, blink back to the control bridge and open her cell. 

You can also open all the doors and start a prison break. Likewise, if you didn’t kill Timsh in the last DLC, he’s alive, ranting to be released from his cell. As for Lizzy, as soon as you release her from the stalks, she’s in, she’ll faint. You have to carry her out. 

If you didn’t leave any traces before, the pylon is still off, so you can just use the pipes above to sneak past all the guards, get on the bridge and go down the side stairs. Boom; you’ve completed the level, and you haven’t even broken a sweat. 

As for Lizzy, she becomes more involved in the second level, once she’s actually conscious. I love her design though; she’s a punk with a mohawk, covered in tattoos, and teeth sharpened into fangs, like a shark. She has easily the coolest and most memorable design in any of the games, save for maybe Euola in DotO. 

The Dead Eels:

The Dead Eels is my favourite level in this DLC, and unsurprisingly it’s a sprawling city level. This time we are visiting the Riverfront and Draper’s Ward, two formerly affluent areas that have been overrun by the gangs. The Hatters control Draper’s Ward, while the Eels control the Riverfront. 

Thomas warns you that tensions between the Eels and the Hatters are high, since Edgar took over, so much so that the gangs are in an open war, shooting each other in the streets. The Eels are on high alert, and Edgar has barricaded himself in the Undine, having learned that Lizzy has escaped Coldridge. 

Once again, if you know how to go about things, this level is very long, but fairly easy. 

Daud lands himself in the middle of an active shootout between the Eels and Hatters. I love this element of the games, and I wish it was further explored in the sequel. It’s an expansion on what you could see/do in Eminent Domain, except this time, there are NO City Watch or Guards at all. At the start, both gangs are hostile to you, so it’s best to avoid them. If you blink into an apartment above the skirmish, you’ll find another one of Granny Rags’ recipes, this one, involving recreating her wedding. You’ll need two people (unconscious, dead or even half-eviscerated by rats), a man and a woman, and a golden ring. The bodies are easy to find; once the fight ends, you can easily Blink past the victorious gang and steal two bodies. 

If you follow the roofs, you’ll see the entrance to Dapper’s Ward, as well as 2 Hatters and a pylon. You don’t need to deal with them quite yet though; for now, your objective is going to the Riverfront and dealing with Wakefield. 

My suggestion, as counterproductive as it may sound, is to ignore everything and go straight to Wakefield. The trick with this level is that once you deal with a gang, the members become neutral to Daud, and you can explore at your leisure. 

If you want to do things the intended way, you can start by exploring the canal. 

On the Hatter side, two Hatters are trying to open a safe; across, a man is standing on an apartment balcony. This is Jerome, one of Griff’s collaborators. He offers Daud a very funny deal; if you kill Skinflint, a Hatter who owes Jerome money, Jerome will pay Daud, and Daud can spend Jerome’s own money back into his shop. Genius. 

What’s even funnier is that if you steal Jerome’s key and rob him, he doesn’t even notice and will still trade with Daud as normal. 

You don’t even have to kill Skinflint; you can just knock him out and lie, and Jerome will pay up. Truly genius. 

You can find Skinflint in the canal under Jerome’s apartment. I don’t know if this is a glitch, or it has to do with my chaos level, but I’ve never been able to get Skinflint to talk to me, even though the wiki says you can. 

Above Jerome’s apartment is an Eels lookout. If you listen to their chatter throughout this beginning part of the level, you’ll learn that none of them like Wakefield. He has no style, no love for the game, and is more focused on the gang war with the Hatters than the actual smuggling. 

In the building over Daud can find the Dressmaker. He used to sew for the elite of Dunwall, including the Kaldwins, all the way back to Jessamine’s childhood. I find this hilarious because, true to the game not knowing how to render teenagers, this man is supposed to be in his 60’s. 

The Face of a Pensioner

Since the Dressmaker can no longer thread the needle as he used to, he has retired and as a parting gift he got a lock of Emily’s hair, which he cherishes. Delilah visited him and tortured him with visions for 3 days, after which she stole the lock. 

The Dressmaker gives Daud a revised version of Delilah’s backstory: she was not a baker’s apprentice, but Jessamine’s playmate, and the two were very close. 

One last thing you can do before you move onto the Riverfront, is to find the golden ring and safe key in a bush. With the ring you get Granny Rags’ rune, and with the key some gold ingots. 

As soon as you enter the Riverfront, Thomas lets you know that Wakefield barricaded himself on the ship. The gang knows Lizzie is coming, but they don’t know about Daud. You can also hear more Eels who complain about how needlessly cruel Wakefield is, drowning people in the river in sacks. 

You can use the pipes to get closer to the Undine. Thomas will appear again and warn you that he’s being watched. Some of the Eels say the same thing; a woman is watching them. 

The woman is a witch and a spy for Delilah. You can deal with her on the roofs, and you should because if you don’t, the witches will attack the Eels crew at the end of the level, as you leave Dunwall. 

Thomas will also let you know that like most smuggling ships, the Unine has a hatch on the bottom that releases contraband should the ship get caught. The best way to deal with Wakefield is to dive into the river, swim up through the hatch and knock him out. Then you can use the boat’s siren to call Lizzy. 

Lizzy will deal with Wakefield if you leave him knocked out, so no matter what you do to him, he’s a dead man. However, Lizzy is fairly forgiving; she tells her crew she’ll forgive them for going along with Wakefield’s treachery, but she demands fingers from some of the crew (two from Anabelle, who reacts to the demand for one). I love the way Lizzy talks and deals with the crew; it’s easy to see how she got to be in the position to lead a gang, because she’s tough, but she’s not heartless, and she does genuinely seem to enjoy causing chaos. 

The new issue now is that while Wakefield was being paranoid, the Hatters stole the Undine’s engine coil, without which the ship can’t move. You need to get it, and for that you have to go to the Hatter’s Mill. Lizzy tells you the password; it’s heavily implied that Mortimer Hat, the Hatter’s leader might be someone dear to her, perhaps a father, not that you as Daud care. 

Now is the best time to really explore the Riverfront and the Eel side of the canal since the gang is neutral. There are a few things here: a Weeper keeping guard over a bonecharm, and an underwater tunnel that leads you to an Outsider shrine. 

The Outsider is impressed that you breezed through Coldridge, and questions if Daud has really changed, or he’s hoping to outrun the fate that Corvo is bringing his way. 

On the other side, you can see the Eels letting a Hatter go, and if you save an Eel from the Hatters, he’ll comment how no one will believe who saved him. Slowly, a truce is being formed, at least on this side; time to work on the other. 

To get into the Mill, you need to go around the pylon. There’s no need to turn it off, but you definitely can, perhaps as a way to test your Pull abilities. You give the password and you’re in. 

I recommend two things: one, get on some high ground quickly, since a Hatter will come check who just entered the area and two; just like before, go straight for the main entrance. To the left of the wall of light are some broken windows you can use to get in. Head straight for the main office, where you’ll meet Nurse Trimble and the Mortimer Hat or the Old Geezer, as the Hatters call him. 

Thomas will tell you how the Hatters make their coin; they make the shrouds used for the plague dead. This is important, since the reason the Hatters need the coil is to power their machines. 

If you listen to the Hatters and Lizzy, you will know that it’s Nurse Trimble calling the shots, not the Geezer. Moreover, Trimble has rigged the life-support machines of the Geezer so that if they were to be tampered with, they will release a toxic gas that kills everyone, save for himself. 

Trimble offers you a simple deal; someone broke the watermill the Hatters use for power. The men he sent to fix it, never came back. If Daud fixes the mill, Trimble will give him the engine room password, and he can take the coil. 

If you take the deal, the Hatters are now neutral to you, so you can explore. A similar thing can happen here, like it did in the Flooded District level in the base game, where the NPCs aren’t hostile, but if you stay idle around them for too long, they will attack you, so I suggest you keep moving. 

There are 2 ways to get the coil, and in both cases someone will lose. The first way is to do what Trimble asks and fix the mill; that way you will explore the sewers and learn more about Delilah and her plans. 

The other way is to completely bypass this and speak to the Geezer. You can’t talk to the Geezer with Trimble in the room, so the best way to do things is to lure him out of the room. You can do this by setting a timer in his lab, and he’ll come running. You can silently knock him out. You can even find an audiograph that opens a wall with the antidote recipe. 

Then, talk to the Geezer. He’ll ask you to kill him, by pulling out the pylon from his life support. Sounds great? 

Not really, not unless you want to kill every Hatter in the building, including yourself unless you make the antidote. The Geezer will give you the first 2 numbers of the engine room code, as he dies. 

There is no way to do this non-lethally; even if you manage to take all the Hatters out of the building, as well as Trimble, killing the Geezer counts as a kill, so only do this if you’re not chasing Cleanest Hands. 

The intended route is to go through the sewers, which are my least favourite part of the level. Like always, the River Crusts are always watching, always waiting. 

Once you get to a metal-barred door, you’ll see a dead Hatter on the other side.

There are 2 options; one, go through the side planks, which will take you to the reservoir, or two slide under the grates and next to the Hatter. It’s better to do the latter, because you will come up behind two witches who are waiting to catch you in a trap. 

I love the witches as enemies, but I hate fighting them. Many of them become invulnerable to projectiles aggroed, making it needlessly difficult to deal with them if you are playing non-lethally. It’s best to avoid or knock them out.

If you take them out, and return to the reservoir, you’ll see an injured woman begging for help. The woman is likewise a witch, and she’s there to assassinate you. You can stop her, but the way Daud does it is brutal; he breaks her arm with his sword. It’s really quite jarring, since none of the other non-lethal interactions are this violent.

There is one more witch in the room to the side, speaking to Delilah’s statue. After you knock her out, you can speak to Delilah. 

Delilah knows all about you; she knows you killed Jessamine, that you are marked like her and she boldly tells Daud that out of the 4 marked, she will be the only one who is remembered by history. In the base game, the Outsider tells Corvo that 8 were marked, so does Delilah mean 4 are marked right now? That checks out, since it would be her, Corvo, Daud and Granny Rags, who at this point is still alive (this level takes place right before Lady Boyle’s party).

The water pump is in the room with the ambush. Fixing it requires you to get rid of the witches, and then get a winch from the basement, which has 4 Weepers. There’s also an Outsider Shrine which requires some work to get to; you have to activate a broken fan and then slide down the shaft. 

The Outsider warns Daud that Delilah has a real plan; yes, Daud can and will make it upriver to her mansion; but what will he do when he gets there? It seems that finally the Outsider is on Daud’s side, after 5 levels of questioning his sincerity and choices. 

After you fix the pump, you have to take out the two briars holding the wheels (explosive bolts are the way to go), and finally you can return to the Mill. 

If you don’t intend to kill the Geezer, give Trimble the news and he’ll give you the code. Get the coil and bail. 

Once Daud returns to the canal, it’s silent; the gangs have made a truce. Daud wonders how long it’ll last; even the Eels seem confused, unsure of what to do now that they no longer have to fight the Hatters. 

This is the final point at which the witches can attack you if you don't take care of them in the sewers, so another reason to explore them, even if you don’t intend to use Trimble to get the code. 

This level rules. The conflict between the Eels and the Hatters is great; I love the back and forth between the gang members, especially the Eels making fun of the Hatters for being run by a nurse. 

I also enjoyed the slow building of a truce between both sides, especially the Eels commenting on the truce’s progression as it happens. 

The Hatters were not particularly interesting in KoD, and even here they don’t get a ton of development, compared to the Dead Eels. The Eels’ designs are very interesting, and their dialogue was funny while also moving the story forward, much more than the Hatters. Nurse Trimble supposedly came in to revamp the gang after they lost Bottle Street and the Distillery to Slackjaw. He wants to create a legacy for the Geezer, whether the Geezer wants him to or not, and he is the reason for the arc pylon and wall of light being used by the Hatters in the first place. 

Lizzy claims that she stole the Hatter password from a Hatter, but the Geezer confirms that he was the one to give it to her, and he is sad that Lizzy hasn’t come to see him, perhaps even hoping that she would free him from Trimble’s contraptions. 

What I don’t understand is if Trimble was brought in to help the Hatters, and he is hoping that the gang will live on forever, why would he rig the Geezer’s machine to release poison gas and kill everyone? 

I find it kind of funny that out of all the gangs in the games, the Hatters are the only ones to appear in more than one game, and yet I find them the least interesting, and least developed.  

Delilah’s Masterwork:

This is the final level of the DLC, and the official final piece of the first Dishonored game. As it seems to be a pattern with these games, the first time I played this level, I hated it. There were too many enemies, I didn’t like the way the witches fought, or how they travelled in groups, and I loathed the gravehounds.

Now, it’s one of my favourites, and I believe it serves as a much better conclusion than A Light at the End. It’s another single location level, set entirely in the titular Brigmore Manor.  

The Manor is one of the most beautiful locations in the game. The yard is half-submerged in water, full of green grass, lush trees, and fireflies. There’s a truly dream-like quality to the Manor and the surrounding area, and it is the only level that isn’t set in any kind of industrial zone. The mansion itself is old and crumbling, parts of it sinking into the water, and at several points I just stopped and stared at how pretty everything was. 

Likewise, though mechanically I dislike fighting the witches, their designs are very cool. They have vines and roses sprouting out of their bodies, and when they become alert, they turn black, green or grey, and their eyes glow. In the game’s universe they are meant to be unnerving and terrifying, and they really do look it. There is also a cool sense of camaraderie between them; they call each other sister, protect each other, and though the witches are not good people, they feel like a real coven. 

This is also, strangely, a level where Daud goes at it alone. Thomas appears twice; at the start to warn you about the gravehounds, and apologize for not knowing how the witches get in or out of the mansion and a bit later if you’ve purchased the crate - favour to ask you if everything is in order. Outside of that you are riding solo this time around, which is maybe why Daud offers significantly more commentary on the manor and the witches than in any of the other levels. 

Gravehounds are littering the yard, and they are a bitch to kill. You have to kill them twice, once to kill the hound and once to destroy their skull bone. It’s hard to do this without alerting the witches to your presence, so my advice is to stock up on bolts. 

There are a few ways of getting into the estate. If you bought the hole in the wall favour, you could enter into the yard through the fence which is nice because it’s right next to the shoreline. A butler had been smuggling things here, and you can follow the clues to the waterfall in the backyard, where you will find what’s left of his body, along with a key to the mansion’s front door. 

I don’t recommend this approach; the front yard is crawling with witches. Instead, I suggest purchasing the turncoat favour. A witch in a red coat will meet you in the backyard and tell you Delilah’s plan; she wants to possess Emily. She doesn’t really care for Daud, but she does care for the rest of the coven, so try not to hurt anyone in front of her.  There is a way in through the crypt near the solarium; the latch for it can be found in the tripwire building right next to you. This is also where you’ll need to go for Granny Rags’ final recipe. 

You can bypass all the witches in the backyard via the waterfall way which takes you to a building next to the solarium. In this building’s attic you’ll find Granny Rags’ recipe. It involves drinking 3 River Krust pearls with the water from the fountain I mentioned and gives you a rune. 

As for the crypt, I suggest that as soon as you get inside, you close it, because if the witches see it open, or they hear you accidentally trip the wire in the entrance, get attacked by the rat swarm or take the bone charm under Delilah’s statue, they will come for you. 

The manor is crawling with witches and it’s quite hard to navigate because it’s completely decaying. Ceilings have come down, doors and walls are blocked by debris, and the entire ground floor is flooded. 

The second floor will offer you several things. One is an Overseer who was sent to spy on the witches but was caught. He’s completely gone off, rambling about denouncing the Abbey, and as far as I know, the only way to stop him from giving himself a heart attack is darting him. 

The second is hearing about Delilah’s lantern, hidden in a studio. She’s closed herself into the Void, painting her masterpiece. The lantern is in her study which is rigged to shit with launchers, and when you take the lantern, you realize what Delilah wants to do: paint a portrait of Emily and possess her through it.

Getting to the gallery is hard; there are many witches on the ground floor, so I recommend using the second floor. After you knock the two who are guarding the painting you can use the lantern on the blank canvas to open a portal to the Void. The Outsider appears; he explains that Delilah imbues the subjects she paints with her will and can then control them; that’s how she’d forced Timsh to give her everything. On a side note, you can hear two of the witches discussing Timsh’s arrest, and one of them suggests that Delilah may have had a soft spot for the old man after all. 

The Outsider let’s Daud know that he is genuinely surprised with how Daud has changed since he learned about Delilah. While it’s pretty clear that no matter what happens, the Outsider will no longer speak to Daud, he does tell him that he doesn’t pick favourites, but will watch what unfolds with great interest. 

With that, you enter the Void. There are a few ways to deal with Delilah. The easiest is to just kill her; like Granny Rags you have to kill her twice, once just her and then her and all her statues which become copies. 

The second is to knock Delilah out and replace Emily’s painting with that of the Void. You can then put Delilah on her altar and finish the ritual for her, trapping her in the Void. This also requires knocking her out once and then knocking out all of her statues. 

The third and easiest way is to wait until she finishes Emily’s painting, swap them without her noticing and watch as she traps herself in the Void. It’s interesting because up until this last playthrough I didn’t realize that it was here that Delilah merged with the Void, which is how she was able to separate from her spirit in the sequel. She merged her spirit with the Void, thinking it was Emily.

With that, Emily is safe.

The Ending:

Depending on your chaos level, there are several endings. I got the best one; Daud knows that no one will know Emily was ever in danger or that he saved her, but he doesn’t need them to. His choices matter to him alone. He chose to use the Outside gifts to become a killer and kill Jessamine. But then he chose to save her daughter, and now he must deal with the consequences. 

Corvo arrives at the Flooded District, he and Daud fight, and the Outsider takes over the narration. He is pleased with Daud; maybe he doesn’t pick favourites, but between Delilah and Daud, he’s clearly team Daud. He also likes that Daud doesn’t care that no one will know what he went through to save Emily, or that he doesn’t try to dissuade Corvo with that information. He did it because it was the right thing to do, and not for a desperate grasp at redemption. 

The Outsider then confirms that what happens to Daud is up to Corvo. If you played low chaos, Corvo let’s Daud go, and Daud leaves Dunwall, placing his blade on Jessamine’s plaque in the Gazebo. 

As far as endings go, I think this one is pretty solid, and dare I say, better than the ending of the base game. The confrontation with Delilah is an actual confrontation; even if you simply replace the paintings, you have to actually sneak in and do it, and if you knock Delilah out you still have to deal with her statues. 

Likewise, since the witches only appear in this DLC, and only sparingly in the previous level, fighting them feels fun and fresh since they aren’t an enemy that has been overused to death like the City Watch. Daud facing the coven on his own makes the stakes higher, and as a player you feel the pressure mounting without the game having to resort to hordes of enemies. 

The only thing I wish, is that the fight with Corvo that we get in Choose Your Mark happened at the end of this level instead. I think it would have been much more suspenseful if instead of a cutscene you actually fought Corvo, and had to win, or couldn’t win. Either option is fine, but I think winning maybe would be even better, because then Daud gets the final choice: does he kill Corvo, ensuring the Empire’s failure but his own freedom, or does he let him go? 

I do like the suspense of not knowing what Corvo will decide; even knowing it’s based on chaos level; I still get tense waiting every time. I can’t imagine how much more tense it would be if I had to actually fight. 

Before we end this, I do want to bring back something that I mentioned all the way back in part two, when I spoke about the Immersive Sim genre, and that is:

Player Choice vs Streamlined Narrative:

Dishonored, and the entire genre to which it belongs is all about choices. It’s a choice to play low chaos, it’s a choice to spare certain characters and kill others. In the first game at least, all of these choices combine to determine the game’s ending. The issue comes with the sequel. 

Suddenly, nothing you decided matters. You chose to kill Daud? Too bad, he’s alive and kicking. You chose to kill Billie? She’s one of the lead characters. You chose to help Granny Rags and turn Slackjaw into soup? Too bad, she’s dead anyway and her dried hand is a massive plot point. 

This greatly undermines the weight of the decisions you make, because nothing you decide matters. It doesn’t help that only 3 characters in the entire game are not killable- Emily, Jessamine and Calista. Everyone else, including extremely important characters like Daud, Sokolov or Billie can be killed and are assassination targets. 

I really, really wish the developers didn’t create a ‘true canon’ and instead allowed the players to port a save-file like Mass Effect does. I know this is an unrealistic expectation but it’s an expectation born out of games who have done this kind of thing in the past and out of this very game stressing the importance of player choice! There has to be a better way to do this kind of narrative. Either don’t make really important NPCs killable or be willing to actually let the player kill them.

With that, Dishonored 1 is done. Join me next time when we talk about: 

Dishonored 2

Part 7: Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall

Changes:

The first and most notable change is that we no longer have a silent protagonist. 

This is a really good change, not the least because it would have been incredibly weird to have Daud voiced in the original and not in the expansion. Michael Madsen reprises his role and he’s even better in this DLC; he gets more lines and more time to shine and develop Daud’s voice and character.

