Dishonored EP14: Like Real Assassins

By Josh Posted Saturday Apr 13, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 87 comments


Link (YouTube)

Why is it that everyone seems to know who Corvo is when he’s sneaking around in disguise? First Martin figures it out in half a second, not only that the creepy assassin in the skull mask that just choked/shot/stabbed/blew up the heckling guard is not here to kill him but to free him, but he also identifies exactly who the creepy assassin in the skull mask is. And now we have this guy at the party, who calls you on being the creepy assassin in the skull mask while in disguise as the creepy assassin in the skull mask…

Okay, I suppose there’s no complaining about that one. Still, it would have perhaps been more interesting if, somewhere along the line, someone mentioned that, yeah, basically all the nobles know that Pendleton and Havelock have some ace-in-the-hole super assassin they’ve been using to cause mayhem and further their agenda. But at this point, nobody’s going to dare call them on it for fear of starting a civil war, what with all the power the two have accrued.

Also, true story, I was talking to Shamus about this week’s episodes earlier, and he said, absolutely seriously, “I don’t remember this week being silly at all.”

No Shamus. Not silly.

Not one bit.

 


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87 thoughts on “Dishonored EP14: Like Real Assassins

  1. Thomas says:

    This game looks so pretty :(

    1. StashAugustine says:

      Really, the only ugly games they’ve played were the Mass Effects and Fallout 3.

      1. Jokerman says:

        Mass Effect is not ugly, in some places it looks really nice.

  2. Vect says:

    I forget if this was mentioned beforehand, but would it be possible that The Knife of Dunwall would be covered at some point before the Flooded District?

    1. Josh says:

      It’s possible, the DLC certainly looks pretty good and we are blowing through this game at a surprising pace…

      1. I thought so, too. Then they had to toss in dialog from The Outsider and his awful, awful voice actor…

  3. Duhad says:

    I honestly am curious if the game devs intended the non lethal route to be some much more heinous then killing too make some sort of point or if they illegitimately thought that just handing her off to the creepy guy was a moral gray area that still put you more on the side of the angels then just knifing her?

    Either way, its creepy as hell, but I want to know if the devs where contusion about just how messed up this option was even when compared to the rest of the things you do in game.

    With the slavery thing or the branding thing I get the feeling that the devs meant thous to be the more moral options, with a dash of poetic justice mixed in (thou as pointed out, thous are also pretty messed up), but with this one? I suspect it was the same motivation, but I really hope it was not!

    1. Thomas says:

      It gives me little shivers to even consider the possibility that someone thought this was a moral grey area.

      The worst thing is, there’s absolutely no visible tone from it. It’s hard to tell if the games condemning it or even playing it slightly for laughs. It’s like the voice acting, it’s monotone, like they weren’t aware that letting someone be r***ed continually for as long as they still live was meant to provoke any strong emotion

      1. mixmastermind says:

        I think his mask is definitely meant to portray him as deranged. I mean, look at that thing, it’s horrifying.

        1. Thomas says:

          Oh yeah I’m not contesting that. But I can’t tell if it’s deranged funny or deranged hideous or even ‘serves her right deranged’

          A lot of his dialogue is fairly polite and formal and his mask is very noticeable. What does polite and formal mean? I can’t get into the writers heads at all I don’t know what point they’re trying to make with it

    2. Perhaps they meant it to raise questions of morality, such as “Is murder more or less heinous than slavery?” in the same manner as Legion’s loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2. Like that mission, the one dubbed paragon/low chaos feel’s just, if not more, morally wrong than the renegade/high chaos route. I may be giving them too much credit, but the “low chaos” option may be intentionally horrible to promote a pragmatic viewpoint in Corvo(blow to morality, less stringent security measures due to low chaos in future). Given the games low chaos ending, that probably isn’t the case, or different writers had different goals with the same mechanics.

      1. StashAugustine says:

        Both games suffer from the problem of having an alignment meter which is not strictly good/evil but then forcing it on good/evil choices.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      “With the slavery thing or the branding thing I get the feeling that the devs meant thous to be the more moral options, with a dash of poetic justice mixed in (thou as pointed out, thous are also pretty messed up), but with this one?”

      Really?Getting two guys mutilated and then sent to work in a slave mine till their deaths is more moral than selling a girl into sexual slavery?Both are just as repulsive.

