An Eye for the Eyeless

A charge for the warden

I might never have touched this game if it weren’t for my friend telling me about the mechanic where you can listen to the thoughts of rats. Which of course would’ve been a great shame because what an experience it turned out to be! 

My history with the Dishonored series is limited, I played a fairly small amount of the original game and intermittently watched my partner play through the second, catching enough glimpses to become enamoured with aspects of its world – the rats, the whales, the witches but never truly becoming attached to it. Protagonists Corvo and Emily never felt like people I was interested in exploring, in this world of grimy alleys, underworld organisation and cruel monarchs navigating through the eyes of the briefly deposed Empress just seemed distasteful. The leanings on the history of the witch hunts, the reflections of the real world religion and scientific establishments found in Abbey of The Everyman and the Academy of Natural Philosophy who find themselves in allegiance against a collective working class and female coded scourge of “heresy” and “irrationality”. While they were never simply presented as the villains of the world in the other games, the street rats, witches and mystical assassins on the underworld of Dishonored’s world where always in conflict with the upper class agent protagonists on offer. So much of Dishonored felt to me like an incomplete puzzle, a world I desperately wanted to explore but couldn’t find a way in.

Grant us eyes!

Insight is a precious commodity in and around the city of Yharnam. An amusingly literal interpretation of the word leads to some grotesque ideas about “eyes on the inside” being the path to transcending humanity. This obsession drives The Healing Church (the scientific-religious power structure of the city), their grisly labs stocked with jars of eyes for invasive experimental procedures, pursuing communion with the gods by literally putting eyes inside of heads. Signs that this practice may have been harvested from folk traditions lie in the hamlet on the outskirts, populated now by women appearing to harvest parts of corpses for use in rituals of communion. Further still there are the haggard witch-like, dressed in cloaks festooned with eyeballs dotted through the game attempt to literally steal the player’s eyes.