There is a longstanding debate in video games on silent vs voiced protagonists. I understand how someone might prefer a silent protagonist (especially if the alternative is someone who will not shut up), but I’ve always preferred the latter, especially in this series, since we are roleplaying as a specific character. Having a voice helps develop Daud's personality, and actually allows for dialogue and real interaction, instead of picking 1 out of 2 prompts while his scene partner just stands in front of him, looking straight down at the camera.

Though you can technically play as Corvo in Dishonored 2, the intended protagonist is Emily, meaning that every instalment of the series has a different PoV character, and each has their own personality, beliefs, skills and powers, and so none of the games feel repetitive or boring. 

Moreover, many of the series staples, like the presence of witches, a conflict between different gangs and/or the City Watch, corrupt/black bonecharms and favours/contracts are first introduced in the DLC.

Story:

Daud can't sleep after Jessamine’s murder. Something inside him has broken, and the Outsider, who hasn’t spoken to him in years appears. The Outsider loses his interest in his marked subjects who use their powers ‘predictably’ - violence for power’s sake. Daud questioning his choices has made him interesting again, and he stands at a crossroads. Whatever path he chooses, things will never be the same again, and if he truly wants to change, he can start by solving the mystery of Delilah. 

For the next 6 months, Daud searches for Delilah, and finally on the day that Corvo escapes Coldrige Prison he finds her - a whaling ship owned by Bundry Rothwild.

Instead of a revenge, this time we have a mystery, one whose answer will determine the course of Daud's life. Not only has he killed Jessamine, he has had a lifetime of killing that he can’t easily atone for. Finding out who Delilah is and how she ties in with Jessamine might be the very last chance Daud has to save his soul.

Gameplay:

The chaos system is the same from the previous game; stay quiet, stay unseen and don't kill if you want low-chaos; it’s even possible to do a full non-lethal run called Cleaner Hands (as opposed to Corvo’s Clean Hands). 

High chaos still allows you to destroy everyone and anything, and gives you a different, darker ending. Once again, I am partial to low chaos, so for the most part, we’ll be discussing that. 

In terms of gameplay, there are a lot of small changes that I found really improved the experience.

The first and FUNNIEST is that Daud, the assassin, has MORE non-lethal options than Corvo. 

He has the standard sword/pistol combo, along with regular and explosive bolts, as well as grenades. Instead of a crossbow, he has an Assassin’s Creed style wristbow, with regular bolts and sleep darts. He also has 3 new weapons: an arc mine and a stun mine, the first one being deadly, the second not, as well as chokedust, a smoke bomb that’s invaluable when confronting groups. So he has 3 options in his arsenal that are non-lethal and silent, which is 2 more than Corvo did. 

Daud too is marked, but his powers and abilities are different. Blink and Bend Time  are the same, but his Void Gaze combines Corvo’s Dark Vision and the heart, highlighting both enemies and runes. He has another power called Summon Assassins which as the name suggests, summons an Assassin to help out in a fight. 

Daud has 4 of the same abilities as Corvo: Vitality, Agility, Blood Thirst, and Shadow Kill, but he also has Arcane Bond which copies his own abilities to his assassins, so they can use the same powers he can in combat. 

Daud’s powers and abilities are unlocked and upgraded with runes, and like Corvo he also collects bonecharms, which give him different buffs.

Here the game includes a new mechanic - Corrupted Bonecharms. These charms have greater advantages in exchange for drawbacks; for example, taking no fall damage, but depleting all mana when falling. It’s up to the player to decide if the perk is worth the downside. Personally, I’ve never found much use for any of the bonecharms, but I imagine on challenge or higher difficulty runs they make a difference. 

As for the enemies, it’s more of the same. Overseers, Guards, and the City Watch make a return; the only ‘new’ enemy are Soldiers, which are a reskinned version of the Guards. We still have gangs, but instead of the Bottle Street thugs we have Haters. 

Characters:

Our protagonist is Daud, and he is a much more interesting character than Corvo, starting with being able to speak. He narrates the opening to every level, he comments on events and characters, and he makes quite a few jokes, especially in response to people questioning his authority. 

His conflict is a lot more personal than Corvo's because he is the source of his own problems. Not only will he sentence Dunwall to destruction if he doesn't find Delilah, or if he continues down the bloody path, he has been on for years, but he will also doom himself at Corvo's hands. If he changes, he may live yet and save Dunwall from certain destruction. The Outsider tells Daud that his years of slipping into the shadows with no consequences for his actions are over.

If you played low-chaos in the base game, you already saw the kernels of his redemption; he curses Burrows, admits that killing Jessamine was a mistake that permanently changed him, and pleads for his life. In KoD, we see the journey he took to arrive there.

Is Daud truly sorry for what he did? Does he understand the consequences of the life he’s lived? Or is his repentance all a selfish ploy to get out of the vengeance that’s coming his way? 

My reading is that Daud starts off his journey selfishly, trying to do what the Outsider told him in an attempt to deflect or delay the punishment he knows is coming. However, through the course of both of the DLCs he comes face to face with people who reflect his worse qualities back at him, some much worse than even the Lord Regent himself. This, I think, is what gets him to start changing sincerely. 

I like Daud better because he's a more complex and more difficult character to like. Even on high-chaos you can easily sympathize with Corvo - he's a wrongfully accused man, he had everything he loves taken away from him, and even his allies became his enemies. The Guards he kills work for the same people who have his daughter, who murdered his lover and threw him in jail.  

Daud has spent 30 years killing people for money. The people who want to kill him deserve to do so. And yet, despite everything, it's not too late to change. He can never bring Jessamine back, but he can make sure there are no more Emilies in the world, or at the very least, he alone can stop creating them.

The few other notable characters we have are: 

Billie Lurk;

Delilah; 

Bundry Rothwild; 

Barrister Arnold Timsh; 

Thalia Timsh; 

Abigail Ames;

& Overseer Leonard Hume. 

As you can see, the gender breakdown is already better than the base game. Not only are Billie and Delilah well developed and interesting characters in their own right, they are equally as important as Daud. We’ll talk about them more later; for now, let’s start with:

Level Breakdown:

KoD has three levels and like before have a mix of city levels and single location levels. There are levels here which are on par with Flooded District in length, which is impressive for a DLC.

We open on Daud narrating Jessamine’s murder. The Outsider pulls him into the Void, and it’s very apparent that whatever affection they had for each other is long gone. Daud is being replaced by Corvo, but he doesn't know that yet; all he knows is that the Outsider wants him to find Delilah.  

There is no Hound Pits Pub-like area where Daud can relax and shop, so you start each level with an upgrade screen. This is where we are introduced to Favours, a concept that gets even further developed with the Black Markets and Contracts in the sequel.

Favours are small things that Daud can pay for to make the game slightly easier or open up different paths of playing, such as purchasing extra tanks of whale oil to be put in a specific location or having a rune hidden in the level. You can finish each level without them, but they are useful, and especially on low-chaos, quite helpful. 

A Captain of Industry:

Boundary Rothwild, a former deckhand, now owner of the Rothwild Slaughterhouse, is brutally crushing a worker strike with the help of the City Watch and his Butcher enforcers. 

Daud needs to find a way to infiltrate the factory, and he has help from his second, Billie Lurk. Billie is a Whaler, Daud’s point-woman, and the best and smartest of the crew. She’s snarky, sarcastic, and isn’t afraid to show anger and compassion alike during missions. I loved her and Daud’s banter; their dialogue really fleshes out their characters as well as their relationship.

Billie informs Daud that all worker timecards have been confiscated, and many workers are still trapped inside. 

Outside the Slaughterhouse, you will be dealing with regular City Watch; inside are the Butchers. Butchers are my favourite enemies in the first game; they are brawlers who come in two flavours: regular dudes who use a cleaver and massive giants with whale oil powered chainsaws. The death animation from their saws is GRUESOME. They scare me every single time, no matter how many times I replay this level. They also set you up for a fake out with Rothwild; the whole level you imagine him as a giant brawler too, and when you meet him, he's a regular dude who lifts.

There’s quite a lot to do before you enter the Slaughterhouse. First you can visit an apartment that gives you Granny Rags’ first side quest. Though she’s not physically present in any of the DLCs, she still has the most involved side quests, and the reward for all of them is a rune.  

In this particular one, you need to find a Weeper body and then the eye of a whale. The body is nearby; the whale will come later. From this apartment, you can find a safe whose combination is a favour you can purchase, hidden behind some planks. That very same balcony is also where you can climb down and talk to a man in a boat. He mentions someone named Abigail who could help you, but she’s stuck inside. 

From the boat you can easily get to the impromptu prison, where Butchers are keeping some of the striking workers. If you free them, one will give you his timecard, though you don’t actually need it to get inside. If you already have one, the workers are shocked you saved them and are asking nothing in return.

The best way to get inside is to power up a crane and use a balcony on the other side. This not only gives you a good vantage point over the whole slaughterhouse entrance, but also lets you get to a body with a rune. 

The Whale Butchers (the jacked-up cousins with the saws) are threatening a worker. If Daud saves him, he will tell Daud about Rothwild's torture chair. You can find the chair in the next area, where you get to see, and more disgustingly hear the Whale Butchers using their saws on carcasses. 

The chair is electric, and it will serve nicely, should you elect to go that route with Bundry. 

The Slaughterhouse is my favourite location in the first game. It’s fairly big, with many interconnected paths, and interesting things to do and see. You can find the other half of Granny Rags’ recipe in the Whale Harvesting Room. 

Apparently, the best way to get oil from whales is to slowly and brutally electrocute them to death. Billie will outright ask you to put the whale out of its mystery, which you should. To do this, you need to power up the machine and electrocute it quickly; then you can steal its eye. 

The area is grim, every detail contributing to its atmosphere. The river of blood and oil running under the whale, the Butchers with their smoking saws, powered by the same oil the whale is being tortured to produce, the clashing noises of their saws and the whale cries, the enormity of the room. It's a brilliant piece of world building.

From this room, you can blink up into the archives, circumventing some Butchers. There’s a safe here that you can rob, and you can listen to Bundry’s really creepy audiograph in which he's doing an ASMR gloat.  

Currently, Rothwild is arguing with Abigail Ames. Ames only appears in this one level, but she knows who Daud is. To the workers she was a union rep; to Rothwild she was the head of his labour force. In reality, she’s an agent for Lord Ramsey (the guy who called the Guards on you at the Boyle party), sent to kill Rothwild and steal his workers.

If you decide to play non-lethally, you will be met with scorn and resistance from everyone you encounter. Here especially, both Billie and Abigail make fun of Daud for considering alternatives. Abigail agrees to tell you about the boat if you blow up the slaughterhouse, and when you ask about the workers, she mocks you for growing a conscience. She doesn't consider Rothwild or the Butchers are people, so she doesn't care if they get caught in the explosion.

If you are serious about doing a non-lethal run, don’t leave Abigail and Rothwild alone; she will stab him with a screwdriver. It’s best to knock her out and put Rothwild in the chair. 

Delilah belonged to Lord Arnold Timsh. He sold the ship to Bundry for a quarter of its market value, because he wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible. 

This leaves Daud with two choices. You can leave Rothwild in the chair or you can put him in a crate that will take him to the furthest part of the Empire. If you leave him in the chair, in the next level, Butchers will be waiting for you at the docks, to kill you for what you did to him. 

With that done, beware of the Butchers that enter the Slaughterhouse from the front door (this is why I like the roof entrance) and leave. You can finish Granny’s recipe for the rune, and on your way out, you’ll get your first real brush with the Overseer music box. 

Music boxes were used in the base game, but Daud encounters them far more frequently. They disorient magic users, taking away the use of their abilities. Billie is surrounded by Overseers and disoriented by the box. The best way to save her, is to chuck a chokedust at them, and she’ll blink out herself. 

Billie asks Daud if she can tag along for the next mission too, since she was already planning a hit on Timsh. Daud agrees.

Eminent Domain:

Daud narrates the start of the second level, explaining what he knows about Arnold Timsh. He is a wealthy noble, barrister, and close friend of Hiram Burrows, and during the plague, he's tripled his fortune by confiscating property from plague-stricken families (not all of whom had the plague). However, he’s embroiled in a familial war with his niece, Thalia Timsh, over his mother’s will. 

Armed with this knowledge, Daud seeks Thalia out, and she agrees to meet him at Treaver’s Close.  

The level starts with you and Billie taking out some guards; if you didn’t kill Bundry, Billie will follow your lead and knock the guard out. Treaver’s Close is on the other side of the wall of light, so you have to make your way there.

The main advice I have for you is to SHUT IT OFF. If you don’t, there’s no way across the wall and no way to deactivate it from the Waterfront side, so you will essentially break the game. Do it and save yourself the frustration.

Thalia is waiting for you; a Hatter has killed her bodyguard and is harassing her. This is a trap: two of his buddies are waiting behind the roof, and they’ll attack you as soon as you take him out. Moreover, if you’re not careful, and you say, try to get into the open window, you might alert ALL the Hatters in the area, since there’s a lot of them. 

Thalia tells Daud that Delilah completely messed up Timsh’s mind; he is erratic and seems to now be afraid of her, whereas before they were lovers, and he was willing to leave everything to her. Thalia wants Daud to kill Timsh and replace his will, which is maybe a problem if you’re playing Cleaner Hands.

Before you can worry about that though, there is the slight issue of getting into the Legal District. If you listen to the City Watch talk outside, you’ll hear that they lost the key to the Legal District to the Hatters, and you need it if you want to get inside.

If you’re low-chaos, the key will be in the Hatter building on the second floor. In high and medium, it’ll be with a dead Hatter named Chauncy, whose body changes rooms. The stronghold is crawling with Hatters, so be careful. 

The other thing to note is that if you break the wooden planks on the Hatter side of the street, you’ll start a war with the City Watch. It’s easy to get caught in the crossfire, and this also alerts the City Watch,

There’s an apartment here that has another incomplete Outsider shrine with a bone charm instead of a rune. On the shrine you can find Granny Rags’ second recipe and this one is a lot more involved than the first one. 

If the Slaughterhouse was my favourite location, this is my favourite level. I love the city levels where you get to explore the interconnected apartments and observe the street below. Apartment 10 is presently locked, but well be needing it. For now, get as close to the entrance as you can, and after you hear the guy being congratulated for finally getting a squad after what happened last night, enter the Legal District. 

Since the Whalers have been planning a hit on Timsh for a while, you have a scope location already set up where you can talk to Billie and stock up on weapons and gear. Before you do that, it’s good to visit one of Timsh’ former ‘friends’, Roland. 

Timsh has destroyed Roland's entire family by falsely accusing them of having the plague and confiscating their property. Roland wants revenge, so he gives daud the address to his old apartment, where he has a fake immunity document signed with the forged signature of the Lord Regent, along with something to make his apartment infected with the plague; a bag of dead rats. 

The apartment is 10, and it makes it easy to circumvent the Legal District entrance and return to the Waterfront. Conveniently it’s also the best vantage point to blink into Timsh’s third and fourth stories. Inside, behind a bookshelf is the actual Outsider shrine. 

Billie is aware that Daud can speak to the Outsider and wonders what he’d say to her. I find this very sad; the actual first time the Outsider speaks to Billie, he’s 20 years too late. 

As for the Outsider, he’s not too thrilled with Daud’s sudden ‘no killing thing’. He thinks it’s another desperate attempt to avoid his fate, rather than a genuine change of heart, something that many fans seem to believe to this day. 

There are many ways to go after Timsh. My favourite is to blink to the fourth floor and speak to Delilah first. She knows who Daud is, and warns him to stay away from her, but do whatever he wants with Timsh, who is no longer of use to her. Billie calls Delilah a bitch and hopeless painter.   

Timsh is on the third floor, arguing with his Head of Guard. He’s supposed to get a visit from General Turnbull, but Turnbull is late because of Corvo kidnapping Sokolov. Once the argument (concerning Thalia) ends, Timsh goes upstairs, and you can knock him out and steal his key. On the third floor you can replace his immunity document with Roland’s forgery. You can then steal the will, which to Daud’s shock, leaves everything to Delilah. 

Before you dump the dead rats in the cellar air duct, finish Granny Rags’ recipe. On the first floor of Timsh’s house there is a deck of tarot cards. If you have Granny’s note, pull out the World card. Then, return to apt 10, place the card on the Overseer Shrine and cut your palm over it. Take the bloodied card and throw it in Timsh’ fireplace. Whoala; you have a rune. 

With that done, dump the rats, and watch Turnbull arrest Timsh for using a forgery of Burrows’ document. 

Thalia is waiting for you at the docks, like she said she would. Though she's not a good person, she does keep her word, and give Daud Delilah's backstory.

Delilah was a baker’s apprentice in Dunwall Tower, before she became Sokolov's apprentice. She met Timsh and they became lovers, but this led to conflict between Timsh and his mother because he would put her life in danger for Delilah and tried to write Thalia out of the will in order to give everything to Delilah.

Timsh is Delilah's experiment for her real plan which involves Emily, but Daud doesn't know this yet.  

On their way back to the Flooded District, Billie comments that she likes the poetic nature of Timsh getting taken down by a forged document, like he had done to so many (a callback to Daud's speech about the Lord Regent) and muses that she might have misjudged Daud. 

This for me is the platonic ideal of a Dishonored level. It's long, but doesn't drag, it involved a lot of weaving from building to building, carefully knocking out or avoiding enemies, but also some sneaking through corridors and hallways. The scenes between Daud, Billie and the Outsider are great, Granny Rags' side quest is interesting and not too easy, and I really enjoyed seeing a different part of Dunwall. It’s nice to see that Dunwall was still a functioning city while Corvo was out killing people.

As Daud returns to the Flooded District to regroup and plan however, Delilah has other intentions. 

The Surge:

As soon as Daud enters his base, Billie Lurk informs him that Overseers have attacked the hideout. Many of the Whalers are dead, and others have been captured. Billie is adamant that you can still push back against the Overseers if you free your men and attack. Daud is more interested in how the Overseers found the base in the first place.

This is the final level in KoD, and I HATE it.

It's not dull like A Light at the End, but it combines my least favourite elements of the series. I hate fighting Overseers and their Hounds, and I hate dealing with the Overseers music boxes. I don't like single location levels where you fight a bunch of enemies, and this one has the double whammy of being a reused location from the base-game. It's also a hard level, full of groups of enemies that can’t be easily separated, and to make it worse, because the base has many walkways and bridges, using projectile weapons will have you reloading at least 5 times a minute to save all the Overseers you accidentally kill by knocking them off the edge. 

The last time I replayed this level, I think the game glitched on me, because all the Overseers were in a permanent alert state which made it fucking impossible to do anything. I’ve never had hostiles notice me from that far away, like buildings away (some could even see me THROUGH walls and barriers) and become that aggressive that quickly. I had to restart several times over, and even when I finished it, I still felt like the game was breaking under how many enemies it threw at me, even though I was playing Cleaner Hands AND Low Chaos. 

The only positive I will say is that story wise, this is the most famous of part of the first game, and it's crucial to everything that happens in BW and the sequel. So, let’s go over it.

You can retrace Corvo’s footsteps from the base game to discover the absolutely insane number of Overseers in the base. Like always, there are multiple ways you can do things, but honestly? They are all bad.

The best thing I’ve found is to free all your captured Whalers (there’s 4 of them), and then go after Hume, because that way you can get to the best position to get to him; through the window and floors of the neighbouring building where you fought Daud as Corvo in the base game. 

Dealing with the Overseers for me is like pulling teeth, so I won't belabour things; my only advice is that chokedust works well to disorient and briefly scatter groups, and gives you enough of a window to choke out the music box carries, and THEN shoot the rest, because the boxes are impossible to deal with when they start playing (they also alert even MORE Overseers to your location). 

The trick with this level is that it’s actually deceptively simple. You don’t even NEED to save the captured Whalers; all you need to do is choke out or shoot Hume and steal his letter which is how you know that the Overseers had a plan that Hume moved early on. You still need to actually look into the Overseer plans, which are in a heavily guarded building across from your base, but knocking Hume out will open the possibility to rendezvous with the rest of your crew, and you can order them to choke out or kill the rest of the Overseers. 

Taking Hume down is easiest by using the window and Bend Time. One thing to note, is if you do go after Hume, and you’ve saved at least one assassin, make sure to knock him out and run before you’re seen, because otherwise Billie will help you, and she will sometimes just kill Hume even after he’s been darted. 

The plans you find will let you know that Hume was tipped straight to your hideout, and that there’s a massive Overseer force coming. However, with your knowledge, Billie and the others can bottleneck the Overseers and prevent them from taking over the base. 

Once you do all this you can talk to the Whalers. Billie comes clean; she is the one who gave Delilah your location. 