      Personally,I wouldnt mind these things being a low chaos options if just one mission before you had an option to set a plague victim free as a low chaos option.Its clear from acts like that that they think killing is always the evil route,while everything else is a good route,which is definitely not the case when it comes to the twins and this lady.

      1. guy says:

        I think this probably takes the lead in the morally reprehensible horse race, if barely. However, what really makes it the worst is that Lady Boyle is the one target who is not a terrible person.

        Personally, I picked the nonlethal option here because I completely misread the subtext talking to Creepy Guy and thought he was her old boyfriend set aside for political reasons or something and she was going to have one of those semi-happily-ever-after endings where she loses her wealth but keeps her life and true love.

        Theeeennnnn his line on reaching the boat. I felt like a terrible person.

        1. newdarkcloud says:

          This is the biggest problem I have with the Lady Boyle quest. She’s not even evil, ESPECIALLY when compared to the other assholes you kill.

          It’s partially what inspired the article I wrote and linked to Harvey Smith.
          http://pressstarttodiscuss.blogspot.com/2013/01/55-dishonored-non-lethal-option-and.html

      2. Nimas says:

        “Really?Getting two guys mutilated and then sent to work in a slave mine till their deaths is more moral than selling a girl into sexual slavery?Both are just as repulsive.”

        Honestly, I’d have to say yes. Not by too much, but still just a bit. The thing is, the Pendletons own the mine they work in, and do some other rather terrible things, so in a sense (a terrible, quite evil sense) there is some poetic justice there. (still evil)

        Whereas Lady Boyle is financing the guards or the military (if I remember correctly), and sleeping with the Lord Regent. I mean, you could even make the case that what she’s doing is good for the city, given and improved guard/military would hopefully be able to keep order better in a city ravaged by the plague.

        Plus there is the whole ‘rape/sexual torture is one of the most looked down upon crimes in our society’ thing. I do wonder if that colours my perceptions of perceived ‘evilness’ too much, but I am fairly hopeful they don’t.

        1. Thomas says:

          If we start with the basis that they are all completely horrible disgusting things. Mutilating a person tortures them during the act and then they have to live the rest of their lives with crippling image problems. Being a slave in a mine contains no actual torture but involves having horrible life conditions and basically starving to death.

          Being a sex slave involves being repeatedly and frequently tortured until death. There’s not much reason to suppose your conditions will be much better than the slave and you will have plenty of the mental issues that the disfigurement causes. So I think even from a fairly dispassionate point of view where sexual abuse isn’t given a higher ground than any other form then this is still easily the worst of them because of it’s continual nature.

          To be blunt. At least as a slave down a mine you can die. If they cared enough to stop you, slaving wouldn’t be cost efficient. I can’t imagine Lady Boyle having that open to her which is unspeakably horrific

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Sure,you can die while doing slave labor,if you dont mind being beaten/starved to death.And both take a long,long time.Basically any form of slavery is a fate worse than death.Comparing two forms of slavery on which one would be worse is kind of pointless.

            What further complicates things,is that we know nothing about this guy.Maybe his fetish doesnt involve sex at all.Maybe lady boyle will develop stockholm sindrome quite quickly.Maybe he will just keep her locked up in a room while giving her extravagant meals.Or maybe he will keep her locked and starving in a basement.Maybe he is a sadist and will beat her as well.We dont know anything save for the fact that she will die as his slave.We dont know when or how.

            1. WJS says:

              I think this is part of the problem. With the Pendletons, it’s quite explicit exactly what will happen to them, but here pretty much nothing people are complaining about is actually in the game. The guy could be being perfectly honest with us – the omniscient Outsider doesn’t contradict him, IIRC, and if she isn’t grateful for the “rescue”, he may not force the issue. But everyone seems to assume that as soon as Corvo’s back is turned, he’s gonna get his rape on. Do we really see enough of him to justify this assumption? He’s asking you to abduct her, sure, but not in a vacuum – he knows that the only other outcome is you killing her. “Leave her be” isn’t an option the game (or the Loyalists) give you.

        2. Humanoid says:

          I feel the problem is less the thorny issue of trying to put atrocities on a scale relative to one another but simply that unlike the prior ‘solutions’, it leaves out the poetry from ‘poetic justice’.

