Killer Instinct

Gorgeous, wicked and infested with secrets, dishonored 2 may be this year’s definitive stealth exploration game. We speak to arkane’s creative director, harvey smith, about telling stories through sorcery, programming insect swarms and painting the town red.

- Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

The windmills capture your attention first. Sprinkled liberally across Karnaca’s domes and chimneys, whirring merrily against delicate eggshell skies, they seem more redolent of a latter-day Legend of Zelda than a steely exercise in murder and abduction like Dishonored 2. They aren’t the only things that set the new game apart from Dishonored 1’s Dunwall, capital of the isle of Gristol. Dunwall was a plague zone, its slaughterhouses and factories sagging into ruin. Karnaca is a resort, draped across the southern coast of balmy Serkonos in the lee of a forested mountain. Where Dunwall’s structures were all damp, belching smokestacks and heaps of refuse, Karnaca’s buildings are elegant and airy, their facades tastefully speckled with verdigris. And where Dunwall is more or less devoid of vegetation, Karnaca’s streets are home to ancient, majestic trees, its walls pierced haphazardly by sprays of purple blossom.

It’s not long, however, before you start to notice the city’s darker side. Karnaca might look attractive on postcards, but it’s also a place of casual brutality, where crippling taxes are made up from day to day by a tyrannous Duke, and thugs in bronze masks gun down dissenters on sight. If the center of Karnaca is a place of leisure, the same can’t be said of the silver mining districts, where convicts toil through clouds of toxic dust. And as for those harmless windmills – many of them generate power for the lethal Walls of Light that block the city’s roads and intersections. Yes, Karnaca is as ugly as Dunwall if you look at it through the right set of eyes.

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