Unfortunately, because of how well known this scene is, it was spoiled for me before I got to play it, but I still loved it. Billie has been your partner the whole game; she bounced ideas off of you, helped you develop plans, commented on your actions, joked with you - she is clearly as close to Daud as much as he lets anyone get. To find out that she sought Delilah out and wanted to betray you is a genuine blow.

What’s more, even on low-chaos, Billie’s biggest regret isn’t attempting to kill Daud, or getting her friends killed; it’s moving in too early, before she was ready. She regrets it because she failed Daud's teaching; that is not what he would've done. It's still a reflection on him; she messed up because she wasn’t as effective a killer as he is. 

It's not that Billie doesn't regret betraying Daud; she tells Delilah Daud deserves better when Delilah appears, angry at her failure. It's more that Billie is mad at herself for misjudging Daud, mistaking his unwillingness to kill for weakness.

It was really Hume who blew the whole thing; had he not moved early the Overseers would have taken the base, and Billie would have killed Daud in his tunnel. Delilah mocks Billie for telling Daud that her life is in his hands (which Daud echoes in his confrontation with Corvo), and after your decision, she bamfs out, with a ridiculously over the top warning that she will “crush your cold heart and walk into your skin”. 

This is your final, real choice as Daud: kill, or spare Billie. 

To compare this choice to Covo’s choice of sparing or killing Daud, I think this was done much better.

Firstly, Billie has been with you for 3 straight levels. She has a strong personality and presence in the story, both physically and to Daud as a character.

She betrayed Daud directly, and if you died a lot in this level like I did then you have a lot of personal reasons to be angry with her. Your feelings and decision as a player are aligned with that of Daud, the character. In the base game, even after two expansions all about how Daud changed, I still don’t think Corvo would let him go. Corvo doesn’t know what happened to Daud, nor do you when you are playing as him. Daud knows everything about Billie, and your choice informs the way you see his character: do you believe that he is changing, really is sick of killing and trying to make amends, or is it all just a shallow facade in an attempt to avoid his inevitable fate? 

I also like Billie’s little aside about how she and Daud, both knew it would end like this between them; Billie was going to betray him at some point, and he would have had to face her. Even Delilah acknowledges this, by saying she knew Billie’s betrayal would have been sweetest. 

We end the DLC with Billie boarding a ship away from Dunwall, and I don’t just mean in your choice. Billie Lurk is one of the most important characters in the Dishonoured franchise and her story isn’t even close to being over.  

As for Daud, we stay with him for the second of the DLC expansions - The Brigmore Witches.

Part 6: Dishonored: Concluding Thoughts

Part 8: Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches

The Flooded District:

For a while, my favourite level in the game was the Flooded District. I still like it a lot; it has the 2 best encounters, and the start is very different from everything you had been doing before, but it drags a lot in the second half, where you really feel that it's the longest level in the game.

So far, each level has had a specific challenge:

Level one - no powers.

Level two - side quests and multiple entry points to your target.

Level three - chaos system in full effect.

Level four - technology instead of hostiles.

Level five - almost no combat.

Level six - many enemies in a single location. Not my kind of challenge, but still a new challenge.

In the Flooded District the challenge is endurance. 

You'd think that once Corvo returns to the pub, things would be happy. Instead, Samuel refuses to go in with you, and when you enter the pub, things are strange. Everyone congratulates you. Havelock toasts to you and Emily. You can shop from Pierro (and you should). But something is off; the atmosphere is tense, and after your drink, your vision gets blurry. Moreover, Martin seems to be arguing with Calista over Emily, and you find an audiograph by Pendleton in which he swears ‘this’ wasn’t his idea. 

‘This’ is betrayal; Sam has poisoned you on Havelock’s orders. He halves the dose hoping you’d survive, and he sends your body down the river in a boat. You wash up in the Flooded District, where the Whalers find you and take you to Daud. 

Daud is very practical about the whole thing; he sees your Outsider mark, and knows you escaped prison and have a very good reason for wanting to kill him. So, he tosses your weapons at the bottom of a refinery and has the Whalers put you in a room that’s so poorly guarded, I almost think he wants you to escape. 

Before you inevitably do, you get a visit from the Outsider. He proposes 3 theories on why the Loyalists betrayed Corvo:

They got scared they would be held accountable as traitors for taking the Lord Regent down;

They realized they had an Empire at their fingertips and knew Corvo would never allow them to manipulate Emily;

It’s simply in man’s nature to betray for money and power.

Before you can ponder that you have to decide whether you’ll go after your weapons, or Daud first. I suggest getting your weapons, not just because if you’re like me, you have upwards of 15 upgrades on them, but also because you’ll need lots of bolts, incendiary bolts, grenades and explosive bolts for all the fucking river crusts you’ll be fighting. 

Luckily at the start you can get a solid amount of stuff together from the dead Overseers littering the place. Though you don’t know it yet, the Overseers have mounted an attack on the Whalers, and all the corpses are a remnant of that. The Overseers carry bolts, which are useless, but also pistols, bullets and grenades, which are VERY useful for the river crusts. You also need to be careful because you don’t have a lot of elixir for the mana you spend. 

This is my favourite part of the level. The Flooded District is an eerie, but beautiful location. Outside of the river crusts the only enemies are Weepers, which you can easily avoid or knock out. There’s a lot of greens and water which make for a nice change of pace and most of this section is you slowly exploring the area, scavenging and managing gear and learning what happened between the Overseers and the Whalers to result in so many bodies. 

Your gear is at the very bottom of a refinery. There are Weepers inside, and the one of note is former High Overseer Campbell himself. You can read his final words, in which he blames everything on Burrows, and mentions how he should’ve banned the Heretic Brand, but he wanted to use it on a few people, including Burrows himself. 

With your gear in tow, you can go after the man himself, which isn’t easy. There are a lot of Whalers around, as well as Hounds and the space is pretty limited. If you know where you’re going you can get around a lot of the Whalers and go straight for Daud. 

There are two ways of defeating Daud on low-chaos, and both are great. The first is knocking him out manually or with a dart and stealing his pouch and key to get out of the base through his secret tunnel. 

The second is fighting him. On low-chaos, Daud tells his Whalers to stand down, and you fight one-on-one. In both high and low chaos, Daud will ask for his life. If you oblige, Daud is shocked and actually leaves Dunwall for good.

If you hang around the room before you engage Daud, you’ll hear him talk about Burrows. Daud hates him; in the 6 months after Jessamine, he's contemplated killing him many times. If you defeated Burrows by using the PA system, he is pleased that the apparatus of lies, propaganda and public opinion that gave him his power, is the same one that took him down.

Daud, however, presents an interesting problem: What happens when your motivations are different from the character you are playing?

Daud killed Jessamine. He may hate Burrows, he may regret his decision, but he took the money and did it. When Corvo engages him, he still fights to kill. Daud knows who Corvo is, he knows he deserve his revenge, and yet he taunts Corvo, reminds him that he is the one who killed Jessamine and ruined Corvo's life. He pleads for his life, but he is shocked if you spare him.

But why would Corvo ever let Daud go?

Corvo watched Jessamine die. He watched Emily torn from her mother and handed to the twins. Had Burrows been smarter, he could've easily lied to Corvo, claimed that the evidence pointed at him and Corvo would've never known Burrows hired Daud.

And yet, I, as a player, have never wanted to kill Daud. The first time I fought him, I went out of my way to keep him alive, because I wanted to hear more of his dialogue. He's the most interesting character in this game, and just the speech he gives about Burrows before you even confront him is the best written one in the game.

I’ve never felt such qualms about any of the other conspirators; not the twins, not Campbell and certainly not Burrows, even though all of them are much further removed from Jessamine's death than Daud is. I, the player, am at odds with Corvo, the character. Corvo has every reason to kill Daud, not the least being that he has no guarantee Daud will really leave Dunwall or even stop killing. Demonstrably, in their fight, Daud hasn't changed.

Whatever your choice is, you can use Daud’s key and tunnel to escape. This will take you to a mass-grave, where the wagons dump the sick and dead bodies into piles and piles on the street. 

There are a few scattered survivors you can talk to; one is a pair of nobles, struggling to pull themselves out of the pile of bodies. The first one is traumatized; he believed the City Watch when they promised him food and medicine in the Flooded District, only to be thrown out with the dead. His friend isn’t so naive; he knows why the Watch does what they do, he was just hoping to die at home. 

The other person you can talk to here is Alfa, a survivor hiding in one of the apartments. She’ll tell you that many people try to escape by jumping from the balconies onto the corpse cart. The issue, which you can learn if you climb the building right next to the electric rail, is that a wall of light protects the entrance, and people get electrocuted once they get there. 

You can learn this from two scavengers on the balcony. I don’t know if this is a glitch or intentional, but if you stand idly, especially near the edge of the balcony or on the window, one of the scavengers will push you. When you confront him, he’s not hostile, and he counts as a civilian if you kill him. It’s very strange, because they aren’t hostile when you climb on the balcony with them, they just stop talking. 

To save myself the desire to murder them, I usually just knock them both out. 

The next area has a side quest that’s so rare and hard to find, I only did it on the fourth time I played this level. There is a building to the right of the scavengers’ balcony. If you enter it, you’ll find a group of survivors discussing how to escape back to civilization, since none of them are sick. 

You need to find a man named Blake. He has someone coming with a boat to take the survivors to safety, but he needs your help to shut down the arc pylons in the courtyards of the two buildings. 

There is only one City Watch guarding the pylons, and after you knock him out, and let Blake know, you can climb up the balcony overlooking the street.

There are patrolling tallboys, who will attack the survivors if they spot them or will definitely attack them if the floodlights turn on. All you need to do to distract them is to fire bolts at a crumbled wall near them, and the survivors will gather in the yard. Blake will thank you for your favour and you get some good chaos back.

After you turn off the wall of light, and circumvent some Weepers, you can go to the final area of the level, the sewers. Immediately you come face to face with a wounded Bottle Street member who fills you in.  

Slackjaw took his boys into the sewers to kill Granny Rags once and for all. Unfortunately, she more or less has all your powers, including Devouring Swarm, so she decimates the gang. Slackjaw is alive, captured by Granny, and lucky you, he is the only one with the key to the sewers. It’s time to pick a side in this conflict: save Slackjaw, or help Granny turn him into soup.  

If you refuse to help Granny, she isn’t pleased but she doesn’t attack you; you can still leave. If you chose to help Slackjaw, be aware that she has one power that you don’t - she has to be killed twice. 

The first kill reveals her magic camo and destroying it will allow you to actually kill her for good. You can burn the camo in the furnace in her house, but you have to be quick about it, since after you kill her or knock her out the first time, the swarm of rats will attack you.

Like any man who almost became soup, Slackjaw lights up a cigar and tells Corvo how when he was a kid, he thought Granny Rags was a witch, but when he grew up, he realized she was just a sad, old hag. Guess he was right the first time. 

The last Outsider shrine is in Granny Rags’ house, and he too is shocked that you let Daud live. Honestly? What can I say other than the power of Michael Madsen’s voice is too great. 

After this you can progress in the sewer, fight some. More. Fucking. River crusts. And speak to a few more survivors. Then, using a key you got from Cecilia, you can drop into her apartment which is right across the Hound Pits Pub.   

The Loyalists:

This level changes drastically, not based on your chaos, but on your playthrough. If it’s your first time, it can be frustrating, long and difficult, with many patrolling Guards, City Watch and Tallboys. If you know what you’re doing, it’s extremely short and easy. 

Cecelia is in the apartment, and she’ll fill you in on what happened. After you disappeared, the staff was called to the yard for a bonus, but Cecelia wasn't, because Wallace told her she wouldn't be getting one. Cecilia watched as Havelock shot and killed both Wallace and Lydia, sparing only Calista, all right in front of Emily.

This is the last time you’ll be seeing Cecilia; after you defeat the Guards in the level, she leaves you a note that you made her brave enough to make a run for it. There is a fan theory that Billie Lurk’s lover Deidree is Cecilia under a different name, but that's impossible.

Next thing you should do is avoid the Tallboy on the street while listening to the Guards who have been ordered by Havelock to shoot Corvo on sight. Once again, your 'allies' have framed you for murder, and Havelock has kidnapped Emily. 

The best thing to do, is to beeline it for Emily’s room. There you will find Calista, who was spared by Havelock out of respect for her uncle. Samuel is alive; he never came back on shore, and he’s installed a flare in Emily’s room that can call him back to the Pub. He has been searching the river for you.

Next you want to sneak to your room. There’s lots of Guards inside, but you can hear them talk about how Piero and Sokolov are alive and have barricaded themselves into the workshop. You can enter it using the riverside window and learn that Sokolov helped Pierro complete the pylon Pierro has been working on the whole game. 

This pylon has a much larger radius and can either incapacitate or burn the people it targets. In order to complete it, the duo needs a blueprint that Havelock stole from them. It's in a bin in his room, and after getting it, you can pick what you want to happen to the Guards. Fill the tanks and activate the pylon; it’ll knock out all the hostiles, and you can wander around the Pub, getting all the stuff you missed. 

There aren’t many things left. You can shop from Pierro one final time (and you should because you’ll need all the gear you can get for the last level). 

You can speak to Sokolov who seems to be under the impression that being kidnapped and held for a few days sipping brandy is the same as being imprisoned and tortured for 6 months.

He suggests that Havelock and Martin started with the best of intentions, but once you start ordering people killed to get your way, everything else is just details. It's why I was suspicious of the Loyalists from the very first mission.

Calista seems to agree with Sokolov, especially about Martin. Regardless, they need to be stopped, and she can’t help you; she just wishes you luck.

Emily has left you a drawing and a note where to find her: Kingsparrow Island, where the Lord Regent’s final project, a massive lighthouse, was being constructed. Once you speak to Samuel, he agrees that’s where the Admiral would be hiding and gives you one final ride. 

The Light at the End: 

The final level is also the worst one.

First off, it’s another monotone level set at a military base, this time a fort and lighthouse. Second, it’s another one of those levels that drastically change depending on which chaos you are playing. If you are on low-chaos, you only have to deal with one boss, but it’s a real slog to get to him. 

Sam drops you off on the shore and gives you a heartfelt goodbye. He really respects Corvo for all he’s done, especially for never losing sight of what’s really important: Emily. He is optimistic that Dunwall can pull through; there are too many good people not to. He also asks for Corvo to send his regards to Emily, since when she becomes Empress, she won’t have time for old sailors like him.

From there, you have two options: the beach or the harbour. Either way, most of this level is drainpipes, grates, and. So. Many. Guards. 

Here’s the thing. Dishonored is an immersive sim. It’s not an FPS. In each level there is a finite number of bolts and darts that I can carry, so when the game shows me a certain number of enemies I plan accordingly. It’s bullshit that this level will do that and have 7 more guys immediately rush in after you killed the first round, and it does this CONSTANTLY. It’s the only level where Guards actually reacted to me turning off the walls of light, and there are areas where you HAVE to do it. It’s also the only level on which I managed to RUN OUT of sleep darts, because the enemies were never ending, and would often spawn while I was trapped in rooms with them. 

After you survive the incredible tedium of the fort, you have to sneak your way into the lighthouse elevator. Be careful if you shoot any of the guards on the stairs, because they will fall over the railing and kill themselves. 

Inside the actual lighthouse there are no enemies. You can walk into a meeting room, and you’ll find that Havelock has already poisoned Pendleton and Martin. He talks about his paranoia, how they fought over who would get the title of Lord Regent and he blames Martin for poisoning Corvo, as if he wasn’t the one who decided to go with his plan.

You have a couple of options on low-chaos. You can knock Havelock out even before he finishes his speech or confront him. He tells you he won’t fight you; the only way to make him hostile is to take the key to Emily's room in front of him. He comments how similar she and Corvo are, and how attached she is to him watching everything he does carefully. Havelock also told Emily everything - why he betrayed Corvo and later why he poisoned Martin and Pendleton. 

You can bend time and take the key, ending the game once you open Emily’s room.

There are several epilogues, based on your chaos-level; the best one shows Emily ascending to the throne with Corvo by her side, Pierro and Sokolov curing the plague, Calista reuniting with Geoff, Sam taking over the Hound Pits, and several of the various survivors cheering. Once Emily is old and Corvo has passed, she places her doll on his plaque, in the same Gazebo Jessamine died in. 

Part 6: Dishonored: Concluding Thoughts

Part 4: Dishonored: Level Breakdown 1 - 5

High Overseer Campbell:

This first level is by far the best designed. It's not the longest, but it has 2 substantial side quests, and introduces many important locations and characters, so forgive me if I'm a bit longwinded.

Before each mission, Havelock and Pendleton give you a brief. High Overseer Campbell has a black book he uses for blackmail, and the Loyalists need it, among other things, because it contains the location of Emily Kaldwin. Havelock asks you to rescue the third Loyalist, Overseer Teague Martin who orchestrated Corvo's jailbreak. 

Before you leave for Dunwall, you speak to Calista Curnow. She is Captain Curnow’s niece, and she’s heard that Campbell intends to murder him, since he can’t be corrupted. She asks Corvo to save him, which is your first official side quest. 

Sam drops you off under Clavering Boulevard, in the Textile District. He mentions that the streets are heavily guarded, and perhaps someone named Granny Rags can help you. My advice, and not just because I like her, is to seek her out. The rewards for her side quests are runes and they are vital this early on, especially for non-lethal playthroughs. 

Throughout the levels you will encounter characters and vignettes that really capture the desolate and desperate atmosphere of the city. You are immediately greeted by City Watch dumping infected, dead bodies into a container from the bridge, headed for the condemned Flooded District, including still living people.

Down the alley, you can find your first, civilian; a girl, speaking to herself about what she has to do to get elixir, which is the only moment in the game where the misogyny of the world is acknowledged, and it of course has to do with sexual coercion.

Thankfully, next you meet Granny Rags, who lightens up the mood. She's in a condemned building across from the Dunwall Distillery, which is Bottle Street Gang territory. She asks that you get rid of her Gentlemen Callers, for a special price. 

This is also where you encounter your first Outsider Shrine. At each shrine, the Outsider gives a bit of backstory on the characters, in this case Granny Rags, as well as the ‘cult devoted to hating him’, the Abbey of the Everyman.

The Gentlemen Callers are members of the Bottle Street Gang, who’ve come to rob Granny Rags. The reward is a rune, and it’s enough to knock them out, to get it. 

Like mana, health depletes every time you take damage, and you can replenish it by drinking Sokolov’s elixir (or eating food if you have the charm), which you can find or purchase. Slackjaw, the leader of the Bottlestreet Gang, is making his own bootleg batch of the elixir, and selling it for cheap. If you decide to accept Granny Rags’ second quest, you will be poisoning said batch.

To do the quest, you need to sneak into the apartment of Robert Galvani, a doctor who is working on a cure for the plague. You have to steal the intestines of a plague infected rat and put them in the elixir brew in the Distillery. Galvani lives on Clavering Boulevard, so on your way to his apartment, you might want to rescue Griff from some more Bottle Street thugs. 

Griff is a vendor, though his prices are much higher than Pierro’s. He’s still useful though, especially for buying upgrades and replenishing sleep darts in a pinch. His venue is right under the roof you want to climb so you can use the pipes to get to Clavering. 

Galvni’s apartment is huge, and there are Guards inside, as well as some maids, and I hate the maids more than I hate the Guards. Since they are civilians you can’t kill them, but if they spot you, they alert Guards and activate alarms. 

The rat viscera are in a lab on the third floor. Galvani, like Pierro is obsessed with Sokolov, so the code to his safe is the day they met. Another thing to note is that Galvani has realized that the plague carrying rat isn’t native to Dunwall. 

After you get the intestines, you have to sneak into the Distillery. Sneaking across the yard is easy; just go on the pipes. Once inside, it’s more difficult to navigate around the distillery without getting spotted. The brewing stand is in the basement, and you can use it before you poison it if you’re running low. Once you get your rune, you are done, although you won’t see the consequences of your work until the next level. 

The next big hurdle is the wall of light, which is what separates Clavering Boulevard from Holger Square. The wall of light is this game’s version of a checkpoint. It was designed by Sokolov to keep rats and the infected from crossing between districts and spreading the plague. In reality, it’s a convenient way to separate the levels into sections. 

There are 3 ways to deal with the wall of light. The first is to shut it off, which can be accomplished by removing the whale oil canister. The second is to rewire the wall of light to let you through, but this will kill anyone who passes through it, which is no bueno for non-lethal and low chaos playthroughs. For both, Dark Vision 2 is especially helpful. The third and usually easiest option is to find a way around. 

Holger Square is where you find Martin. At present, he’s being taunted by another Overseer, though listening to Martin make ‘yo mama’ jokes might be the real torture.

Freeing him lets you know that Campbell is indeed about to kill Curnow, and he will be using poisoned wine. One thing to note is that there is a non-lethal way of disposing of Campbell; you will learn about it in the very next area, but though Martin definitely knows about it, he doesn't mention it.