          …which would take the form of: “So, you’ve been using your money to fund my enemy’s henchmen, eh? Well now I’m going to spend it on funding some other group of henchmen that I don’t particularly care about! How do you like that, eh!? Eh!?”

          1. StashAugustine says:

            It would be a funny nonlethal option to just embezzle all her money to paying your soldiers instead of the Regent’s.

    4. Lame Duck says:

      It seems to me that this is the result of the fact that the games moral-choice system isn’t supposed to be a moral-choice system. It’s trying to present a choice between the more chaotic and the more ethical, but unfortunately it just doesn’t make any sense in the context of how the chaos system works.

      1. Thomas says:

        I think one of the things is, these acts, particularly this one, have a strong moral component even outside any developers intent. In a featureless plain, people are always going to bring in a moral judgement when asked to consider if they should be killing someone or selling them off whatever.

        So if the aim is high chaos having fun with powers/low chaos responsibility and you try to make it not a moral thing then you’re ignoring a chunk of what players would use to interpret that situation so your conclusions end up looking like nonsense.

        If they weren’t going to tackle morality head on, then they needed to simplify it down a lot. Remove all these morally questionable acts because they’re causing people to question something the game didn’t want to handle

      2. newdarkcloud says:

        I believe that they tried to make a system that wasn’t a moral choice, but I don’t think they succeed in that regards.

        In terms of the ending, Low Chaos in clearly superior to High Chaos.

    5. Chauzuvoy says:

      I think the whole chaos system wasn’t thought all the way through. It really feels like something that was meant to showcase the various playstyle options for the level by creating 2+ explicitly stated and scripted ways through the game, and to give the appearance that the gameworld changes based on Corvo’s actions by drawing attention to the instances of that which would be otherwise easy to miss on the first playthrough.

      I think a couple episodes back Rutskarn made the comparison to the scripted assassination methods in Hitman: Blood Money. Mechanically, you have a couple dozen ways to solve your objectives (gun, sword, crossbow, rat swarm, possession, etc.), but if you want you can take this scripted alternative, which needs you to be stealthier or more creative in exploration and recon, or something. If the alternative methods were lethal, then it would just be another cool thing for you to discover about the level.

      But they didn’t make them lethal, because they wanted to have more player control over the game. Remember how the levels change depending on your overall chaos? They wanted to have that kind of Deus Ex-ey mechanic where the playstyle you choose is reacted to by the game, but on a mechanical level. And that’s not a bad idea, but because they chose to tie that to the chaos system, it turns the chaos system into a moral system, whether it was intended as such or no. They made the game comment on your actions, and turned high chaos actions into actions that make your game harder, which makes them a mechanical evil in addition to a moral evil. The problem is it doesn’t comment at all on how much of a sick bastard you would have to be to send Lady Boyle into sexual slavery, or torture and mutilate the high overseer. If anything, because they’re the nonlethal, low-chaos alternative, the game mechanically presents them as undeniable moral goods.

      And I don’t think the devs intended to moralize it like that. They did a lot to contextualize it as being high-chaos/low-chaos, not good/evil. They added the justification that it wasn’t about whether your actions were good or evil, but about how many corpses were left hanging around for the plague to fester in. They wanted to have this cool mechanical thing, but apparently didn’t realize the extent to which the mechanics themselves make it a moral issue, and the fairly twisted way in which they do that.

    6. Vect says:

      I always thought it was meant to be something of an act of “Cruel Mercy” where it’s probably crueler to leave said character alive than dead. It’s mainly Burrows and Daud that don’t get horribly screwed over.

      Considering that (as far as I know) the game will still be Low Chaos if you simply kill the target while not killing others, it’s really for those who want to go the “extra mile”.

      1. WJS says:

        With Daud the non-lethal choice may just be to leave him be, but are you serious about Burrows? Do you realise what will probably happen to him? Turning him instantly to ash is by far the merciful option.

    7. Klay F. says:

      I never understood why people think the nonlethal options were ever supposed to be sort of rainbow filled happiness outcomes. I mean, the game is called DISHONORED after all. They made it pretty obvious, at least in my opinion, that everything you do is dishonorable.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        The game is called dishonored for what you were framed for in the beginning,not what you do later.

