Going from skull-cracker to safecracker in Dishonored 2

From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #302 (UK, March 2017). You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.

My playthrough of the first game was more disaster than Dishonored. At the time, I didn’t quite grasp that slitting every throat I met in those early Dunwall levels would send me spiraling toward the dreaded High Chaos ending, never to return.

As the hours rolled on and the increasing swell of rats began to gnaw on Corvo’s bootstraps, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to redress the balance by going full stealth, stifling the screams of my foes without shuffling them off their mortal coil.

Alas, Arkane’s Chaos system was more severe than I’d anticipated. The rats continued to scoff their way through the mounds of decaying flesh strewn about the city, and poor Emily might as well have been crowned Queen of the Dunwall rodents by the end, her citizens having long since been digested in a million tiny rat stomachs.

No wonder Corvo felt so sluggish when he possessed them—his hosts had been binging on the Great Dunwall Rot-off. Fortunately, Arkane evidently managed to get the exterminators in before the events of Dishonored 2, and I finally got my chance to do things right.

In a fit of madness, I decided to embark on a perfect, no-kill, no-detection run—a tall order for someone whose last attempt at stealth ended up elbowing half of Prague to death in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

40 hours later, I finally succeeded, but not without having doused my trigger finger in several vats of anti-itch cream first. Indeed, there were several moments during the Clockwork Mansion mission where I almost gave in.

After five hours of quick-saves and hasty restarts (yes, five), I could have happily shot Kirin Jindosh in the face during our eventual confrontation, but the opportunity to strap him to his own electric chair and reduce him to a babbling idiot felt like better revenge.

Even the Grand Designs team would struggle to piece his house back together, let alone someone who can’t even spell their own name anymore.

Little did I know that Jindosh would have one last laugh, as just a couple of chapters later I encountered his infamous Jindosh Lock, a sealed door that you can only open by solving a riddle. I could have squeezed some hints out of the local neighbourhood gang lords, but I was determined to solve it peacefully. So I sat there, staring at it. I don’t know how much time passed, but even my monitor got bored waiting, going into sleep mode long before I cracked the combination.

Paper case

Damn you, Jindosh, I thought. This scrambled brainpan isn’t going to get the best of me. So I put my keyboard aside, grabbed a pen and reached for my dusty gaming notebook, something I haven’t touched since scrawling my way through The Witness earlier in the year. I tore out several scraps of paper and made cards for every last variable, shifting them around until, at last, my brain whirred into life.

Admittedly, it was immensely satisfying solving Jindosh’s last remaining masterwork, but it did make me wonder whether I should have been so merciful just a few hours before. I won’t spoil the solution here, but I will say you should definitely start with the alcohol (both literally and figuratively). It helps. A lot.