The non-lethal option is the Heretic’s Brand, which is what is done to members of the Overseer order who break the seven scriptures. 

At this point you have several options on how to approach your target. There are the roofs which take you straight to the second floor; the ground level which is the best guarded; the kennels; and the backyard. This is a good time to decide on how you want to neutralize Campbell because that will determine your approach. 

Killing Campbell is the easier option; he’s on the third floor so it’s trivial to get up high and either switch the poisoned glass or shoot him. If you want to save Captain Curnow, you have to clear the second floor is clear of guards and disable the alarms so he can exit the building on his own. Otherwise, you have to knock him out and carry his body far enough from the building. 

If you want to brand Campbell, you need to steal a key that will get you inside the Interrogation room, where you find the branding instructions. Knock Campbell out and put him in the chair to administer the brand; he’ll stay put. 

There are a few other areas of note in the residence. One is Campbell’s secret room, where you will find the portrait, he was sitting in for the day Jessamine died. You’ll also find proof that he’s a frequent user and abuser of the girls in the Golden Cat, as well as an audiograph which confirms that Emily is being held at the Cat, by 'the twins'. 

In the Archive you can hear an Overseer discuss how Martin planned your jailbreak and read depositions of the Guards and other inmates. You can also listen to a Whaler interrogation and learn that the Whalers carry poison to end their lives if they’re captured.

You can make your escape through the backyard. There are a few more optional encounters here: you can save an Overseer and his sister from overzealous colleagues who think she’s a witch, and you’ll get the code to a safe in the Overseer barracks as thanks. You can also witness two other Overseers execute one who is infected with the plague, to prevent him from becoming a Weeper. 

After all that, the only thing left to do is make your way to Samuel and bounce. 

House of Pleasure:

The second level is also fittingly, my second favourite. For all my whinging about sex work in this game, I actually really enjoy fictional brothels, and this level is mostly set in the Golden Cat. 

However, getting to the Cat is easier said than done, and in a series staple, first, you have to revisit Clavering Boulevard. 

Corvo wakes up to some commotion in the Pub; it seems Weepers have somehow appeared in the sewers under the building. Havelock asks you to dispose of them, and if you do it non-lethally, Pierro will award you some sleep darts, and promise that they will be treated with dignity at the Academy. 

After this bit, you are informed of your next target: Pendleton’s very own older twin brothers Custus and Morgan.

Throughout the game, Lord Pendleton will write journals and record audiographs about his life; through them you can learn that he’s estranged from the twins, mostly because they have spent his entire childhood abusing him, even almost killing him as a baby. Despite this, he still tries to reason with them, and it’s very clear that killing them isn’t something he wants to do. The only reason he agreed to it is to prove his loyalty to Havelock. 

What I love is that Pendleton isn't entirely selfless; if you end up disposing of his brothers non-lethally, Pendleton will make a comment when you kidnap Sokolov that he wants a new portrait - this one of just himself.  However, if you do kill the twins (and for the brief moment before Pendleton learns you didn't) he is mean and passive aggressive to Corvo. It's only when he learns that the twins are alive does he thank you.

Pendleton is the best developed and characterized of the Loyalists, and for that he's my favourite. 

The bridge to Clavering now has a watchtower that shoots at anyone who gets caught in the light. Luckily you don’t need to go there, and you are immediately approached by Bottle Street thugs who ask you if you want to do a job for Slackjaw. 

I really like the Bottle Street gang. Their design is great; the bowler hats, the suspenders, the dozens of rings, blowing fire as their weapon of choice. Hilariously though, the game repeatedly calls attention to the fact that the Bottle Street gang are mostly teenagers, and yet every single character model looks like a man with a mortgage.

the face of a teenager

Since you are doing a job for Slackjaw you can just walk around the Distillery yard and overhear conversations between the gangsters. I think the developers did a great job of humanizing the gangsters; my favourite was one boy admitting that he can't pay with coins because he gets his numbers mixed up.

This is where you learn what happened with the poisoned elixir - it has turned over half of the gang and innocent civilians caught in the crossfire into Weepers. They are locked in the yard next to the Distillery entrance. If you don’t knock them out, once you leave the Distillery they will break out and attack the Bottle Street members in the yard. 

I could write a whole paper on Slackjaw, and believe me, people have written entire books. Yes, he is a gangster, but he’s a net positive to the city. He makes a bootleg, much cheaper version of the elixir and ‘employs’ the disaffected youth of Dunwall. He never attacks Corvo, and after you complete his side quests, he keeps his word and never turns hostile. So not only has Corvo halved Slackjaw's gang, but he's also destroyed the ability for dozens of people to protect themselves from the plague. And for what? A rune from a crazy, blind woman who thinks you are her dead husband?

Slackjaw doesn’t know you did anything to the elixir, but he does know you’re after the Pendletons. He offers to help you enter the Golden Cat if you do a job for him. Someone has been attacking his men and stealing territory, so he’s sent one of his men, Crowley to investigate Galvani’s apartment. Crowley's disappeared.

On your way to the apartment, be careful not to fall into the Whaler trap; they are stalking the roofs and apartments around the area where Griff stands. Like the prologue, they can use pull and blink, so make sure to knock them out. 

This is the only level that doesn’t have an Outsider shrine; one of the apartments has a Weeper who seemingly tried to make one, with a bone charm instead of a rune. 

You can also save a servant girl from two City Watch thugs who want to kill her for her elixir. She will give you the key to the Art Dealer’s apartment, and tell you he’s fired all his staff, but he keeps something valuable in his safe. 

The Bottle street gang is already in the apartment, but they are having trouble opening the safe, and if you want to rob it, you will have to come back too.

Inside Galvani’s apartment you'll find Crowley’s dead body and two Guards arguing over how to classify his death. Crowley recorded an audiograph so you can take that back to Slackjaw. 

We don’t learn who’s after Slackjaw from the audiograph, but you can guess it’s either Daud or Granny Rags. Slackjaw seems genuinely distraught that Crowley is dead, and he keeps his end of the deal, giving you a key to a hotel called the Captain’s Chair which you can use to get inside the Cat. 

He also offers to get rid of the Pendletons quietly, if you can find the art dealer, Bunting, get the safe code from him and bring it back to Slackjaw. 

Like before, there are several ways into the Cat. One involves Granny Rags who has made a new home in the Weeper infested underpass. My preferred method is the Captain’s Chair, because it lets you get on the balcony of the Cat, right on top of Madame Prudence. 

To balance out the previous level, it's actually easier to deal with the twins on the non-lethal route.

Bunting is in the Silver Room, strapped to an electric chair. He doesn’t realize you are not a sex worker, so you can torture the combination out of him (it’s ok he’s into it).  He also admits that he has been slowly defrauding the Pendletons, by lying to them that their collection is worthless, when it’s in fact worth thousands. The Pendletons are haemorrhaging money; both brothers lament how they had to borrow to even get into the Cat, and Morgan talks about killing himself as soon as the money runs out. Don’t feel bad for them though; their family has made their fortune by using slave-run silver mines. 

From Prudence you learn that Emily tried to escape twice, and the last time, she got the closest by finding the VIP entrance. To make sure she stays put, Prudence keeps the master key on her, which you can easily steal. 

If you want to kill the brothers, Prudence will let you know that one of them is the Golden Room and the other in the Steam Room. Whoever is in the Steam Room is very easy to kill with the pipe pressure.

Once you rescue Emily, you can use the VIP entrance which will take you to Granny Rags’ underpass. Emily will find her own way to Samuel, though from her dialogue, you can surmise that Granny Rags helped her. 

Return to Slackjaw to report the code, and he’ll tell you what he intends to do with the twins: cut their tongues off, shave their heads, and put them to work in their own mines. This is the first time in the game where the non-lethal route is worse than simply killing the target, but it won’t be the last. 

The only thing left to do is to rob the safe before Slackjaw can, just be aware that you need to be quick, since 3 Bottle Street thugs will appear on the second floor once you open it. When you’re done, meet Sam and Emily and bounce. 

The Royal Physician:

This level is the first one that takes us to a different location: Kaldwin Bridge. It’s also the first level where you don’t have to kill anyone; instead, you are kidnapping Anton Sokolov.

The Loyalists need Sokolov, because he painted a portrait of Hiram Burrows’ mistress, and you need her name.  

Kaldwin Bridge is a cool, albeit slightly underused location. Sam drops you off on the Southside, because the bridge has newly installed floodlights which make it impossible to get to Sokolov’s house. Moreover since it’s sundown, the mandatory curfew is in effect, so City Watch is everywhere making sure it’s being enforced. 

The first real thing of note is Lord Pratchett arguing with a City Watch Guard about the curfew. His house is well stocked and well connected to the neighbouring apartments, though one of his neighbours seems to have been driven mad by the Outsider shrine.

Sokolov is the first person the Outsider has a lot to say on, namely how much he fucking hates him.

Sokolov has spent decades doing everything in his power from occult rituals to human experiments to get the Outsider to speak to him, but though everyone in-universe is obsessed with him, the Outsider thinks he's boring.

This area is full of apartments you can explore and rob, and there is also a woman you can save from a rat swarm. She will tell you the rats became aggressive after a man brought a bone charm inside, and everyone who was hiding with him is also dead.

Eventually you will make your way to a roof which gives you the best vantage point of the bridge and a new arc pylon is at the foot of it. A few Bottle Street thugs lie in wait. 

The City Watch talk about how many desperate boys will try to do a suicide run at them, in hopes that they’ll either cross the bridge or die before they catch the plague. These guys are not here for that; they are trying to rescue their friend Alec from the brig, but they get incinerated or shot regardless.

Blink 2 is very handy here, since you can just blink on the chains of the bridge without alerting anyone. The towers have many platforms and Guards, as well as the way to disable the floodlights. Alec is in the brig for stealing pearls from River Crusts. You can get him out, but make sure you have cleared a way for him on the other side, because if you haven't, he will alert every single City Watch quicker than you trying to shoot a River Crust.

Once you cross the bridge you can break into the apartment where Alec’s friends are waiting and steal all the pearls they’ve gathered. You have to avoid another pylon, and it can be done the same way as the first one. 

Before Sokolov’s house, which likewise has several ways inside, there is a group of prisoners. If you listen to the City Watch they are to be Sokolov’s test subjects; the problem is most of his test subjects die. You can free them by disabling the pylon, though be careful not to do what I did and accidentally blink yourself inside the cage. 

The best and easiest way to get to Sokolov is through the roof. He is working in his greenhouse, recording an audiograph. You can talk to him and he won’t turn hostile, but you still have to knock him out to get him to Samuel. There is also a female test subject you can rescue.

The hard part is actually getting Sokolov to Samuel. The house is crawling with guards and if Sokolov touches water he immediately drowns. The best way to do it, is to fix his private elevator on the lower floor, knock out the guards and rewire the alarm at the house entrance, and drag him out.

Lady Boyle’s Last Party:

Like the title says: you’re going to a party.

But first, you need to make Sokolov talk. 

Sokolov is a great character, though he’s a bit underutilized in the first game. He’s a true Renaissance man; a genius inventor who developed the City Watch technology like the arc pylon, the tallboys, and the wall of light. He’s also a doctor, having created the plague elixir, and searching for a cure, while also being a painter and an occultist. The only people who are not obsessively fawning over him, despise him.

You can get Sokolov to talk in two ways; releasing a swarm of rats on him or bribing him with expensive alcohol. If you pick the alcohol, you get to break up the aforementioned spying on Calista scene, just so we are clear which game we are still playing.  

Sokolov explains that one of the 3 Boyle sisters is Burrows’ lover but he doesn’t know which one, since he painted her from behind. The Boyles are throwing a party that night and he was supposed to meet the elusive mistress, but obviously he won’t be appearing. Since it’s a masked ball, Corvo can simply go as himself, the masked vigilante from the wanted posters, and no one will suspect a thing.

The problem is, because of the party, the entire City Watch is camping around the mansion, and they bring out the big boys: tallboys.

Ahem.

The tallboys are men in armor on stills who can see from above and fire explosive bolts at you. The best way to deal with them is to blink past the one on the street, and enter the Boyle Estate ground. After that all the tallboys disappear. 

It’s worth exploring around the estate first. There are several Weeper infested apartments around, one of which contains a shrine. The Outsider says that regardless of whether you cut Boyle's life short, or let her live a long time in hiding, this is her last ball. 

Like always, there are multiple ways into the mansion; whichever one you choose, once you are inside, you’re in neutral land. 

There are a few things you can do to get noticed; killing or attacking any of the partygoers, trespassing on the second floor, stealing too many things in quick succession, or annoying Lord Ramsey. Otherwise, everyone thinks you are wearing a provocative mask, and they will even comment in interest or disgust. 

So much of this level is just funny details. For example, you can sign the guestbook as Corvo Attano to piss off the Lord Regent. You can steal from the Boyles and other guests will comment on how everyone does it. You can duel!

Before the ball, Pendleton gives you a letter that you are to deliver to Lord Shaw. You never learn what’s in the letter or why Pendleton wanted Shaw dead; all you know is that as soon as you hand him the envelope you are enrolled in a duel as Pendleton’s representative. 

In order to win the duel and retain your non-lethal run, you have to wait for the countdown, use Bend Time and shoot Shaw with a dart. Pendleton will thank you, and give you a rune. 

I am still not sure what the deal with this side quest is. You would assume that the duel is a set-up by Pendleton, his way of avenging his brothers. However, if you kill Shaw, he thanks you and gives you a rune.

Moreover, if you never deliver the letter, he is mad at you for putting him in a precarious position. So, was he hoping you would kill Shaw? Was he trying to get you killed? My theory is that after you dispose of the twins, Pendleton becomes a worse version of himself, and he abuses the missions to have you deal with his personal enemies.

The actual gimmick of the level are the sisters. All 3 are dressed in an identical outfit, save for the colour. You can either kill all 3 or guess the correct sister. You can imagine which one I chose. 

Finding out the correct Boyle can be done in several ways. The easiest is to talk to a Lord Brisby who will outright tell you who the sister is and ask you to take her to the cellar where he has a boat ready to take her away. This is also the non-lethal solution. 

The other more fun way involves getting a partygoer, Miss White drunk so she’ll tell you about the game. You can also sneak upstairs and go through the sisters’ rooms. Waverly and Esma’s rooms share a secret passage which can circumvent some of the guards on the second floor. 

The Boyle lover will have a letter from the Regent in her room as well as a skeleton key to Dunwall Tower. After you learn who the correct sister is, the next step is getting her to come with you to a private area. 

The intended way to do this is to 'intuit' each sister’s personality, because the game wants me to believe they are different. The flavours are horny (Esma), alcoholic (Lydia), and paranoid (Waverly). Once you get the correct sister to follow you, (and you are blessed if Waverly is your sister because she goes straight to the cellar) you can get rid of her.

Let’s talk about the non-lethal solution. Once again, I want to remind everyone that Lady Boyle’s ‘crime’ is sleeping with the wrong person. 

Lord Brisby tells Corvo that he has been in love with Boyle for years. He begs you not to kill her, and if you bring her to him, he will hide her and keep her safe with him.

There is ZERO indication that Boyle even knows Brisby is, let alone wants to spend the rest of her life with him. I have to stress, a big part of this level is reading Lady Boyle's DIARY, and yet she doesn't mention him ONCE. Even if Boyle does know Brisby, and maybe would be down to clown, why would you then need to trick her into following you, knocking her out and carrying her to Brisby, like a sack of potatoes, instead of, you know, telling her he is waiting with a boat in the basement?

Once again, Corvo Attano, brave Royal Protector, goes along with a scheme to kidnap and sentence a woman to marital rape and capture for the rest of her life, on the word of a masked man, and this is the ACTUAL, CANON choice in the series. Not only that, but the next morning Covro receives a rune from the Boyle family, thanking them for ridding them of the 'problem' that Lady Boyle had caused them. 

I am baffled. This could've been fixed so easily. You can read Boyle's diary. You can talk to her, hell, you have no other choice! That's the only way to get her to go with you to the cellar! One simple line about Brisby would've fixed this horrible plot-thread.

I was so mad about this, that I actually looked up to see what Arkane had to say for itself. Lead developer Harvey Smith did say on Twitter, that he regrets this decision. While I appreciate this, writing Boyle later on as someone who manages to manipulate Brisby enough to have a good life is not great. I’m glad they owned up to the poor writing, but I don’t like the way they are still trying to weasel out of it.

After that terrible decision, you have to avoid the watchtower lights on the river and get to Sam’s boat.

With that, we finish the first half of the game, and the 5 best designed levels. All that's left is to take down the Lord Regent himself, and that's exactly what we will be doing next.

Part 5: Dishonored: Level Breakdown 6 - 9

Part 3: Dishonored: Gameplay

Immersive Sim:

Dishonored falls into a category of game called Immersive Sim, which in short means a game where the player has the ultimate choice in how to approach a situation. To paraphrase a quote from Warren Spector, the lead developer on Deus Ex, 'a key should not be the only way to open a door.'

The same thing applies to characters; though you are playing as a specific person, your decisions as a player greatly determine the personality and traits of said character, as well as their impact on the world. 

In theory, I love immersive sims. In practice, especially in a series, games run into a lot of issues when it comes time for the sequel. Dishonored is no different. 

If we take the first game in isolation, Corvo can be as violently destructive or as quietly imperceptible as you want. However, unlike the Mass Effect games, which take into account what you did in the previous games, Dishonored doesn’t; instead the game has its own true canon, which can be especially frustrating if you like to play loudly and violently. I will talk way more about this when we get to the level breakdowns, but suffice it to say, your actions have way less influence on the world than the game would like you to believe they do. 

Corvo Attano:

Ironically, though he is our protagonist, we know very little about him, especially in the first game. We know is that he is devoted to both Jessamine and Emily, that he is very close to Emily, acting as her father figure, and that he is respected by the people who know him.

This is where the issues start. Does Corvo know Emily is his daughter? Does Emily? In the first game, the answer to both seems to be no, and yet, in the sequel, this is common knowledge not just to Corvo and Emily, but the Dunwall public as well.

The game never explains why Corvo and Jessamine aren't together, whether it's a personal choice or if marriage between nobles and commoners is illegal. This lack of clarity does bring up some questions about the world, since we see that Dunwall, and by extension the Isles are quite conservative and traditional, with the Abbey having a very large influence over its citizens.

How is Jessamine an Empress? Why is her being unmarried or her having a child out of wedlock not a bigger issue? Why is Emily’s birthright not an issue for succession if her father is unknown? Does the Abbey not have anything to say about the fact that the Empress just seemingly had an immaculate birth?

This isn't just idle speculation; it brings me to a much larger and more serious problem with the first game, namely

Sexism and Misogyny:

I want to do a little experiment. I’m going to list the most important characters in the game. Ready? 

Royal Protector Corvo Attano;

Empress Jessamine Kaldwin; 

Princess Emily Kaldwin;

The Assassin Daud; 

Royal Spymaster/Lord Regent Hiram Burrows; 

High Overseer Campbell; 

Lords Custis, Morgan and Treavor Pendleton; 

Admiral John Havelock; 

Overseer Teague Martin; 

Granny Rags aka Vera Morley; 

Slackjaw, leader of the Bottlestreet Gang; 

Ladies Lydia, Waverly and Esma Boyle; 

and Inventors Anton Sokolov and Piero Joplin.

Do you notice something about this list?

Let’s do it another way. 

These are all the female characters in the game:

Jessamine Kaldwin, 

Emily Kaldwin, 

Granny Rags; 

The 3 Boyle sisters;

 Governess Calista Curnow, 

& Cecilia. 

6. There are 6 female characters in the whole game. 

I am not counting named NPCs like Madame Prudence, Lydia, Alfa, Elsa or Miss White, the same way I'm not counting Alec, Griff, or Lord Ramsey for the men. And I am not counting the 3 Boyle sisters as separate characters when they serve the exact same function and have the exact same character model. 

Actually, I think the Boyles deserve their own section because–

Lady Boyle:

After escaping prison, Corvo is tasked with eliminating 5 people who have orchestrated Jessamine’s murder. Those 5 people are: the Lord Regent, the High Overseer, Lords Custis and Morgan and Lady Boyle.

Lady Boyle is the ONLY female assassination target. She is also the only one who had no involvement with the plot to kill Jessamine.

One of the Boyle sisters is the Lord Regent’s lover, and she is financing his grab at power, specifically paying off the City Watch. When you read her journals, you quickly realize that she's in way over her head, has no way out of the relationship without jeopardizing her life and her family’s reputation, and she even talks fondly about Jessamine - she misses her, she likes her, and hates how bad things have gotten without her. 

We need to take her out because we need to take out Burrow's financial backing, but the justification for killing her is given by Lord Treavor Pendleton who is a) a super unreliable character, who b) has a very incel-adjacent relationship with all the Boyle women, and c) whose proof that Boyle ‘helped’ Burrows kill Jessamine is just ‘trust me bro’.