        And really the problem doesnt come from the actions themselves.They portray a nice contrast between low and high chaos.Doing good for the city,or giving a merciful death to the villains.However,the problem comes from other actions that do frame low chaos as the good option.For example,letting that girl from sokolovs cage,or emilys painting.

    8. Nidokoenig says:

      The thought occurs that non-lethal options so far have been using a heretic brand to essentially excommunicate and ostracise someone, making two slavers into slaves, and making a woman a sex slave in a horribly sexist society.
      These are all using the current status quo, the institutionalised injustices that hold sway, to fulfil your ends, rather than taking chaotic options that upset a society that completely deserves to torn apart and remade as something that isn’t a fucking hellhole.
      The question the game is trying to pose is whether a time when a sick society suffering from a plague and dealing with the fallout of a coup d’etat is the right time to right those wrongs, and whether fighting them through the actions of a lone vigilante empowered to do so by some watery bore is justifiable. The truly unsettling thing is that the game’s answer seems to be a fairly flat “no”.

      The game suffers from it not seeming to have the sophistication to make such a relatively subtle point, looking at things like the general level of sophistication in the writing and voiceacting. There’s also the problem that making three subtle points over the course of about five or six hours or so, if the player is powering through, is an awful way to build a theme.
      It also suffers from not having some obvious alternatives, like stealing diaries, deeds and other papers from people in positions of power and giving them to secularists, abolitionists, suffragists and anti-whaling activists so that they can use those resources and bits of information to further their causes. Those could be medium chaos, and unleashing all those groups at once could well lead to a clusterfuck, but a distinctly different clusterfuck to straight high chaos, and achieving their objectives while not bringing about chaos in any other way, or achieving the objectives of only the groups you choose, whatever your reasons, could bring about a medium-low chaos ending which has difficulties, but also hard-fought social reforms.
      This would build more subtlety into the chaos system, and make thinking about it more than simply budgeting your skill and patience with using non-lethal methods to get a low chaos ending. Having to wonder if you have low enough chaos to strengthen the abolitionists while not condemning the brothers to a life of slavery and not have everything descend into chaos would be interestingly grey.

  4. Bluesnowball says:

    Darkvision was one of my favourite abilities, especially when upgraded, as it allowed you to see loot and pickups as well as people, making my late game attempts to find as much loot as possible way more successful. I do agree that it makes sneaking easier, but some people like that kind of help more than others. I’m pretty sure you could turn it off at any point while using it simply by casting it again while it was active.

    1. StashAugustine says:

      I used it exclusively to trace back the whale oil that devices ran on. It’s way too much fun to have a game with leaning in it to pass it up.

    2. newdarkcloud says:

      Dark Vision was a mainstay in my arsenal. I utilized it a lot in my playthrough of the game.

      I needed it more to avoid missing out on loot than anything else. It made locating all the Sokolov painting easy.

  5. krellen says:

    The key word there was “remember”, Josh. He didn’t remember it being silly. You know how easily we old men forget things.

  6. burningdragoon says:

    I managed to glitch out the nonlethal option in an “interesting” way. I had her knocked out and was carrying her. I was Blinking around the basement and I accidentally slammed her into some of the wooden planks, killing her, and also triggering the the scene with Creepy Guy. So I turned Creepy Rape Guy into Creepy Necrophilia Guy, is what I’m saying. >.<

    Anyway, one thing I didn't like about this mission is how easy it is to figure out which one is the target, since Creepy Guy shows up pretty much right away.

    1. Nick-B says:

      I was rushing through on my second playthrough and if you jump down while holding her to land right next to the boat (rather than take the long way around to the stairs) it triggers the cutscene, but in the background you can hear her unconscious corpse flopping to the not-too-close-ground. After the cutscene (or during it) you can see her portrait in the upper corner with a red X, indicating she was eliminated.

      So yes, in my game, she had been dropped to her death, while asleep, then sold into sexual slavery to a guy who doesn’t mind not only a corpse, but a bruised, squishy one.

    2. newdarkcloud says:

      I agree when it comes to this mission being too easy. Talking to two specific people gives you all the information you need to pull it off. I wish they made the investigation element more worthwhile.

  7. StashAugustine says:

    I actually didn’t find Creepy Guy. I just ID’d the target, she invited Corvo upstairs (flashing back to the suburbia level in Blood Money) and when she wasn’t looking I shanked her. This level isn’t the best example of the mechanics, but it was a really nice change of pace and I’d like to see more stealth games involving walking into heavily defended bases and just bullshitting your way in.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      “I'd like to see more stealth games involving walking into heavily defended bases and just bullshitting your way in.”

