a few of yall are reblogging this and tagging it ‘the flooded district” and I’m really curious as to who hurt you guys

Okay but The Flooded District is simultaneously the thematic lynchpin of the game and a fever-dream-esque interlude where everything that nominally drives the plot takes a brief vacation.

In terms of atmospheric storytelling it is Dishonored’s masterpiece. All the other missions are about the Loyalists’ plot, but The Flooded District is about Dunwall. About the people who live between the cracks of “real” society (or are shoved there unwillingly), about the limits of the political power that seems so all-consuming during the rest of the game, about the physical alteration of the very landscape. I think the contrast brings the rest of the game out more clearly.

It’s a world within a world, a place from which few escape, and your only real goal is to get out. You can leave your equipment behind, you can skip interacting with Daud altogether, and I think you can grab Granny Rags’s key and sprint off without finishing her fight. The Flooded District’s overwhelming apartness is the key to the experience. The Flooded District is when Corvo is furthest from everything he cares about. Nothing he does there can directly impact the main plot and that’s wonderful.

Every one of its setpieces hammers home the theme of choice, even moreso than the rest of Dishonored. Your choices are more “purely yours” in a sense because they are so disconnected from your overarching goals. For instance, all of Corvo’s other non-lethal eliminations still have to be eliminations, hence all the poetic justice and fates (arguably) worse than death. In contrast, The Flooded District the only mission is which Corvo gets the chance to dispense true mercy, no strings attached.

I get the appeal of Lady Boyle’s Last Party, I really do, but The Flooded District is the heart and soul, bleak though it is, of Dishonored.