The only argument you could make is that in a transitive way, Boyle’s money paid for Daud, but that’s such an incredible reach that I sprained my neck just typing it. 

What’s worse, is that the alternative to killing her is so much worse than committing murder, that I don't even think the developers realized what they'd written.

Back to the Sexism:

You thought we were done?

Calista Curnow, along with Cecilia is one of the two female characters who like Lydia serve mostly to flirt with Corvo. What makes Calista different is that she's a) Emilly's governess and b) a canon 'love interest' for Corvo. Heavy quotations around "love interest", because it's part of the WORST subplot of the entire game.

Calista exists so that Inventor Pierro Jopin can stalk and leer at her. And when I say stalk, I mean that literary, because you catch him watching her while BATHING.

You, as Corvo, can tell him off, only for the game to give you the option to ALSO spy on Calista. You can enter the bathroom and 'apologize', and even proposition her; she rejects you, but the game lets you enter the bathtub even AFTER she does. The game treats this as a joke; if you do it you get a game over screen, but there is nothing funny about making your protagonist someone who is willing to sexually assault someone. You can even poses Calista and make her get out of the bathtub to ogle her naked character model. She not treated like a character; she's treated like an object for the male players to jerk off to.

Ceclia has a different subplot that ends up being crucial in helping Corvo in the latter half of the game, and she is the only character to have an actual arc throughout the game. She out as a cowardly, meek woman, who is afraid of Corvo and afraid of standing up for herself, but inspired by his bravery, she ends up escaping certain death and leaving Dunwall. 

Jessamine Kaldwin, is immediately killed, and spends the rest of the game as a LITERAL object, her physical heart and metaphysical spirit trapped in the mechanical heart the Outsider gives to Corvo. He only role is to be Corvo's literal spirit guide.

We never see what she was like as Empress, we learn very little about her opinion of Dunwall, her allies, or even of Corvo; all we know is that she loves Emily and wanted to cure the plague. Despite having many voice lines as the heart, most of them are about other people, and almost never about her.

Emilly is, thankfully, spared any sexualization, being 10 years old. She is, however, much like her mother, treated like an object more than a character. The game claims she imitates Corvo and watches everything he does with great interest, but in reality, outside of 2 scenes where Corvo plays hide and seek with her, she exists to get kidnapped and rescued.

There is only one female character that isn’t sexualized, isn’t in love or obsessed with Corvo, isn’t in constant need of rescuing, and whose motivations have nothing to do with Corvo:

Granny Rags:

I love Granny Rags. If Arkane ever magically gets the chance to make a Dishonored 3, I want it to be all about her. I want 10 more books about Granny Rags instead of whatever the Corroded Man is about.  

We meet her as a blind, crotchety old woman, but in her youth, she was so powerful and beautiful, that princes fought over her favour. She rejected them all, devoting herself to studying the occult and earning an Outsider mark. Because she can’t see Corvo, it’s unclear if she knows who he is, or thinks he's her late husband, but she ropes him into her schemes.

In addition to her side quests being the longest and most involved they are also the most morally fucked up. She’s never a direct antagonist, in fact for most of the game she's on your side, helping with runes and alternative routes. Even when she ends up fighting Corvo, it’s only because he gets between her and her soup.

So, to recap, out of the 6 female characters, only 2 aren't sexualized, a child and an old woman, and only the old woman gets to be an actual character with motivations and goals unrelated to Corvo.

Yes, We Are Still on the Sexism

I can already see the comments. 

Monika! This game is supposed to be brutal! And Dunwall is supposed to be sexist! The Abbey preaches that women should stay away from science and stick to the kitchen! That’s why it makes total sense that the only women in the game are maids or sex workers!

Well newsflash! Dunwall DOESN’T exist! The devs actively chose to build their setting in a way so as to exclude any female characters save for sex workers and maids. The place where you will see the most female NPCs in the entire game is a literal brothel. So no, they were not making a commentary on Dunwall's sexist society.

Even if they were, they did a piss poor job of conveying it, because the game never makes any commentary, outside of depicting misogynist actions.

The world the developers built doesn't even make sense under their own sexist logic! Once again, I have to ask: how is Jessamine an Empress? How is she unmarried? Why would a society where women can't do anything apart from raise children, cook and clean have a succession line of the eldest child instead of the eldest son? How come the Abbey never questioned Jessamine's decision to not marry or her daughter born out of wedlock? And if we are to believe that Jessamine is a good ruler, why wouldn’t she push back on the Abbey’s teachings?

Look, I love this game, I do. But part of loving something is being willing to acknowledge its flaws. I am glad that people did it, because guess what? The games improved! Even in this game's very own DLC the things I'm complaining about here start to change, and the games are better for it. But that would’ve never happened had people not acknowledged the issues in the first place.

Part 3: Dishonored: Gameplay

Part 1: Dishonored

World-building:

Dishonored’s world is breathtaking and meticulously crafted. 

The city of Dunwall is an industrial port, built on the banks of a traffic heavy river. It’s a city of towering, metal buildings, narrow, interlocking streets, factories, assassins, gangs, and disease, with only occasional glimpses of the city’s more glorious past and beauty. The opening sequence gives us just enough of Dunwall's beauty to make us understand what the characters are fighting for. 

Left unchecked, the Weeper plague has ravaged the city; the rich throw lavish parties while the poor suffer under the draconian policies of the City Watch, and the bloodlust of the gangs. Dunwall is corrupt from the head down; Corvo is framed by the new Lord Regent and High Overseer, who torture him moments after the game presented them as allies.

The streets are mostly devoid of friendly NPCs, and the few you encounter are desperate runways, people who are already ill or have resigned to their death. Everyone in Dunwall is power hungry, mad, or desperate; the only question is how much of Corvo’s soul will be left after everything he will have to do to save Emily. 

Art Direction:

There is no doubt that Dishonored has withstood the test of time, and that's in large part owed to the game's art direction. The characters and buildings are heavily stylized, with sharp, blocky models, strong colors, and excellent lighting.

The color palette is mostly grays, blacks, and blues, but occasional splashes of vibrant greens, purples and reds provide just enough of an escape from the decay and despair of the plague, giving the game an ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere. 12 years later, and I still regularly see gif-makers and artists creating beautiful snapshots of the Outsider shrines, Campbell’s office, the Hounds Pit Pub, or the Golden Cat, and they look as beautiful as they did the first time I played it.

World and Level Design:

The game's level design has likewise held up incredibly well.

The levels fit in a cohesive whole that gives the illusion that you are exploring a real city. Dunwall feels tangible; the developers use the repetition of areas to great effect, while expanding them just enough to make the player feel like he's building a map of the city. The way the hub-area, the Hound Pits Pub just ‘clicks’ in place is the cherry on top.

Individual buildings have actual entrances, with back doors leading into yards, basements, and apartments with functional rooms like kitchens and bathrooms. Corvo can climb through windows, across balconies and pipes, over roofs and flag posts and survey the streets below. In every game of this franchise, my favorite levels are the ones where I get to sneak around the dark alleys, waving from roof to apartment window, getting a bird’s eye view of each district. The sectioned off areas form natural boundaries to the levels, and I desperately wanted to climb over them and see what the rest of Dunwall looked like.

The game is littered with tons of notes, posters, books, journals, letters and audiographs to find, all fleshing the world out. I especially love the posters on the streets, advertising canceled operas and concerts, as well as the propaganda posters urging citizens to drink elixir or obey the City Watch. Sometimes you don’t even need to read the journal pages; sometimes all you need are two corpses embracing, hiding in the sewers to feel the plague’s impact. 

Speaking of corpses, you will be seeing a lot of them; by the time you leave Coldrige, the plague has decimated most of the city, with entire districts walled off, a mandatory sundown-sunrise curfew, and an overbearing PA system that constantly reminds you of the blocked streets and districts, the curfew, or to report anyone or anything suspicious to the City Watch. 

The dead and the sick are thrown into massive piles in the sewers or the Flooded District. Very few avoid getting ill, and those who do die alone or turn into shambling corpses who retch disease and flies called Wheepers. 

I don't think the game has a more effective 'enemy' than the Weepers. They are not actually considered 'hostiles' by the game; they are just sick people for whom the disease has progressed to such a degree, they are barely human. They shamble and mindlessly charge at Corvo, they scream and puke bile, and they hit like trucks. They rarely appear alone and will easily swarm if alerted. Even the noise they make when they are close by and not aggressive is eerie, a quiet sobbing and retching. 

The Weeper plague is carried by rats, which are likewise formidable enemies. Swarms of them will attack you or any other NPC/dead body in the vicinity, and they will clean off the flesh in seconds. They can also become an ally, if you learn how to direct them to kill enemies or possess them to sneak into places. 

Dunwall is powered by whale oil, which fuels the city’s electric streetcars, streetlamps, machinery, tallboys, and various weapons like the walls of light, pylons, electric bolts, and mines.

However, thousands of years before, a different city stood where Dunwall now stands, and its people carved the Outsider’s mark in whale bones, creating bone charms. The Outsider, a figure of folktales and myths can bestow his mark on the chosen, giving them extraordinary powers. He lives in the Void, a place outside of time and reality, and people still pray to him, erecting shrines in his name, and carving and collecting bone charms.

The Outsider can see the past and the future, and he cares little for human morality. He cares about the unravelling of history, and his mark on Corvo gives him magical abilities, which can be unlocked and upgraded via runes and bone charms. To find them, the Outsider gives you a heart, which marks their location and also lets you hear the thoughts of characters around you by pointing it at them.

The Isles’ religion, the Abbey of the Everyman, hates the Outsider, and they are not wrong to call him a trickster. The people the Outsider marks can create untold destruction around them, and the Outsider simply watches, unconcerned with how his gifts are used. The poor and downtrodden pray to him, but it’s unclear how much he responds or if at all. Characters are often shown as being driven mad by the influence of his bonecharms and runes, and they are confiscated and banned by the Abbey. 

Part 2: Dishonored: Characters

The TV Shows

The first thing, right off the bat, is that Marvel set this movie up to fail. Yes, it did come out at the tail-end of the SAG-AFTRA and WAG strikes, meaning that none of the cast or crew could promote it. Yes, it came out after a historically bad summer blockbuster season, in which every large superhero film underperformed. It also didn’t help that Marvel themselves did next to no promotion for this film, releasing only 2 trailers, the second of which barely contains any footage of this film. 

That’s not what buried this movie, and at the risk of sounding naive, I also don’t think it’s the small but vocal minority of sexist and racist pundits who are now rejoicing at this film’s lowest opening weekend numbers. No, what buried this movie is the same thing that’s buried every single Marvel project in Phase 4: terrible scripts, unfocused plots, inconsistent worldbuilding and most importantly - HOMEWORK. 

I have said this time and time again; I even talked about it here as a separate issue. Marvel’s insistence on connecting their film universe to their TV universe is a rake they inevitably keep stepping on. 

I know people are countering this by saying that you don’t need to watch the shows to understand the movie. First, as I’ll demonstrate here, that’s not ALWAYS true. Second, the lone fact that one MIGHT have to have watched hours of TV to be able to enjoy a movie is enough to deter most people from going. 

Marvel simply can’t decide how their shows fit into this universe. They can’t tell audiences which projects stand alone and which don’t, because then no one would watch the shows unless they are fans of that specific character. And seeing as these shows have budgets upwards of $212 million dollars, they NEED everyone to watch them. But how is it fair to expect a regular person to devote 21 hours of watchtime between 3 separate shows just to be able to follow the plot of this film? 

Everything about the marketing of this film highlighted that this isn’t Captain Marvel’s movie: from the title, to the first trailer which heavily involved Photon and Miss Marvel, to the Secret Invasion show heavily involving both Nick Fury and the Skrulls. 

There is nothing wrong with introducing new characters in a franchise. There is nothing wrong with introducing really popular characters into a franchise, without doing their origin story either - one of the best decisions the MCU did was to introduce Spiderman in Civil War as an already established character. 

The problem is that the Marvels isn’t introducing the AUDIENCE to Ms. Marvel and Photon; it’s introducing Carol Danvers to them. This isn’t the same thing. Not only is Carol not this movie’s PoV character, but she already has a complicated history with Monica, history that the audience isn’t privy to unless they watched Wanda Vision.

The Problem of Monica 

Captain Monica Rambeau is the daughter of Captain Maria Rambeau, Carol Danvers’ best friend and pilot partner. She was introduced in Captain Marvel as a child, but we meet her as an adult for the first time in the Wanda Vision TV series. 

In the show we learn that Maria was suffering from cancer, and died while Monica was blipped. When Monica came back, she got involved in Wanda’s scheme in Fairview which is how she got her powers. 

If you hadn’t seen Wanda Vision, the last time you saw Monica she was a kid. She didn’t have any superpowers, and she certainly wasn’t working with Nick Fury. It takes the movie over 40 minutes to get around to EVEN telling us that Monica was blipped. It doesn’t help that the scene we learn this in, is a very contrived bit where she, Carol, and Kamala have to share their memories in order to track down Dar-Benn. 

This should be the emotional core of the conflict between Monica and Carol. Her mother was sick, and Monica missed 5 years of life during which her mother died. Carol, her aunt, the closest person to her and Maria, wasn’t there for any of it: Maria getting ill, Monica disappearing, Maria dying, or Monica reappearing and putting her life together. 

That’s the real reason why Monica is mad at Carol. It isn’t as the movie implies, because Carol made a promise to her when she was 10, and a fully adult Monica is simply choosing to hold on to it out of spite. It’s because after everything, after knowing Maria was sick and Monica came back from the dead, she still wasn’t there for her. But because to know any of this, we would’ve had to have seen Wanda Vision, Monica’s character comes off as incredibly immature and juvenile for the full first act of the film.

Her and Carol have a clear animosity that we have no context for, and the movie expects us to have it, but how could we, when in order to know any of this, we needed to have watched a separate show where she wasn’t even the MAIN CHARACTER. 

As for Ms. Marvel, her introduction isn’t the issue; it’s that after she’s introduced, she has nothing to do for the remainder of the film. Let me explain. 

Kamala gets an animated stinger (which unintentionally comes off as a cheap ripoff of Miles’ introduction in Into the Spiderverse, especially because it’s never once used for the rest of the film), which introduces her and her family. However, because none of the other characters know who she is, nothing that happens in her show is at all mentioned or relevant to the events of this film. All that we learn is that Kamala has inherited a golden bangle from her grandmother, which is part of an ancient set of Kree bangles that Dar-Benn is after. 

How Kamala’s grandmother got to be in possession of one is never explained, which sucks in a movie that revolves entirely around these stupid bangles. If it’s explained in Ms. Marvel, it’s never mentioned here, and if it isn’t, then that makes the only interesting aspect to them nonexistent. 

It’s not that watching Ms. Marvel would materially change my understanding of Kamala’s character or her powers; it’s that I, as a viewer, have to gamble with my time because of Marvel’s inconsistency with its own properties, and that hurts my experience of this film. I shouldn’t have to be a superfan to be able to watch the sequel to a film I’ve already seen, just so I can understand the character relationships. It’s a bad way to go about stories, and it’s what made many people not want to see this film. 

Kamala Has Nothing to Do

Multiple times during the film, I turned to my friend and said ‘it sure would’ve been nice if we saw that!’

For the majority of the film, I felt like I was watching the sequel to a movie that doesn’t exist, but I’d rather be watching. Somewhere between Captain Marvel and now, Carol flew back to the Kree homeworld of Hala, and SINGLE HANDEDLY destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, the AI which rules and controls the Kree Empire. This plunged the Kree into a devastating civil war which depleted their resources into ruin; their sun is dying, the water has evaporated from Hala and the air is no longer breathable. 

Doesn’t that sound like a super interesting direction to take the character? Isn’t that something that would give Carol some much needed moral complexity? Maybe even examine the way in which superpowers interfere in the politics and structure of cultures they don’t understand or are a part of, leading into a cycle of violence and turmoil that is then blamed on said culture? I sure would like to see that!

Instead, this movie takes place after all the interesting things happened. Our villain isn’t Yon-Rogg, Ronan, or even Carol, but a new character who has no connection to Carol outside of just being Kree. Dar-Benn is after the bangles, because she wants to use them to open portals into other worlds and siphon their resources back to Hala. 

How is this the plan she came up with? Wouldn’t opening literal jump points into Hala’s atmosphere allow immediate access to any army that wants to attack the Kree? Not to mention there is no guarantee that the same way the resources are siphoned to Hala can’t be siphoned back to the original planet. 

But it becomes even stupider when we talk about the bangles. Dar-Benn’s meddling in the teleportation network is bad because the more jump points she creates, the more unstable the network becomes until it collapses entirely. I am completely unsure how finding both bangles would in any way prevent this from happening, or why Dar-Benn would need both bangles when she succeeds in what she sets out to do with just the one. 

I am not joking. Using just one bangle, Dar-Benn manages to get both water and air, and even starts stealing the Milky Way’s sun. Once she gets both bangles and uses them, all she does with them is open a hole in space and time which kills her, and allows a different reality to seep into ours. WHY DOES SHE WANT TO DO THIS? 

Dar-Benn’s only stated motivation for this entire film is saving Hala. Even her desire for revenge against Carol is secondary. So then why on God’s Green Earth would Dar-Benn want to a) destroy the universe in which Hala is located or b) want to kill herself and leave her people without a Supreme, and therefore once again leaderless? 

Moreover, why does she need both bangles? Even the film forgets she’s supposed to want them until about ⅔ of the way through at which point Dar-Benn learns that Kamala, the girl she’s fought with, who was on her ship, actually has the second bangle. By this point, she has already siphoned the air and the water from the other two colonies, and is able to do the same to the Earth’s sun!

Dar-Benn doesn’t need the bangles; hell, Kamala doesn’t either! It’s made pretty clear that Kamala’s powers don’t come from the bangle; she could’ve easily left it on Earth. The film tries to explain that it’s because the trio needs both to close the jump points Dar-Benn is opening, but if that’s the case, why not just leave the one Kamala has behind, and come back for it once they have the second one? Dar-Benn has no idea Kamala has it, it’s not stated or implied that the bangles can find each other, and by this point Dar-Benn has already sucked the air from the Skrulls; it's not like things can get worse!

Poor Zawe Ashton; she is having a blast with this role, but she has NOTHING to work with. Everything we know about her character is her acting the shit out of this blank slate; what’s in the script actually makes her worse. Did she know Carol before Carol destroyed Hala? Did she know Ronan? How did she learn about the bangles? Why does she think this is the best way to go about saving Hala? WHY DOES SHE ATTACK CAROL AFTER CAROL PROMISES TO RESTORE HALA’S SUN?

This terrible plot bleeds into Kamala’s character as well. It makes no sense that Kamala’s powers become entangled with Monica and Carol’s; she wasn’t touching the light energy they were. She was nowhere near either of them. Moreover, because Kamala’s only utility to the plot is her bangle, until the bangle becomes relevant, she has nothing to do. Carol and Monica don’t treat her as an equal, she is always sidelined in fights and action scenes, she isn’t involved in the personal drama between them, and she isn’t even there to provide any emotional conflict for either. 

That’s not to say that there aren’t attempts to give her a conflict; it’s just that this film is allergic to it. 

No Conflict Allowed

There’s this growing mindset in fandom that I really don’t like; I call it the Coffee Shop AU syndrome. It’s this idea that any conflict, especially between characters that are ostensibly on the same side is ALWAYS bad. That people aren’t allowed to disagree or have different ideas on how things are supposed to be run. And this movie falls for this hard. 

Kamala is the most obvious victim to this, but Carol suffers for it too. 

Kamala is Carol’s biggest fan; Carol is her idol. After they meet, Carol insists that Kamala leave behind Skrull refugees because the ship is full and they need to take off, an objectively horrible and callous thing to do, especially for someone who can fly, is super-strong, and can BREATHE IN SPACE. Kamala is hurt by this; it’s clear this act of Carol’s is shattering the image she had of her, and Carol isn’t what Kamal imagined her to be. 

It’s a very simple set up. Kamala is young and earnest, and she is there to remind Carol that Carol isn’t fighting for the vague concept of peace, but real people. Carol is there to teach Kamala that even heroes are flawed humans who make mistakes and get overwhelmed. 

The arc of this film, if you can call it that, is that Carol, can’t, shouldn’t, mustn't make decisions alone. Her insistence on solving the Kree problem by herself is what leads to the Kree’s civil war and their subsequent targeting of the Skrulls. Her insistence that she can see through the Kree’s intentions during the peace conference, and her meddling is what gives Dar-Benn the excuse to attack the Skrulls. Her repeated favoring of grand ideas instead of the actual people who have to live with these ideas are the reason she’s willing to leave refugees behind. 

Instead of the film doing anything with this,  immediately after the Skrulls are shipped off to New Asgard, Carol apologizes to Kamala for yelling and all is forgiven! The issue wasn’t that Carol yelled at Kamala, it was that she LEFT PEOPLE BEHIND TO DIE. 