      Yahtzee did a post about this recently about how fun it would be to have a game where you are playing a sneaking guy in various ways.One being the obvious sneak thing,the other being the spy wearing a disguise thing,and the third being the fast talker.That I would really want to play.

      1. StashAugustine says:

        I read that and would totally buy that. Throw Burn Notice and Alpha Protocol in a blender, and I would eat that up.

        1. MrGuy says:

          Ideally, you’d throw in the facial animation/reading from LA Noire to give bullshitter guy something to read/react off of.

          1. Thomas says:

            If it’s not possible, dossiers and good writing should make up for it. The conversation boss battles in DX:HR were surprisingly easy to understand

      2. newdarkcloud says:

        I thought that idea was awesome when I saw it. I’d totally play a game like that.

  8. guy says:

    Granny Rags is actually in one of the buildings across the river from the manor. I could have sworn it was the one with the Outsider shrine, but apparently not.

    1. X2-Eliah says:

      Granny Rags herself? Really? Huh. I didn’t know that. The apartment with the outsider shrine in it was Granny’s old/abandoned place of residence (her journals are still left in the room), but I’ve never seen Granny herself in it.

  9. X2-Eliah says:

    A nitpick about the Dark Vision complaint – er, actually you *can* easily toggle the dark vision off at will – just ‘use’ the darkvision magic hotkey whilst it is active, it will stop the active effect (same goes for slow/freeze time). I don’t recall if the overall mana loss is proportionate to duration or unequivocally lost.

    1. Irridium says:

      The mana loss is the same as blink. Activating it drops it, but if you wait a bit it’ll regenerate. Doesn’t matter if it’s active or not.

  10. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Ah,the jumping on people.They made it so hard to achieve in bioshock infinite.You had to be really high in order to jump on someones head.

    1. You’d have to be really high to use those skyrails things, too.

      All I’m saying is that sobriety is best when violence is an option.

  11. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Ok,this is just bugging me now.How come all of them can be around bone charms and runes with no ill effects?I get how piero could be around one,since he is one of the outsiders chosen,but these guys arent.And you learn of quite a few people going completely insane and killing each other over these things,but these guys simply hand them over to you with no problems.

    1. Syal says:

      I believe the canon explanation is that they are all Tom Bombadil.

    2. Sleeping Dragon says:

      To be honest I don’t think runes and charms were established as necessarily driving insane. Maybe some people are just more or less susceptible? Maybe a certain state of mind makes it easier for it to affect you? Or maybe it’s just that when you rub your piece of whalebone too much the Outsider notices and then he flips a coin or something to decide if it’s going to be “meh, I don’t care” or “here, have some madness” for you.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        There is one guy that killed his friend simply because his friend had the rune.So it works simply by proximity.Whether it works on anyone,that is debatable,but we have quite a few people here,and none of them are affected because…Plot armor,I guess.

  12. RTBones says:

    Watching Josh do incredibly ridiculous things incredibly just doesn’t get old. That was hilarious.

    On Darkvision, with the idiocy of the mask, I wondered why they just didnt build Darkvision INTO the mask. If you think about it, darkvision shows you objects that are essentially different temperatures. You could almost call it a stylized version of modern day night vision goggles, but without the goggles (or style). Yes, darkvision is a little more than that – but it would give the mask a little more purpose than it has now.

    1. WJS says:

      Thermal vision? Based on the fact it highlights people? That’s pretty weak. No, I much prefer that one being magic rather than try to come up with some stupid technobabble about how it could work. Thermal vision wouldn’t let you do anything that dark vision does. Not that I’d complain if the mask also had nightvision or thermal vision – it’s way more advanced than the setting implies, but so are the rest of the whale-oil machines. But dark vision as-is? Yeah, that should be magic.

  13. “Is your mom feeling better?”
    “Signs point to yes.”

    I thought this was a family show, Shamus!

    1. Henson says:

      “Reply hazy, try again.”

    2. newdarkcloud says:

      Out of all the possible responses NPCs can give, by far either the most common or the one that stuck to me most was “Indeed, I believe so”. That sounded weird to me.

