I’m here for Sokolov, the Royal Physician. Not to kill him, but abduct him. A small arrow points in his general direction, but getting into his well guarded building is left to me.
I start in the streets, two guards chatting up ahead. I creep as close as I can, then Blink past: a short range teleport spell. I appear on the other side, and watch them for any signs of suspicion as I back down an alley.
Something stops me. It’s a guard. We both spin round, but I’m quicker. The sound of the kill brings the first two guards running, and I have to use an incendiary crossbow bolt to even the odds. As one guard thrashes in flames, I sprint past his friend to hide in a crumbling half-building overlooking the water.
I ready Wind Blast, hoping to fling him off the edge when he comes through. Instead, a rock comes skittering through the door. What?
I peek out. The guard has backed away across the street, not falling for my trap. He throws another rock at me. I duck back.
I can still make this work. When I peek back out, I have a different spell ready: Possession. My body is physically sucked into him, giving me complete control. I walk him purposefully to the very edge of the floor, where it’s collapsed into the sea, and step back out of him. I’m about to Wind Blast him off the edge, but he’s so disoriented by the experience that he staggers off the planks of his own accord.
I hear the splash, then… gnashing. I look over the edge: a shoal of piranhas are devouring his floating body. I half wonder if I could possess one, but they’re out of range. Although there is a jetty down there, and Blink could take me closer…
I manage to Blink down just as they finish nibbling the guard’s skin off, and possess one before they swim away. There’s an inlet that leads under Sokolov’s building, so I swim on.
Inside, there’s a waterwheel generating power for the building. I swim into it. Its paddles lift me up, out of the water, and into the bowels of the machine. Fish lift!
Either because I’m literally a fish out of water, or because the spell’s duration is up, I turn back into my normal self at the top of the wheel, and hop off into a maintenance corridor. A startled fish awakes to find himself lying on a water paddle shortly before it deposits him back in the sea.
I’m in.
The ground floor is crawling with guards, but I stick to the shadows and sneak upstairs. The way ahead is blocked by an energy field – it lets guards pass harmlessly through, but disintegrates any intruders. On a nearby bench, I find something relevant to my interests: a Rewire Tool.
It’s right next to the control box for an alarm bell, but I don’t want to rewire that. I want to rewire the field that kills people. The trouble is, I’m not entirely sure where the controls are.
Skirting the restricted area to search for it, I pass a window and am glimpsed by a woman inside. I duck out of sight and wait. I need to know if she’s coming to investigate, so I switch on Dark Vision.
The walls become transparent, and I can see everything. The woman in the room has stayed put, but she’s still looking at the window. And I can suddenly see the wiring that laces the building. Cables lead from the energy field right into this woman’s room: to the control panel.
Dark Vision lasts long enough for me to see her relax and go back to her business. I lean into view and shoot a sleeping dart into the back of her neck. At the control panel, there’s no hacking minigame to be played: if you have a Rewire tool, it’s used up. If you don’t, it can’t be done.
Before I can get back to the energy field, I’m spotted by the guard who patrols these corridors. I duck into a room and leave it by a different door, losing him and arriving at my destination from the other side. It’s a clean escape, but I was half-hoping he’d chase me through the energy field I hacked, just to see it in action.
Experimentally, I clang my knife against a metal pipe. A second later, the guard comes running down the corridor, passes through the field, and disintegrates into floating, glowing dust. Wow.
Inside the room, there’s also a whale oil battery that powers the field. The level of oil inside has depleted slightly from disintegrating the guard. Elsewhere in the building, there’s a machine that can refill it. I could even take it out to de-power the field, and throw it at a guard to melt him in an explosion of incandescent gunk. But I’ll leave it – if I set off any alarms, I want my death field up when everyone comes running.
There are only a few more guards between me and Sokolov, and I slip past them with a mixture of conventional stealth and Blink trickery. The man himself is in a rooftop lab. When he sees me and guesses my intention, he tries to cut a deal. I put him in a sleeper hold.
From up here, there’s a very short route out: a series of small rooftops and balconies I can hop between to get to the docks. Carrying Sokolov makes me slower, but it doesn’t stop me Blinking. And I know where I want to land: there’s a man on giant robo-stilts guarding the docks, but a distant ledge looks high enough to hide on before hopping down to the docks. It’s too far to Blink, but if I took a running jump…
Running with an unconscious man on your shoulder is difficult. Jumping, harder still. And falling hurts a lot more. I Blink as late as I possibly can, slam into the roof tiles with near lethal force, and scuttle towards the wall to avoid the Tallboy’s gaze. He saw something. He stalks towards me as I press myself against the wall to stay out of sight, still carrying Sokolov. After a tense pause, he stomps off. I Blink down to some sandbags and sneak off to the harbour, delivering my unconscious mark to a contact for extraction.
I am going to like this game quite a lot.
Dishonored is out in October. You can see the mission previous to this, The Golden Cat, played two different ways in these videos.
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