You’d think that in a movie that clearly sets Kamala and Dar-Benn as ideological opposites, as two extremes to Carol’s personality, that Kamala would have a much clearer conflict with Dar-Benn. Dar-Benn loathes Captain Marvel, the Annihilator; Kamala adores Captain Marvel, the Avenger. Both see Carol as an idea instead of a person, and both represent ideas: Dar-Benn is militaristic, vengeful and selfish. Kamala is earnest, idealistic, and naive. Through their conflict, Carol is supposed to change.

Instead, Dar-Benn has no idea who Kamala is for 90% of the movie, their only interactions revolve around a fucking gold bangle, and their conflict boils down to ‘good guy punches bad guy’. 

Where in the World is Carol Danvers?

Marvel doesn’t know what to do with Carol Danvers. They can’t agree on anything about her character, which is why she’s so inconsistent over the 3 films she’s appeared in. The best version of her is still Captain Marvel; there Carol is confident, funny, and determined. She knows her abilities and her powers. Her struggle is internal; the Kree have stripped her of her memories and are trying to control her by constantly undermining her worth in a parallel to the U.S. military undermining the female pilots. Carol coming to terms with the fact that she has been lied to and used, but that she has a real home and people who love her is what allows her to come into her powers fully. 

In this sequel we learn that Carol has apparently taken all the wrong lesions from the first film. She has once again rejected her family, she is still hunting after old memories instead of building new ones with the people she loves, and she still is fighting first and thinking second. 

Like I said, this is an interesting direction for the character. Carol getting worse isn’t the issue; it’s that the film refuses to commit or develop any of these ideas.

Is Carol a flawed character who needs to grow? Or is she perfect as is, and it’s the rest of the world that needs to see her be vindicated? Objectively, deciding by yourself with no input from the people who will be the most affected by your decision, to destroy the Supreme Intelligence is a bad thing. Meddling in peace talks between the Kree and the Skrulls when neither side wants you there is a bad thing. On a personal level, running away from the people who love you and rely on you because you know they won’t approve of your actions is also a bad thing. 

Instead of dealing with this, the film contorts itself in pretzels to justify Carol at every step. Sure, Carol fucked up by killing the Supreme Intelligence, but she did what she had to! The Kree themselves are just genetically predisposed to war and destruction so much that they destroyed their own planet! Yes, Dar-Benn is objectively right to want to save her planet, but we have to make her so cartoonishly, stupidly evil, that she’s willing to make insane decisions just so she can hurt Carol. Yes, Carol did abandon Maria and Monica, but she felt bad you guys! It’s ok! 

No one is allowed to confront Carol on her bad decisions; hell outside of one single scene no one is allowed to acknowledge that Carol made bad decisions at all! Everytime the film seems like it’s going to introduce an actual conflict it undercuts itself. Kamala and Carol fight? Carol immediately apologizes. Carol puts Kamala and the rest of the universe in danger by wanting to prove that she’s a better pilot than Dar-Benn? She just felt so guilty for failing the Skrulls, she had no choice! She abandoned Monica because she was afraid Monica would hate her for being a war criminal? Guess, she was wrong, because Monica immediately forgives her! 

Because the film can’t decide what kind of character Carols is supposed to be, she’s the worst kind of character: confused, unfocused, empty. She stands for nothing and she cares about nothing. If this is how she’s being treated in her own franchise, we can’t blame the Russos for ‘running’ her in Avengers. 

Conclusion 

Yes, the film isn’t good. But that’s not the real problem. It’s that it’s a distillation of everything Marvel has been doing wrong for years, even before Endgame. It’s a movie about nothing, told through characters who serve only to dump exposition and move the plot along. It’s at moments really pretty to look at, but that just makes it worse. Seeing this many talented people working so hard to produce such a soulless, empty project, genuinely pains me. I hate that this is the bar that’s deemed acceptable to release, and I worry what it means for the future. 

Visually, the film is gorgeous. CGI has come a long way since 2009, and the attention to detail is staggering. I love everything about the Na’vi designs, from their bioluminescent skin to the way they move and their animal-like mannerisms. The new clan introduced in this film, the Metkayina look amazing, especially the way their bodies and arms are adapted to water. Likewise the designs of the tulkuns are beautiful, as these truly massive, deeply intelligent creatures. 

Generally, all the designs from the animals in the water, to the locations new and old, like the Cove of Ancestors, or the Hallelujah mountains are beautiful. The CGI combined with the film being shot and cut with 3d in mind makes the experience of watching it in the cinema worth it, even if it ends up being more of  spectacle rather than a compelling story.

While I didn’t love how Quaritch was brought back, his design was very well done. I loved how his squad still clung onto the human way of dressing, walking and hunting even in their new Na’vi bodies. There was also generally a better integration of the characters who were meant to be humans in Na’vi bodies into said Na’vi bodies; in the first film both Jake and Grace looked very close to the uncanny valley, especially their faces. This film avoids that; Jake and Quaritch look a lot better. Kiri is the only character who sometimes looks awkward which is ironic because her face is the one on all the posters. 

Now let’s get into some gripes. 

The first one is the plot. There isn’t one. This film is 3 hours and 15 minutes of vibes. Stuff happens, but one cannot call it a plot, since there’s no real progression of events or even a heightening of tension. To explain this I will have to go into SPOILERS, so if for some reason you don’t want this film spoiled, skip this section. 

The film starts with Quaritch and his squad waking up in Na’vi bodies. In the last film, supposedly, they gave their DNA and memories to scientists on Earth who have somehow fused them (?) with Na’vi DNA and now they are all Na’vi. The new squad remembers everything the OG people remembered up until the point where they handed off their DN, but they are not actually those people. 

Here we run into problem nb. 1: why would Quaritch, a man who was so racist and hostile to the Na’vi, so determined to exterminate them from Hometree by any means necessary, so dedicated to the survival of the humans, agree to give his DNA to this type of project? And if this new Quaritch has enough of the OG’s memories and personality, so much so that he cares about Spider enough to risk his life to save him twice (we’ll talk about Spider later) why isn’t he more conflicted about this? 

General Ardmore (Edie Falco) tells the Na’vi squad that their mission is to find and kill Jake Sully because apparently he’s what’s stopping them from relocating the Na’vi and terraforming Pandora. I don’t understand how Jake’s guerilla strikes are doing any damage to the insane amount of military power these humans have, especially because in the first film, the humans on Pandora had been there for years, and had one base. Here, they have a massive compound and have made rail tracks into the forest and spread all the way into the ocean. How would Jake, even with his successful attacks stop them?  

Quaritch is the luckiest man in this movie, because Jake’s kids chose this very moment to explore so both groups end up at the compound where Jake and Neytiri killed OG Quaritch. Jake has 3 kids with Neytiri: Neteyam, Lo’ak and Tuk, and he has also adopted Kiri who is Grace’s daughter, born out of her avatar body after Grace died. Jake also semi-adopted Spider, who is in fact Quaritch’s son. Spider was born before Quaritch died, but because he was a child, he got stranded on Pandora since he couldn’t be put in a cryopod. 

The two groups fight and eventually Quaritch captures Spider. Afraid that Spider would betray their location (and not even once considering rescuing him from his deadly enemy) Jake decides to quite literary ABANDON the Na’vi and even worse, force Neytiri, their literal Tsahik and LEADER to abandon them as well, under the excuse that Quaritch would come for them and put the clan in danger. 

I have NO idea why suddenly now Jake is afraid of Quaritch; he doesn’t know about the terraforming plan and he killed Quaritch once before, and that was before he was even fully Na’vi. What’s so different about Quaritch now that makes him more of a threat? He doesn’t have an army, he has a squad of 10 people!  

So at this point, one might assume that Jake’s kids would maybe rebel and go after Spider? Nope, Spider is entirely forgotten about; Kiri mentions him once. 

Ok, maybe Jake realizes that he can’t run from the war and must convince the new clan he’s hidden himself among into helping him win the war? Wrong. Jake actually is the one who convices the Metkayina not to fight, which leads to Quaritch capturing the leaders’ children. 

So what is the plot? Well, there isn’t one. After Jake and co arrive at the Metkayina village, he and Neytiri drop out of the film and we follow the kids learning to swim, breathe, ride, speak and hunt underwater, for 2 hours. 

In those 2 hours we are introduced to a dozen subplots which either lead nowhere or grind the film to a halt. I am not kidding when I say that most of this film felt like a Fallout 4 playthrough; sure I am in a rush to find and save my kidnapped child, but why don’t I spend several hours doing side-quests in Boston harbor or customize my settlement?

What doesn’t help is that none of the new characters are interesting, entertaining or at all developed. The two new adults we have are Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet), the leaders of the Metikayina clan. They have a collective 15 minutes of screentime as stock characters: Ronal is feisty and doesn’t trust outsiders and Tonowari is strict, wise and good at fighting. That’s about it.  

For the kids we get Tsireya, Aonung and Rotxo. Tsireya is the beautiful princess who falls in love with one of the outsiders, in this case Lo’ak, and the one who is kindest and most easily charmed by the newcomers. She is actually the best character out of the 3, because the 2 boys are interchangeable; they are both assholes, and are both mean to the Sully kids, especially Aonung who takes it to a whole new level by literally trying to murder Lo’ak and leaving him stranded in a bay full of dangerous, carnivorous fish.

Jake’s kids fare no better: Tuk is an annoying cold who only serves to tag along and needs constant rescuing; she could be replaced by a lamp and nothing would change. Neteyam is the older brother who is Jake’ favorite and supposedly perfect. He has no personality and serves to take the fall for every stupid thing Lo’ak does, and dies. I would call him the Boromir of the group, but that would be a huge insult to Boromoir. Lo’ak for his part is extremely stupid, annoying and whiny. He has a strained relationship with Jake which could be half-interesting if the film ever actually committed to exploring it. 

As it stands, Jake comes off as a wildly incompetent and abusive father, but Lo’ak consistently makes every wrong decision ever, in order to justify Jake’s abuse. 

The only remotely interesting characters are weirdly, Kiri and Spider. Kiri is interesting because no one knows who her father is or how she was born; she also seems to have a very strong connection to Eywa; she can hear her, she can control nature, she can breathe underwater longer than anyone else, and sometimes goes in a trance that seems to be caused by Eywa. At one point, while bonding with Metkayina's version of the Tree of Souls, she manages to speak to Grace, but before we get any answers, she suffers some kind of stroke. The film seems to suggest she has epilepsy (?) but it never follows up on it, adding it to the list of dropped plot points. 

Spider is similarly interesting because he’s a human raised by the Na’vi. He ends up developing a relationship with Quaritch, seeing him as a second chance to have a father. Quaritch for his part also cares for Spider and takes his advice, and later his please seriously. The issue with Spider is that the film tries to have him teach Quaritch’s group how to become Na’vi, and suggests that he’s bonded with them, and might actually betray the Sullys. However, Spider never once falters in his beliefs; even at the very end when Neytiri quite literary threatens to kill him, and actually hurts him, his sole priority is saving Kiri, so at no point did I or anyone believe he would turn to Quaritch, especially because what Quaritch is doing is so painfully, obviously wrong. 

About 2 hours in, the film introduces more characters and a subplot that turns into the main plot. In the first film, the human mission on Pandora was to mine unobtainium. The reason they wanted the Na’vi to move was because Hometree was on top of the largest quantity of the metal on Pandora. This film never once mentions unobtainium; instead there’s a new Mcguffin, which is the fluid extracted from tulkuns which stops aging in humans. I don’t need to explain how bad on a story level this is; instead I think they should just invent a new expensive thing that the humans are after in each subsequent film, and pretend like the previous things were never mentioned. 

The way the substance is extracted is by elaborate tulkun hunting, which Quaritch uses to lure Jake out after torching Na’vi villages along the coast didn’t do the trick. 

In one of the many subplots, Lo’ak, as mentioned, is stranded by Aonung. A banished tulkun, Payakan saves him and befriends him. Because Payakan is banished, when Jake tells the Metkayina to send the tulkun away, to save them from Quaritch, Payakan doesn’t know so he gets tagged by the hunters. In incredible dramatic irony, Quaritch once again captures the kids and forces Jake to come out of hiding. 

There is a very stupid fight between Jake and Quaritch, during which all of Quaritch’s squid and Neteyem die, and the fight ends in a stalemate as Lo’ak saves Jake and Spider saves Quaritch. 

In the end Jake realizes what he should’ve known from the start, BEFORE a bunch of Na’vi, including his son died for NOTHING, which is that no place is safe while the humans are on Pandora. Except this film can’t even do that right, because in the end it’s not like Jake returns to the Forest with Metkayina reinforcements. 

Once again, it makes NO sense that Jake a) ran and b) actually believed that Quaritch wouldn’t find him or wouldn’t hurt his kids to get to him. Moreover the fact that Neytiri, THE best hunters on Pandora, and literal leader of the Na’vi agreed to let Jake do this is ridiculous. She already killed Quaritch! She is able to destroy whole planes with one arrow! 

Moreover, if Jake ran because he was worried Spider would be used by Quaritch to find him, why wouldn’t he try and save him? 

The thing that really gets me is that the film is on Jake’s side. No one ever stands up to him, and even when people challenge him, the movie contorts itself to somehow make him right in the end. How do you take a character whose whole motivation was that he was the chosen one, who changed into a different alien race to protect the people he met, the people he was so devoted to he LITERARY died for them, and makes him a coward that selfishly runs and hides? And for what? Because the man who he already killed once is back? 

Jake Sully deserves better than this. His arc in the first film was so simple, yet so effective; he was self-involved, he was reckless, he was selfish, and he learned how to become a leader, he sacrificed everything to help right the wrong he recognized humans were doing. 

This film takes that character and downgrades him back to being selfish and self-involved, and worse, makes him a coward. Jake Sully from 13 years ago would never use civilians as a shield between him and Quritch. The Jake who learned what Hometree means, and why the Na’vi have to fight, and can’t just move, would never tell the Metkayina to send their tulkun away. And worse, this time the movie thinks he’s right. 

The Way of Water is a case study in how not to make a sequel. It retreads the original, but it also devalues it. Watching it made me yearn for the simple yet competent storytelling of the first. This is just a mess. 

We open with a cutscene of a woman stepping out of a mirror to look over a ball. She is searching for a Cinderella, a maiden of pure heart, and she thinks she’s found it in the form of Cyrilla. At the stroke of midnight, the poor girl turns to glass and her sister disappears in the crowd. 

You arrive that same night, in a palace in Italy. Your mission is to find and protect Cyrilla’s stepsister Katherine from this evil Godmother and figure out how to stop her. As soon as you enter the castle you see the Godmother poofing in and out of existence and in the yard, you see a second glass maiden. Before you can help her, a massive, wooden Golem grabs her, and she disappears. 

Inside the palace you find yet another glass maiden who gets kidnapped, as well as Katherine herself. She tells you she saw the Godmother go through the mirror and wants to go after her. You find a balcony that overlooks the ballroom, from which the Godmother had been spying on the dancers. She also has a dressing room where we find something new for this game: small figurines of the previous Cinderellas. 

In this version of the tale, Cinderellas are magical girls who are pure of heart and soul. They are born every few decades, all over the world, which is a neat way of explaining why so many disparate cultures have a version of this very fairytale. The dressing room has Agnes Koch, the second Cinderella, who, we later learn, is the Cinderella who married the Frog Prince, James. 

With Katherine’s help, you activate the mirror. The Godmother grabs Katherine who tosses her purse to you, with all the clues she found, including a map of the gardens, and poisonous smoke, as well as the Golem knock you out of the ballroom. 

Outside you can unlock the garden gate and find the Golem searching for someone. You also find the carriage that the first Cinderella, Ella Bloom, used to get to the ball, as well as an explanation of the 6 traits a girl must have to be a Cinderella. 

One thing I will give this game props for is that it doesn’t rely on the parables to tell the story, like TRRHS did. The story of the Godmother, handmaidens and the Maiden Goddess are much more organically woven into the plot, and you can figure out exactly what happened without having to collect and read the parables. 

Once you complete the mural in the garden you find Pinocchio cowering from the Golem. You use a crossbow with a javelin you set on fire to chase the Golem away. Pinocchio tells you to use the mirror in the fallen tree to enter the dream realm, which is where the Godmother has taken Katherine. 

Inside the mirror world, we find the skeletal remnants of a pirate crew who were all executed for attempting to steal the piles of treasure littering the world. We also see Katherine trapped in a tree. She reacts strangely when we set her free, not at all like the Katherine we met in the castle, which brings me to my main gripe here. 

In TRRHS, I will admit, the first time I played the game, I didn’t realize Eldra was the Wolf Queen so her betraying me and taking Ruth was genuinely surprising. On replay, it’s pretty telegraphed, but still, it did get me the first time. 

Here, this Katherine acts nothing like the Katherine you met; you immediately can tell something is wrong, and yet the game forces you to be stupid, and go along with the deception. You HAVE to hand her the glass slippers, or you can’t progress. I’d buy this in a roleplaying sense, but even there, it just makes the Detective character dense as a brick, if she’s so easily fooled. 

Regardless, Katherine gives you a series of tasks that require you to find a pair of glass slippers. During all this you get separated from Pinocchio and are surprised to see the inert Golem, as well as a grove full of corrupt logs and branches blocking your way. 

Katherine takes you to the glass wasteland, where you find dozens of girls, all turned to glass. You give ‘Katherine’ the shoes like a dumbass, and she turns into a puppet and drugs you. You wake up in a wooden cottage with Pinocchio, who lies that he has no idea who the Godmother is. 

Inside the cottage you realize that Geppetto was the Godmother’s husband and Pinocchio's father. He has become consumed with trying to create a doll just like Pinocchio and has died; the Godmother blames Pinocchio for his death. You find a letter that apparently psychic Geppetto wrote to Pinocchio, telling him his death wasn’t Pinocchio's fault and Pinocchio agrees to let you out of the cottage and save Katherine. 

You sneak into the castle where you learn that Geppetto has gone mad; he is trying to raise an army of puppets and take over the world, going so far as to create a puppet assembly line. The visuals are quite creepy, as we see discarded dolls hanging on hooks and a giant incinerator burning them. Inside the workshop we also learn that Pinocchio has a built-in Cinderella detector, which mimics the Godmothers’ soul detectors and tracks down Cinderellas. 

Each Godmother has a different type of magic, and Amelia, the Godmother’s, is clothes. She tricked Katherine and Cyrilla into coming to the ball, by gifting them new clothes. Kathrine was saved from becoming glass, because their uncle stole Cyrilla’s clothes and Katherine gave her her own. 

On the tower roof, Pinocchio runs to free the bound Katherine, only for his heart to glow. Amelia appears yet again, throws Pinocchio through a hole in the roof, ignoring his pleas to stop her madness. She blocks your way with crystals, which leaves enough time to see a life-like doll of Geppetto lying in a tomb next to the crystals. 

Once you break the crystal you get to see Katherine turn to glass, and her soul be swapped for Geppetto’s. The doll of him awakes and he steals Amelia’s soul detector, Without the gem, Amelia is weakened, and we follow her to her sewing room and back to the ballroom, as Geppetto sends his army of puppets after us. 

Inside the ballroom Cyrilla wakes up and gives you a bowtie, while asking you to save Katherine. You enter another balcony where you find more puppets which Amelia used to spy on the girls at the dances. In her changing room, she has hidden herself in her wardrobe and before she dies, she tells the Detective to find the magic wand and stop Geppetto. 

This series has always tried to redeem the villains in their games, and I’d say for Snow and James specifically, has done a decent job. Eldra never really got redeemed, more like she just died, but here, I hate how the game tries to redeem Amelia. 

She was so in love with Geppetto and so desperate to bring him back that even though she’s a centuries old magical person, she was wilfully blinded by what she was doing in killing girls to find the right Cinderella. She also HATES Pinocchio; she blames him for Geppetto’s death (even though it was Geppetto’s own idiocy that got him killed, and it was Amelia herself that brought him the wood from the Sacred Grove). Even when she’s dying and no longer under evil Geppetto's influence, she shows no concern for her son, and I simply hate that. 

You set off to the gardens yet again, where you open the Maiden Goddess temple and find Pinocchio. He is determined to save Katherine, and you indeed find the glass wand there, as well as an explanation as to who Godmother is, and how she lost it. 

The Maiden Goddess picks a handmaiden, a magical helper for the Cinderellas, and when one dies, another one inherits the mantle. Amelia is the latest and final Godmother, because once the Maiden Goddess saw how evil Amelia had become, she refused to anoint another. Like I already explained, Amelia was desperate to get Geppetto back after he was killed by the villagers. The reason he was killed, was because Geppetto, in an attempt to make another Pinocchio, spent too much time in the Sacred Grove, an got possessed by the souls of the murdered pirates. He then started raising his army of sentient puppets, and built Pinocchio a giant, dangerous Golem. So, what I’m saying is, the villagers had valid reasons to be afraid of him, and no, Pinocchio did nothing to him. 