      “Do you think the plague will continue?”
      “Indeed, I believe so.”

  14. Keeshhound says:

    I actually really like that you can sign the guestbook. It’s an absolutely stupid thing to do, but it’s the kind of think you’d see in a movie or comic book.

    1. impassiveimperfect says:

      It is stupid from a stealth-oriented perspective, but at this point you’re an (potentially mass-murdering) unstoppable machine, and signing it lets the Lord Regent crap his pants doubly (you’re not dead/you’re back with a vengeance, and you’re the one who must have been responsible for all his key supporters dying/disappearing).

      It lets him know his days are numbered.

      1. Keeshhound says:

        Pretty much. It’s the kind of think I can imagine V doing, for instance.

  15. Pattom says:

    The passive power that makes the bodies of killed enemies disappear is exceptionally useful if you play as Sniper Corvo. Fully upgrading your mask binoculars and the crossbow lets you take out patrolling guards long before they could ever see you, and this power saves you the dangerous choice of either leaving their bodies out in the open or potentially getting caught while hiding them.

  16. MrGuy says:

    The “showing up to a party dressed as John Wilkes Booth” reminds me of the advice that you should always carry a bomb when you get on an airplane for safety. Because the odds against there being TWO bombs on the same plane are astronomically small.

  17. Chamomile says:

    When creepy rapist dude says that Lady Boyle will come to love him, he is…Completely correct. Stockholm Syndrome is a thing, and the number of people who think Beauty and the Beast is romantic is significant despite being far less justifiable (Beast kidnaps Belle because he’s a prick, whereas this game’s kidnapper does have the not entirely unreasonable excuse that the alternative was assassination). Maybe that guy would end up raping Lady Boyle anyway, but the odds are excellent that he won’t have to, and Lady Boyle will come willingly after a while.

    Whether or not using Stockholm Syndrome to induce romance is more or less creepy than a more straightforward rape is left as an exercise to the reader.

    1. Thomas says:

      I think the idea that someone might be put in an experience so debilitating it warps her mind to the point where they’re unable to want to escape is pretty hideous :(

      It’s silly but I don’t like that the game has even caused me/us/people to talk and think about things that are so revolting

    2. Mike S. says:

      Once someone is being held against their will and subjected to psychological manipulation, it’s doubtful that there’s any possibility of consent as we’d understand it. (Which is why “The Taming of the Shrew” can be such a problematic play for modern audiences.)

      And, of course even that’s just speculation, because Corvo neither knows nor cares what the guy intends to do. Maybe he’s planning to take her to a farm where she’ll have room to run around, and there’ll be rabbits to chase and other politically inconvenient mistresses to play outside with. Baybe her fate will be prolonged and unspeakable. Low-Chaos, Clean Hands Corvo is evidently fine either way, to the point of not even asking for any (unenforceable) assurances.

      Re Beauty and the Beast: there’s a reason most modern tellings allow the protagonist to leave and give her the option of returning to her former life before marriage becomes possible. That doesn’t make it unproblematic, especially with the added psychological hammer of: “By the way, the Beast will die if you don’t come back.” (And in the Disney version, all the servants remain household appliances.) “But, you know, your choice.” But it’s at least an effort in a direction that’s absent from the Lady Boyle story.

    3. PoignardAzur says:

      A few late years to this conversation, but Beauty and the Best doesn’t actually feature Stockholm Syndrome. SS is when you’re stuck with an abusive, violent person, and internalize leaving in fear of that person’s mood swings, catering to their every whims, avoiding dangerous subjects around them, etc, and rationalize it as attachment.

      In Beauty and the Beast, Belle stays mentally independent, repeatedly confronts the Beast and calls him up on his bad deeds, which in turns pushes him to clean up his act. Their relationship isn’t what you’d expect Lady Boyle and Mr Creepy Guy to have.

  18. MrGuy says:

    Also, all that talk about fish, an NO ONE made a joke about Josh only having Anemonies?

    Spoiler Warning, I am disappoint.

    1. Kavonde says:

      Rutskarn did sneak in that one about the fish being Josh’s nemiseas

  19. Nick-B says:

    I think Martin knew you were Corvo-assassin instantly because… well, right before the mission they tell you that a overseer that was a part of the rebels with them was captured. So he was maybe already a part of the rebellions upper eschelon, and was just waiting for their newly acquired and rescued assassin to come along and save his ass. He was probably arrested on suspicion of providing the key and note to you in prison, and leaving our supplies in the prison itself for your escape.