Armed with this mess, you find a way to the pumpkin carriage and head back to the mirror world. Inside, Geppetto sends more puppets after you, and you realize the only way to defeat him is to burn down all the trees. One of the areas in the Grove you find is a beanstalk leading up into the heavens, a hint to the next game. 

You set the grove on fire, and with it, so dies Pinocchio, since he was made from the same wood. You race back to the tower, defeat the Golem with an insultingly simple puzzle and then kill the Puppet master with the glass wand. Geppetto’s spirit, purged of the pirate influence, questions what he’s done, and then Amelia shows up comforting him that everything turned out fine in the end. LADY, YOU ALMOST KILLED ME 3 TIMES. What do you mean everything turned out fine? 

Katherine, no longer a glass statue, brings Pinocchio and Amelia and Geppetto use their souls to revive Pinocchio, Star Wars style and he turns into a real boy. The best (best, derogatory) part of the game is that much like Anakin, even though Pinocchio appears to be about 10 and Katherine at least 16, she agrees to take care of him, and in the epilogue, they are shown to be a couple. What? 

I don’t like this game, if you couldn’t tell. There are good parts. Like always, I love the clothes, designs and art direction. I like the collectable element of dressing the other 4 Cinderellas, I liked some of the locations, and the idea that the pirates’ souls corrupted the trees in the grove with their hatred. 

However, the Puppet master Geppetto twist, Amelia’s entire motivation being not just reviewing her evil dead husband, but then being surprised that he’s evil, I hated. I hated the evil-Katherine bit, I found Pinocchio rather annoying, an especially pale comparison to Kay or Gerda, and found myself not caring about any of the characters or what happened. Hell, the two things I was most excited for were the Crooked Man and the Crooked Cat stinger and the teaser for the next game!

Like the previous 2 games, there is no secret room or bonus for playing on hardmode, so let’s talk about the bonus adventure. 

Bonus Game: The Oriental Cinderella

That title. Yikes. 

I didn’t think racial politics would become a part of this retrospective, but here we are. For what is worth, Blue Tea is a Hong Kong-based studio, and I sure won’t police them on what they will call a Chinese variant of Cinderella, but still.  

In this bonus game we play as a prince who has come to marry Princess Shan Mao. Shan is a Cinderella, but she has been kidnapped by her stepsister Chi, who wants you, the prince for herself. In the parable it’s explained that she’s the daughter of a powerful spider witch and you are part of a powerful Tang dynasty who knows the secret to immortality, but in the game, I guess you are just that hot. 

You head to Shan’s grandmother’s house, except it’s not really her grandmother; it’s Amelia, Shan’s godmother. She tells you that if you want to marry Shan you must save her (I’d like to think Amelia is just messing with you and could kill Chi with a finger snap), and to do that you first have to find Shan. You end up finding Geppetto instead, wrapped in a web, and after freeing him, he tells you he has created a fan that could extinguish the eternal lava river that leads to the Blazing Mountain. 

You find the fan and Amelia beats you to the mountain, where Shan, turned into a kitsune, is trapped in a cage. You end up having to face Chi, who is now a spider-human hybrid and to do so you have to forge a sacred sword. So, you let Shan free, you forge the sword, and you kill Chi, and Amelia and Geppetto get married. Hooray. 

There is nothing wrong with this bonus story, but it’s just not very good. I was hyped to play a Chinese version of Cinderella, but it’s just the regular version with spiders. It’s almost shocking to me that an Asian studio would be better at retelling the European versions of fairytales than their own, and yet here we are. 

The only funny thing about this tale was realizing that Amelia’s house is literally just Geppetto’s cottage painted red. 

Overall, I would genuinely say that out of the 7 Blue Tea games, this one is my least favourite, rivalling for the last spot with CoBR. Luckily, things pick up with the next game, which is:

Jack and the Sky Kingdom

So let’s get into it. Our opening cutscene shows a little girl being chased by wolves. She gets saved by a Red Riding Hood Sister, Theresa. Before the girl’s eyes, the Wolf Queen appears and slashes Theresa across the back. 

You start the game 3 days later in France. You are sent to investigate who the Wolf Queen is and how to stop her; to assist you this time, are the Red Riding Hood Sisters who guard the forest. Immediately, a wolf attacks you, and no sooner have you gotten up, you are attacked again, but saved by Ruth. 

Now look, I don’t want to harp on Ruth too much. She has a neat design, and a really good voice actress, but her character is legitimately the most incompetent person in these games, and that’s saying something when you’re playing a character who gets captured about 8 times per game. Nothing she does ever goes well for anyone, and in this game alone she needs to be rescued twice. Her introduction is her failing to kill the wolf and getting poisoned so YOU have to find her an antidote. 

The antidote needs moonflower, which you learned in the previous game, is a rare, gentle, flower that blooms in moonlight. You have to fandangle some branches to get it to bloom. There is a really good moment here, as you run around the forest, Ruth gets progressively weaker and sicker, putting pressure on you to get the flower faster. 

Once Ruth is cured, she’ll give you a key to the Sisters’ hideout, which is at the top of a hollow tree. 

The hideout was built by the Hunter, who saved the first Red Riding Hood, Isabela from a wolf attack that killed her grandmother. Isabella decided to train with the Huntsman and after he was killed (also by wolves) she started training other orphan girls to become Sisters themselves and protect the forest and the surrounding region. 

Ruth takes you inside the hideout, explaining that she was scouting the forest looking for the wolves, which is why she is as shocked as you are to find the hideout destroyed and the sisters gone. 

This is where we get to my first big pet peeve of the game. This series is light on the gameplay; that’s why the genre is called casual game. You mostly solve puzzles and even the very brief and generously titled ‘combat’ scenes are disguised puzzles. So obviously, you don’t need the NPCs to do much. The way RotSQ got around this was by having most of the NPCs be children, and the only adult character keeps dropping in and out of the game, handing you objects to help you when he’s there. The kids helped, sure, but they mostly hid, and let you, the adult, deal with the threats. 

Here, Ruth and all the other Sisters are trained hunters; even the non-Sister character Rafael is the last surviving member of a long line of master hunters. And yet, as soon as Ruth sees that the hideout has been attacked she tells you, the Detective, to go around and search for clues while she waits for you. She doesn’t come with you, she just stands in one room, waiting for you to do all the work. 

When you met her, she at least had the excuse of being poisoned, but here, she’s completely healthy, yet you have to be the one who talks to the Mirror, you have to collect all the orbs, you have to venture into the Mist Kingdom BY YOURSELF, and Ruth just waits. They don’t even give her a lame excuse like oh, there must always be a Sister in the hideout, she’s just like, K, here’s a cape, go fight some wolves. 

So, winging notwithstanding, you explore the hideout and learn more about the sisters. Theresa, the sister you saw at the start was the Eldest Sister; the leader of the Order. She was tied neck in neck with her friend, Eldra, according to the scoreboards. You also find out that the Truth Mirror is in the possession of the sisters, because Snow White gave it to them as a gift for saving her son from a wolf attack. 

I presume Snow had done this before Gwyn was injured, since the statue they have of him appears to be the same age as Gwyn when you rescue him, which is kind of ironic; James’ guards must’ve been the most incompetent in this universe and Gwyn the unluckiest prince if he was almost killed by wolves, TWICE. 

The Mirror tells you that the same time you were attacked, the Wolf Queen appeared in the hideout via some kind of portal and kidnapped all the sisters. She took them to the Mist Kingdom, which is a fabled Kingdom that hasn’t been seen for centuries (5 centuries as we later learn). Ruth explains that the Kingdom appears when there is a moon phase, and the orb we have been carrying around can be used to activate a machine the Moon Goddess left to the Sisters to call the Kingdom from the lake in which it has been sunk. 

So I have a question. How in hell can the characters breathe underwater? The Wolf Queen and the Wolf King, fine, but Eldra? Rafael? The kidnapped sisters? Also, speaking of, if you have the orb and the sisters didn’t, how did Eldra or Rafael get inside the Kingdom? 

You call upon the Kingdom from the lake and go in. You immediately see a man watching you, but before you can follow him, you see the wolves take the sisters inside the castle and raise the moat. You end up going to the town square; all the citizens seem to have perished at once, and judging by the goodbye note you find in a sculptor’s workshop, in an agonizing wolf attack. 

In the townhall you end up meeting Rafael. He asks you who you are since you aren’t a Sister, but you are wearing a Sister’s robe (Ruth gives it to you so the wolves can’t track your scent). He explains that he has been searching for his friend Eldra who too was a Sister but has been gone inside the Mist Kingdom for years. He agrees to help you translate a cypher that can bring the moat down, since his family was originally from the Mist Kingdom. 

Inside the castle grounds, Rafael leaves you to find the other sisters, while he looks for Eldra. 

Rafael is a mixed bag. At first I was put off by his unnecessary hostility, and I also didn’t understand why he wasn’t more useful; outside of killing a wolf (which you have to find an arrow for) and translating the cypher he really doesn’t do anything. He has potential; he’s the last member of a long dead, but proud family, his family protected the royal house and monarch which led to the Mist Kingdom’s demise, he lost his best friend. He has reasons to be glib, but he’s just not interesting enough for me to care. 

You find the sisters in the prison, but Jessica tells you they are too weak to go through the gate; they will definitely attract attention. She tells you there is  a way to open a portal right next to the hideout. You soon find the fountain through which you can open the portal and also Theresa's dead body. 

I have to say, when I first played this game, finding Theresa shook me. This series has done death before, but never like this. The thief isn’t a named PoV character, but Theresa is; we saw the opening through her eyes. She’s succumbed to the poison, but has left you a recipe on opening the portal. You follow it and right before you close the portal, Rafael and Eldra come through. 

Eldra tells you that she had been captured and tortured by the Wolf Queen. Ruth mentions a moon temple in the woods that the Elder Sister had access to. You find it and learn about the moon prism you have been carrying. 

The Moon Goddess left mankind 7 moonstones with which they can control the length of night. However, if the 7 moonstones are joined they can plunge the world into eternal darkness. You find a moon prism in the temple, and shockingly, shady Eldra is in fact the Wolf Queen and steals it. Rafael and Ruth attack her, but ofc, Ruth is useless and gets captured, just as you get reinforcements; Briar Rose herself who has now become a Sister. 

Her vines destroy several of the wolves, but Eldra easily stops them from harming her and takes Ruth. Once again, you, the Detective, have to bring the last stone to the Kingdom if you want to see her alive. 

Rafael is shocked that Eldra would betray him (which, uh, she didn’t. She betrayed her sisters, and he isn’t one) and Briar Rose tells you to find the Centaur Bow, which can destroy the Queen. So off you go, into the Mist Kingdom again, this time alone. You find the anvil to forge the bow in the chapel, and test it on a guard wolf in the castle. 

This is a good time to talk about why this game is so underwhelming for me. If you haven’t been paying attention, I talked about 3 separate characters who are all full of potential. I already covered Rafael, but we also have Eldra and Theresa. As we find out in the castle, Eldra and Theresa were childhood friends, who always had a friendly rivalry, until it became clear that Theresa was going to be the Elder Sister. To prove herself, Eldra went into the Mist Kingdom alone and killed the Wolf King, but before she could destroy his talisman it possessed her, using her ambitions and insecurities against her, turning her into the Wolf Queen. But unlike in RotSQ or even TEP, we don’t learn any of this organically, through dialogue or even notes in the world. We learn this through the parables, which once again, are optional, collector pieces. 

What we have instead is a truly uninteresting focus on the Mist Kingdom and the Greedy King who brought the Wolf King into the world. This is absolutely not the interesting part of this story; the King was rich and greedy, and he wanted more loot. The only semi-notable part of this story is the Queen’s chamber, where we see the Queen herself, locked inside, lying on her bed, alone, dead and miserable. The fact that Eldra slept in that room and never considered like… moving the Queen’s skeleton is quite disconcerting. 

Inside the castle we get many hints about the next game: Cinderella. Like RotSQ this game doesn’t have a secret room on hardmode, nor the really clever tie-in like CoBR or TEP did; it’s just a carriage and a glass slipper and I’m still not sure how they ended up in the Greedy King’s treasury. 

Eventually, you end up lifting the barrier from the throne room, and through the portal you enter the Wolf King’s realm. It’s beautiful and entirely magical, like the mirror realm in RotSQ, and you find Ruth held in a cage. As soon as you free her, Eldra appears and steals the moonstone (WHY WOULD YOU BRING IT WITH YOU??) and all the sisters gather for one last stand. 

The final puzzle requires you to move bridges to shoot wolves according to colour, and then we get an unnecessarily flashy action cutscene during which the wolves clash with the Sisters, and before you can shoot Eldra with the bow, a wolf knocks you out. Raphael takes the bow and shoots the prism from Eldra’s hand and the world starts collapsing. 

For whatever dumb reason, Eldra can’t simply escape with the others, even though she isn’t wounded, and for an even stupider reason, Rafael decides to stay with her. If I had a better grasp on these two’s relationship, like if Rafael felt guilty that he didn’t succeed in finding Eldra before she was cursed, or if he reciprocated her romantic feelings, this scene might have had an impact. As is, when Eldra says I’m glad you are here with me, all I could do was scream “you mean you’re glad he’s pointlessly dying with you even though you both have functioning legs?? Fuck you, lady!”

The game ends with Ruth getting elected as the new Elder Sister (WHY, when she’s so BAD at this) and the sisters deciding to adopt some wolf pups to raise them as allies rather than enemies. 

Bonus Game: The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Weirdly enough, this bonus level made me care about the Mist Kingdom even less than I did in the main game, and it takes place on the day the Kingdom was destroyed. It’s a twist on the boy who cried wolf, but it’s a weak one. At no point in this game does the moral make sense, since the kid you play as could have been the most obedient child in the world, who never lied and the Mist Kingdom would have still been destroyed. 

We start with the dad locking his son in the basement for playing pranks on the villagers. When you open the trap door, you see your father passing out from being beaten by the King’s knights for not disclosing the location of the wolf talisman. The father asks you to get help and you set off, using a secret passage behind a shelf to get out. 

I find it imminently hilarious that this child lives next to a witch and has just never noticed, but he sees a mermaid trapped in a pond in the witch’s yard.  The mermaid promises to help you if you set her free, so you do. At the same time, to distract the guards from your house, you blow a hole in the King’s palace, and free a griffin.

You use the orb the mermaid gave you to knock the guard out and then make a potion to rouse your father, but as soon as you do, the King returns and demands you give the talisman over. You can’t, since the talisman has bonded to you, so the King kidnaps both of you to get you to open the portal. As you do, your father apologizes for being an absent father. The wolves attack, and kill the King, while the griffin swoops in, saves you and your father and you watch the Mist Kingdom disappear into the lake. 

Much like Hansel and Gretel, this level is fine, but not very memorable. The character you play is cute; he’s funny and also has the same questions I do, like how is the mermaid going to escape from a pond. The King is as uninteresting as a villain as he was in the base game, and I do not care at all about the ‘absent’ dad.

I feel like had I not replayed RotSQ and this back to back, I would have been kinder to this game. It still has gorgeous art direction and puzzles, and in this one especially, they really did their best to have different models for at least 5 of the sisters. But I think the money that they spent on the 2 action cutscenes would have been better spent on shorter scenes fleshing out the trio of Rafael, Eldra and Ruth, and on crafting a tighter story. The Mist Kingdom is just an accidental backdrop; nothing about its history is actually relevant to the present story, the wolves could’ve attacked from anywhere and the end result would’ve been the same. Ironically, by making the Detective a more active player in the story, the Sisters suffer because they end up being superfluous or just incompetent, when you alone have to do all the work. 

It’s a case of too much and not enough; too many disparate ideas, and not enough focus. 4 games in, and we are already recycling things, like having Briar Rose appear, having Gwyn and the Truth Mirror as part of Red Riding Hood lore, and having yet another villain controlled by an evil artefact. 

Unfortunately, the next instalment makes most of these missteps, even more. 

The Final Cinderella

I both think that Snow White is the most complex and interesting character, and that this is the best best written story in the series. It’s an emotional and dark tale, while also tying in with the previous game. It also has the most satisfying ending. It’s also the only game in this series where the exploration and puzzle solving really are designed so that you slowly piece together what is happening in the castle. There is no Briar or Ivy telling you to go to a specific part or find a specific thing; everything you learn you learn organically from exploring the castle, and even when the other characters give you information, they have gotten it from the same clues you have. 

Speaking of characters, this is the first game that has proper NPCs. Marie and the bodyguard did exist, but here, the characters are present throughout the whole investigation, and actually contribute to your quest. Unlike Briar Rose or Marie who you had to rescue, Kay, Gerda and Noah are proactive members of this tale, and even the other children we meet impart information or clues. It made this world feel so much more realized now that we know other people live in it, and when we have characters we care about at stake. 

So let’s get into it. Like before, the game starts with a cutscene, this one of two children playing in the snow. The Snow Queen appears before them, and hypnotizes them with a golden apple; a moment later a beast takes them away. 

Once again, you are the fabled Fairytale Detective, this time traveling to the Mountain or Snowfall Kingdom in Switzerland. During a snowstorm, all the children from the nearby villages have disappeared. Your guide, Noah, takes you to the gates of what was once the Mountain Kingdom, and asks you to find his son Kay who has also disappeared, giving you a photograph of him.

The first thing you find is an envoy from the Underground Kingdom, (before it was, you know, underground). James has sent his soldiers to capture the Snow Queen, but the soldiers were ambushed and killed. I wonder if James knew at this point who the Snow Queen was, but even if he didn’t, I really like this detail. It shows us that James was willing to fight to get his child back and hadn’t just given up on him. 

Inside the castle, you see statues of the Queen and the Mountain King. This is odd, since the Queen isn’t exactly a positive figure for the locals. You also see a blonde child running around the castle grounds. She leads you to a crypt where you find 2 children who warn you that there is a beast around, and the other children are in the palace. You also see a memorial to a young Prince, seemingly, Snow Queen’s child. 

The beast is indeed watching you, and after you find a piece of an emblem that can get you inside the palace, he creates a snow wolf to keep you away. Defeating the wolf nets you an ice stone, which is going to be rather useful. Sidenote, if you thought James was a dick for letting you die in the caves, the beast tries to kill you 3 separate times, one of which involves putting you in a freezing cell with an already dead body. 

Inside the palace you follow a soft humming to the Snow Queen who has found Kay. She sees you, and erects a wall of ice, preventing you from reaching Kay. While looking for a way to the Queen, you run into the blonde child again, whose name is Gerda. She is Kay’s friend; when the Queen took all the children she hid, and has been trying to rescue him. She tells you she can sense magic radiating through a door, which requires a golden apple to unlock.

Looking for the apple takes you to the astronomy room, where you find a statue of the beast which morphs back into the Mountain King, as well as, many tomes on something called the Silver Moon which happened to coincide with the children’s disappearance. 

You find said apple, and just as Gerda tells you she has figured out how to tell when the beast is close (the air becomes warmer), she gets taken. Inside the room you find a golden tree, full of apples. Eating a golden apple puts the person under a trance during which they don’t remember what they did, and the Snow Queen has been feeding the apples to the children, trying to find a Golden Child. 

A Golden Child is blessed with the ability to be immune to all magic, and lift curses and charms with their tears. Their powers manifest during a Silver Moon, and the Snow Queen has been trying to find one for centuries. Just thinking about how many children have died in her search is a somber thought. 

In the workshop you find notes on a balcony the King requested be made for the Queen, that can only be opened by a pendant. You use it and witness Gerda push the apple away from Kay. The apple reverts back to being ordinary; Gerda is the Golden Child, not Kay. The Snow Queen grabs Gerda, while the beast knocks the detective out. 

You wake up in a cell, next to the previously mentioned dead body. Remember that ice stone? This is where you use it to escape, but not before you learn from your jail mate that the False Mirror is responsible for turning Snow White into the Snow Queen, and the King into a beast. If you have been reading the notes and paying attention, you already know that the King has ordered the real False Mirror be hidden in the treasury (there is a replica in the workshop). The False Mirror reflects and amplifies the worst qualities of the person; even its own creator was afraid of its power. 

Armed with this knowledge, you find the treasury and where the kids are being held, locked in an ice cage. A girl tells you the Queen has Gerda, and Kay has escaped yet again. He is actually hiding in the vault, and you manage to activate a portal that takes you to the edge of the Kingdom. 

Kay tells you that he stole a pendant from the Queen; he thinks it has to do with the crypt. Noah promises to return with supplies and rescue the kids, while you go explore. Inside the crypt you find the sleeping body of Snow White and the Frog Prince’s son, Prince Gwyn. 