    1. WJS says:

      Yeah, I certainly got the impression that he’s at least equal to Havelock, or perhaps actually the mastermind behind the whole thing. Couple that with Corvo still wearing his Lord Protector outfit, and it’s more surprising that everyone else didn’t recognise him.

  20. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

    1.) Knocking the guy out and having the body fall down the stairs and be seen is exactly what happened to me.

    2.) In a speedrun, couldn’t you just shank all three of them?

    3.) I think Josh has forgotten that he is playing Dishonored and not Thief.

    4.) My favorite overheard conversation was in No One Lives Forever -after escaping the East Berlin bar. Two HARM goons are talking about why people turn to crime.

  21. The Rocketeer says:

    Not silly? Didn’t remember- whaaa?

    Shamus, do you know where you are? You didn’t suppress all these memories? I mean, the past however-long isn’t all just fill-in of gazing at puppies in pet store windows? I’m not even mocking you; I’d understand, really. But if you let these two parts of your mind grow too far apart something awful is going to happen eventually and you’ll end up in Silent Hill or something.

  22. Stephen Malone says:

    Any reason for the longer episodes? This isn’t a complaint or issue, purely a curiosity.

    1. impassiveimperfect says:

      Might’ve been a somewhat longer than usual session, and Josh didn’t find much that could be edited out cleanly or that would be better left out.

      1. Josh says:

        Shamus was the one with the stopwatch. I don’t know why he let these episodes run so long.

        1. The Rocketeer says:

          This isn’t a complaint, exactly, but does anyone else miss the “ergh, I think we’re out of time,” puttering about at the end of previous seasons’ episodes? I’m not suggesting that it’s some sort of essential limb of the format, but the way the music just starts up mid-conversation with nary a wave goodbye makes it sound like the crew are being ‘played off’ their own show, which I guess is appropriate since they always run long.

        2. Jokerman says:

          He wanted us all to have the enjoyment of watching you search for more bonecharms of course :D

    2. Humanoid says:

      Quite like how it turned out at any rate, the whole core of the mission plus the debrief. Obviously won’t always possible, but I wouldn’t mind it being made an official thing that if the end of a mission can fit within, say, 30 minutes, to always let it run long.

  23. There’s a guest book? And I didn’t sign it??? D:

  24. Gruhunchously says:

    At 9:05, I really like the one guy’s utterly nonchalant reaction to Corvo randomly teleporting in front of him. ‘Witchcraft’. Does he see this sort of thing happen so often that it’s only barely worth commenting on?

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      The best part about that is that there’s a music box overseer right next to Josh when he lands. The guards should have been tipped off.

  25. MikhailBorg says:

    By an interesting coincidence, if it is one, the day on which this was posted is the day before the anniversary of Booth’s shooting of Lincoln. Booth had a lot to learn about sneaking out afterwards. (Yes, I know, he thought he would be hailed by the public as a hero and savior.)

    1. False Prophet says:

      Well, Booth conforms to the traditional definition of “assassin”: politically-motivated zealot who runs up and kills someone important but hasn’t really thought about escape. It’s only in the last century or so that assassin has also come to mean, in the English language anyway, a professional killer who doesn’t intend to be caught.

  26. Paul Spooner says:

    This episode reminded me of nothing so much as “Luigi’s Mansion” with all the old decorated rooms and the hoovering up everything in sight. I just imagine that there’s a poletergust just off camera that’s stucking all that stuff up. It explains so much!

  27. Ardis Meade says:

    The reason they had so much gelatin around was that it used to be a status symbol. Back in the day gelatin was made out of meat run-off. So if you could fill several molds it meant you were cooking a lot of meat and therefore well-off.

  28. Peter H. Coffin says:

    You know, it really takes a lot of the punch out of Pendleton handing over a gizmo with a “it’s been in my family for generations, maybe you can get more use out of it”, when your character has already lifted 20 of the things and spent 15 of them, with five left rattling around in his coat pockets. It’s like the guy is reverentially giving you an “original oil work of art” and you lift the dust cover and see dog playing poker with Elvis and Santa on a covered bridge set against some Utah mountains.

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