The following is more or less the story of how we got here: Snow White was the daughter of the Mountain King. Her father married the Wicked Queen and bought the Truth Mirror as a gift. The Mirror showed the Queen that Snow White was the fairest and the Queen cursed her. Prince James saved Snow White from the curse and took her to his Underground Kingdom, while the Wicked Queen, cursed herself, escaped. 

James and Snow had a son, Prince Gwyn. One day while playing, Gwyn was attacked by a monster, and James’ guards weren’t fast enough to save him. On the brink of death, Snow White fed him a golden apple, placing him in eternal slumber, neither dead nor alive. No one James called could help the child, and blaming him for his fate, Snow White took him and stole away, back to the Mountain Kingdom. The King, already feeling guilt over failing to protect Snow once, tried his best to help Gwyn, but couldn’t. Whether James altered his curse in an attempt to save his son, or Snow White herself cursed him, is unclear. 

Desperate, Snow White heard about the False Mirror, the Truth Mirror’s twin and found it. The mirror, using her desperation, tricked her into wearing a shard, and giving her father one which cursed both, reflecting their worst qualities: overwhelming grief and cold in Snow and rage in the King. The Kingdom fell apart, the King murdering his council after they tried to execute Snow, his  most loyal of soldiers freezing to death, and the rest of the subjects escaping. The Mirror told Snow White that to get Gwyn back, she needs to fix it, and the only thing that could fix it is the tear of the Golden Child. The Mirror’s real intention is to reflect her grief and despair onto the world, plunging it into an eternal, frigid winter, as revenge for being locked away. 

Noah returns and tells you to use a headlight on the watchtower to show him where the children are being held. Again you are attacked by the beast, and you use the tower bell to shatter the mirror shard, freeing the King from his curse.

Noah helps you break the children out, and gives you an ax, passed down through his family that can cut the magical vines in the solarium. Inside, you find the Wicked Queen’s cottage, and the true power of the False Mirror. You also learn that there is another portal in the astronomy room, which takes you to the Mirror’s hiding place, where you find Snow, Gwyn, Gerda and the King, gathered around the False Mirror. 

Snow White forces Gerda to cry, ignoring the King’s attempts to reason with her. The Mirror rains a snowstorm on the castle, and the wounded King tells you to find pieces of a magical hammer that can destroy the mirror. He helps you forge it and you use it to shatter the mirror, releasing Snow White from her curse. 

Overcome with guilt for all she has done, she cries for her son; Gerda cries with her, and her tears wake Gwyn. Snow White and the King thank you, and you and Gerda depart. 

Bonus Game: Hansel and Gretel

The bonus level is the first one where you play as someone other than the detective; as this is Hansel and Gretel, you play as Hansel. All my praise for the base game translates to the bonus level too; my only issue is that it’s just very, very simple. 

We start with Hansel and Gretel being abandoned by their stepmother in the Ogre Woods. They stumble onto a Gingerbread House, where the Evil Witch takes Gretel. Hansel has to find a way inside the house. 

After you help an injured ogre, you get the key and inside you find Gretel trapped in some kind of glass box. The Witch’s servant, an imp asks you to free it and he will help you save Gretel. To do so you must first defeat a giant spider and find a potion from the Moon Goddess. This is also the second appearance of the Blue Tea Thief, this time having perished via said spider, Sheelob style. 

The imp tells you about an eternal sleep potion you can make which requires several ingredients. You also learn that the Witch tricked the Fairy Moon Goddess into drinking a potion that leeched all her magic and then was trapped in a statue in the forest. After you put the Witch to sleep, the Goddess returns and makes you, or rather Hansel, the first Golden Child. 

Overall, this game is good. The story is engaging, the gameplay is tight, all the characters are complex and likable, the magic has rules and there is some clever subversion of fairytale tropes. The idea that a mother’s love can blind someone so much that they can destroy the world for their child is very fairytale-esque, and I really liked that both King and Snow acknowledge that they have done terrible things to protect each other and save Gwyn. 

The only minor complaint I have is the fairytale logic of the Mirror being evil because it grew angry with its creator for being locked away, but like… it’s a mirror. Why does it have feelings?

With a smash hit under their belt, and 3 successful games, it was time for Blue Tea to step up their game in the ambitious:

The Red Riding Hood Sisters

Immediately, there is a drastic improvement in the game. The scenery is significantly more lively, the game has that very distinct, soft feel that I associate with this franchise, and there is a lot more interaction between the characters in the story and you as the Detective. The first thing you’ll notice are the frogs and ravens which react if you click on them. 

The opening of the game is rather straightforward; you find a key that leads you to a small cottage and you see Marie in the window. Unfortunately taking the key from the frog statue alerts the titular Frog Prince, James that you are here, which causes the frogs to become threatening, their eyes glowing yellow and the fog to intensify. Once you try to open the door of the cottage, James appears and in what will become classic Dark Parables fashion, throws you into a pit underground. 

In his mild defence, he thinks you are a thief, and it becomes clear why, once you look around the cave you are in. There is another man inside; the skeleton of a thief who was convinced he could find the underground kingdom. This is another recurring character in these games, dubbed the Blue Tea Thief. It’s the same face model for any corpse in these games. 

I won’t lie; the very first time I played this game I was really shocked that there was an actual dead person, who had a name and a backstory and not just random skeletons. 

As soon as you get out of the cave, you run into James again, who accuses you of trespassing and uses some kind of magic to block all the exits with vines, similar to the ones in the previous game. He hints that he bears some kind of curse, and leaves you to die. 

One thing that’s never explained and for whatever reason really annoyed me was how James was able to summon the vines. As far as we know, he has no magical abilities, not even with the curse (unless you count immortality as a ‘magical ability’). Later we learn about Ivy and Briar, and they can control plants, and yet here he is, channelling his inner Poison Ivy for no reason. 

Regardless, you find a way to dig through the cave wall and enter the underground kingdom. We learn a bit later on that James built it to hide himself from the world, and he has built a sprawling palace that is essentially a shrine to his 5 wives. 

An apparition, much like Briar in the previous game, of Ivy, her sister, appears. She was the Princess who broke James’ curse and turned him back to a human with her kiss. While they had a happy life, Ivy grew old, while James stayed young and when she died, he turned back into a frog. His curse is immortality; he is doomed to repeat the cycle over and over again, and he already has 5 separate times. Ivy asks you to help break his curse, because that’s the only way to save Marie. 

James’ wives were Cinderella, the Little Mermaid, the Swan Princess and Snow White. Before Ivy disappears she hints that you should go to the greenhouse; of course, to do so you must first explore most of the castle. It’s almost all different shrines James’  built for his wives; after all he had a 1000 years to live. In each part of the castle you find a crown, one for each princess that you are to place on a pedestal in front of a row of statues representing each of them. 

You find out through exploring the castle that James has been experimenting with alchemy, trying to create a potion that turns humans into frogs, as well as vice versa. In the greenhouse, you find an entrance to an underwater shrine, where you find a potion that turns frogs back into their original creature; you test it onto a frog in the kitchen, which turns back to a pig. Throughout the castle you can find notes which talk about an immortality wand, as well as a more powerful potion that could act on humans, which should give you a hint of what happened to Marie, and everyone else who’s disappeared into the forest. 

Ivy appears again, and explains what you have sort of guessed; James’ last wife was Snow White. After meeting her, his curse changed; instead of turning back into a frog, he would stay human but every living thing he touched would become a frog. Because of this, he exiled himself into this underground kingdom, and has been trying to find a cure ever since. 

The wand requires a transmutation circle to work, and through wandering around the castle,  you can find a way above, back to the forest. In the cottage, you find that Marie and her bodyguards have been turned to frogs, so you really need to lift the curse, asap. 

Once the wand is ready, James appears. Somehow he knows you are a detective(?) and wants to stop your meddling, which makes NO sense. Ivy appears, and tells him the only way to join her is for James to let you kill him with the wand. I’m not sure why James can’t use the wand on himself, but you assist in his suicide, he joins Ivy and gives you the locket to get Marie and her bodyguard out of the weird contraption he had put them in. 

You free Marie who tells you a person with white eyes appeared to her, and she felt cold like nothing before in her bones. She has no idea what it means, but I have an idea; it’s the Snow Queen. 

The bonus level in this game is a room inside the waterfall in James’ palace which shows us the location of our next adventure: the Snowfall Kingdom, which is also the 

Bonus Game: The Frozen Lair

The Frozen Lair starts with James’ ghost telling you that he has used the magical fire powers, which he now has, to free a section of the castle that was blocked off in the main game with a thick sheet of ice. This place has Ivy’s tomb, as well as a beautiful statue of James and Snow White, which is kind of an odd choice if you ask me. 

While exploring we end up learning that Snow White actually left Prince James, and we find a mirror shard which shows us that Snow White has become the Snow Queen. The shard is so cold it hurts the Detective when she touches it, and placing it on the pedestal causes snow to start falling  inside the bedroom. 

Eventually, you open a portal that shows you Snowfall Kingdom, and we are off on the third adventure. 

While not my favourite in the series, The Exiled Prince is definitely one of the better entries, it sets the tone for much of what follows. We have the classic “hurl and/or trap the detective in a predicament,'' the main character doubling as the villain, at least for a portion of the game, the first appearance of the Blue Games Thief, and connections to further entries in the series, as well as the Curse of Briar Rose. Like in that game, there is no parable here; we just get the retelling of the Frog Prince in the game itself. 

James has become a twisted, corrupted version of himself, due to his curse, and in his anger and loneliness has become a monster to anyone who happens upon his kingdom. He’s still redeemable though, since he was trying to find a way to break the curse, which makes him an interesting character to follow. This is another theme with the latter games, starting with the next entry, The Rise of the Snow Queen. We never learn who cursed James in this game, but it’s heavily implied that Snow White, his last wife, changed his curse.

This game is in a way a nexus point for all future entries: not only have we set up James, and his relationship to both Ivy and Briar Rose, we are also introduced to 4 other Princesses whose fairy tales we would be exploring next. 

So with that, let’s talk about my favorite game in this series

Rise of the Snow Queen

Even though this is the first official game in the series, for me it almost feels like a beta version. Many of the series staples aren’t in this game, and one of the most jarring is right at the start: the Detective makes his way into the castle completely unscathed!

If you haven’t played these games this will make no sense to you, but if you have… what the hell, right?

The animation for the cutscenes is likewise different; it doesn’t quite have that beautiful, soft polish that the other Blue Team Games have, especially in the opening cutscene, which lacks the personality which distinguishes this series from other HOP games. However, where this game excels is the beautiful location it takes place in. 

This game has the best layout for its castle out of all the games in the series. Here, it feels like the Detective is exploring a proper, medieval castle; it has several bedrooms, an armoury, a treasury, a kitchen, servants quarters, stables, and a menagerie. Every area feels well thought out and the way you travel between them is likewise logical. It even has a chapel and an astronomy tower, and both make perfect sense for this type of establishment.

Once inside the courtyard, you are met by Briar Rose herself, in what appears to be some kind of astral projection. She warns the Detective that the Godmother has returned and she will try to prevent the Detective’s quest, which doesn’t make a lot of sense with what we find out later. For now, Briar Rose asks the Detective to follow her inside.

The way to stop Godmother and the curse is to wake Briar Rose up, and to do so, the Detective needs to make a potion. The way you get to this conclusion isn’t exactly intuitive; you just explore each area of the castle and eventually you stumble upon a lab. If you read your journal regularly, the Detective does comment on what your next objective is, so it’s not unreasonable to assume you’d have to make some kind of potion, it’s just not exactly explained that even an option let alone the right one. 

There are areas of the castle that are more interesting than others; one is the graveyard where the Detective wonders what happened to Briar Rose’ parents. Another is a pantry where there’s just a massive spider on the wall. It’s not hostile, but it’s still… yikes. 

In the graveyard we do see  black crow with red eyes, and the Godmother cackling that you won’t stop her. This is the first of those common elements that show up a lot more in the later games: animals and shadows which follow you around and warn you of danger. 

After exploring the castle you end up crafting the potion, and must find a way to Briar Rose’ resting place. It’s not actually in the castle; it’s in a room underground, under the graveyard called the Rose room, which explains how no one has stumbled upon her body in the 1000 years since the curse was lifted. You end up having to fight the spirit of the godmother, and once you beat her in a rather simple puzzle, Briar Rose wakes up. 

This is where we find out 2 things which make no sense. The first is that the godmother woke up when the curse became active again, and she actually wanted you to find Briar Rose’ body, because she was going to use it so she herself could get a physical form. So why did Briar warn you that she will try and stop us from lifting the curse? Wouldn’t she want us to lift it so we could find Briar’s body?

The second thing is the sequel bait. Briar Rose gives you a crown and tells you another curse has awoken, and the Frog Prince will want to submerge the world in water. Having played The Exiled Prince, I can tell you at no point does James want to submerge the world in water; he’s just pissed that you trespassed in his kingdom. 

 We likewise never find out what caused the curse to become active again. It’s not Godmother, because she woke up with the curse, and it’s not Briar because all she could do was appear to us as an apparition. So what then? 

The other thing that made me tilt my head is that when you play the bonus level you find out about Ivy, so presumably the developers already knew she would be Briar’s sister so why not… incorporate her in the game. We don’t even see her room, let alone her in the cutscene.

There are 2 bonus locations in this game. If you play on hardmode, you start the game with a rose, which you can place next to a door you find inside the well you have to climb down. There isn’t much in the room; just a statue of the frog prince and some lovely concept art. 

The second bonus location is actually the entrance to the bonus level, so let’s talk about it.

Bonus Game: The Spindle Room Secrets 

This is  by far the simplest, most straightforward bonus level in all of the games.  It’s 3 rooms; the spindle room, some kind of wardrobe/clothier room and a balcony. The balcony houses the tomb of the Prince who tried to wake Briar, who happens to be… dun, dun, dun… James’ brother. 

This only works as a reveal if you’ve played The Exiled Prince and then returned to this game. As is, it’s just this Prince has a brother who we will meet in the following game. Great. Thanks. 

Also, sidenote, James’ brother was Briar Rose’s true love and James was Ivy’s? That’s a bit weird. 

Regardless, all you find out in this level is that the brother passed away shortly after he attempted to lift the curse (from grief I imagine) and that’s it. You don’t even get anything after you solve the last puzzle, just a “Congrats, you finished the game”. 

Neither of these 2 bonus locations are worth playing on hardmode imo, though having replayed the game on hardmode for this retrospective, I can say it’s not like the game is very difficult. You can also use the strategy guide if you get stuck. 

Overall, this is by far one of my least favourite games in the series; I’d put it close to the bottom. It’s too simple and uneven, and while I have nothing against Briar’s character we know nothing about her. We don’t even know if the Prince who tried to wake her knew her before she became cursed; it’s not even a great departure from Sleeping Beauty’s fairy tale. Briar does appear in the latter games, but we’ll talk about her more when we get to them. 

For now, we can move onto what I think is the real start of the series: 

The Exiled Prince

Gameplay:

As the title suggests, these are casual games, meaning most of the gameplay is delivered through two things: point and click (PoP) and hidden object puzzles (HOP). Though the games are by no means RPG, you do play  a character, the Fairytale Detective. The Detective is a silent protagonist, well known in the game world. The characters refer to the Detective’s more ‘well known’ cases, and express relief and happiness when you arrive to solve whatever mystery you’re called to solve. Though originally genderless, in the later games the Detective is canonically revealed as a woman, so I will be referring to her by she/her pronouns.

The cases vary depending on the game, but they include rescuing kidnapped children, breaking curses, solving murders and even toppling entire cities from the sky. Each game starts with a briefing from your boss, who gives you the conceit of the case and you take over from there. 

In the beginning, HOPs were the main puzzle of the series, but as it progressed, it relied significantly less on them, and more on other types of puzzles. However, the HOPs themselves are different from other games in this genre, as you aren’t looking for specific objects in a set piece, most of which won’t be useful, but rather to find pieces of an object and put it together. Sometimes it’s an artifact, sometimes it’s a weapon, and sometimes just a stylized version of everyday appliances. 

This was personally what drew me to the series; I really like that you complete an object instead of tracking down 30 random things your character will never need. It makes the HOP a lot more relevant to the character and lets the designers make the HOP puzzles as organic sections of the environment itself, instead of non-diegetic interruptions. 

The other puzzles in the game vary, but they are all activated by the Detective opening locks, chests, completing murals, windows and similar environments. Like the HOP they are usually organically tied into the location you are exploring, and oftentimes they explain things in the story, like backgrounds on key characters or events. As an example, you will often encounter some kind of interactable painting or collage that will tell a story, and by solving it, the Detective will learn a key aspect of the case that lets you progress. 

Each game has 3 modes of play: easy, normal and hard. On easy, the hint button recharges quickly, there is no penalty for clicking on the wrong object in a HOP, and you can skip puzzles quickly. On normal, the time for skipping and hint recharging is longer, and there are penalties for randomly clicking around the HOP screen. On hard, there are no hints, you can’t skip puzzles and the penalty kicks in after 3 wrong tries. 

The first 3 games only let you unlock hard after playing through the game once on easy or normal, and also have a bonus for the hardmode. The bonus is usually an object the detective starts the game with which unlocks a separate room that has something interesting, like a hint to the bonus story or the next game in the series. From The Red Riding Hood Sisters on, the series discards the hardmode bonus and the hidden rooms. 

All of the games have additional puzzle and collector pieces. The first one is the Cursed Objects: objects in the gameworld that shapeshift into something else. Finding each helps replenish your hint bar, and collecting all 20 gives the player an achievement and sometimes a reward. 

Achievements are something that was introduced in the spinoff game Cursery: The Crooked Man and the Crooked Cat, and are a collectors award; you can get achievements for anything from solving a HOP without hints, to solving a HOP with no wrong clicks, to finding 5 objects in 5 seconds, and so on. 

The third game, Rise of the Snow Queen introduced Parables. Parables are items you can find in the game world which you can collect. When you collect a certain amount you unlock a story, which is usually a retelling of the fairytale or an aspect of the fairytale from the main game. They explain the backstory and lore, and are fun to collect. 

The final Blue Tea Game, The Ballad of Rapunzel introduces Flowerstones, which like Parables are collectable items you can find in the game world. Collecting 20 can net the player an item which unlocks a different ending not accessible in the main game. 

Standard vs. Collector’s Editions:

All of the games in the series have a Standard and a Collectors edition. The Standard Edition contains the base game and only that; the Collector’s Edition contains the base game, a bonus game, bonus materials and a strategy guide. It’s also more expensive. 

 Now, I personally think that the Standard Edition isn’t the complete game, and don’t ever recommend getting it. The base game by itself is just not nearly as entertaining or good without the bonus game and materials. Yes, you still get a complete game, and you can still unlock all the Parables and achievements, but you are missing out on the extras and the bonus game which are usually great. 

The bonus games vary; in the first 2 games, Curse of Briar Rose and The Exiled Prince, the bonus games are just a separate bonus level in the game; in the case of CoBR it’s literally just a room, with 2 appendages. But from Rise of the Snow Queen on, the bonus games are entirely new stories, where you play as a character other than the Detective, and you learn something new; it could be the backstory of a character, an enchanted object, what happened to a place or just an additional adventure after the main one is over. 

The bonus materials are usually the same: there is concept art, wallpapers, a movie gallery where you can rewatch all the cutscenes, and download the music and wallpaper files.

The strategy guide is basically just a walkthrough. It contains all the solutions to all the puzzles, along with screenshots, as well as all the locations of all the Cursed Objects, Parables and Flowerstones. It’s not necessary, but it is useful if you are a completionist, or you are playing on hardmode and you get stuck on a particular puzzle. 

Art Direction:

This series is most well known for its gorgeous art style and direction. It is simply stunning; all the locations are beautifully crafted, there is an incredible amount of detail put into each scene, the animation in some of the games is amazing considering these are casual games, and I love the designs of the characters and the costumes. 

Each HOP is a joy to solve because the games are so beautiful, and some shots are downright stunning. The only issue is sometimes the voice acting which is uneven. 

Story: 

There isn’t exactly an overarching story in all the games; more like common elements. For example, characters you meet in earlier games come back later and you can see what’s happened to them in the meantime. They also comment on stories or react to events, so you do get a sense that all these cases are happening in the same universe. The way I would describe it, is that the games share a world, while the individual standalone adventures are their unique, contained stories. 

Blue Tea:

The Curse of Briar Rose

The Exiled Prince

Rise of the Snow Queen

The Red Riding Hood Sisters

The Final Cinderella

Jack and the Sky Kingdom

Ballad of Rapunzel

Spin-off Games:

Fabled Legends: The Pied Piper

Cursery: The Crooked Man & the Crooked Cat

Eipix Studio:

Little Mermaid and the Purple Tide

Queen of Sands

Goldilocks and the Fallen Star

Swan Lake and the Dire Tree

The Thief and the Tinderbox

Requiem for the Forgotten Shadow

Blue Tea (the Return):

Return of the Salt Princess

The Match Girl's Lost Paradise