When you arrive at a floor, the doors open with a cacophonous ding and can often alert nearby guards. Closing the doors does not mean sealing yourself in, as much as briefly containing your movement within a loud and conspicuous box. By their very design, they are open and exposed to the level. With few exceptions, the elevators in the game, in accordance with its Victorian aesthetic, are antique-looking cage elevators. That these long, confined pauses double as loading points for the next area only further serves to mark their isolation from the rest of the game.ĭishonored 2 does something different with its elevators. Mass Effect infamously features over-long elevator rides complete with muzak and strained conversations.
Portal uses elevators as a literal demarcation between one test chamber and the next. Games tend to uphold this understanding of elevators by employing them by and large as punctuation between levels. Elevators are spaces that are extraneous to where we want to be and what we want to be doing. Forced inside these cramped spaces, we struggle at awkward, stilted conversation as we wait interminably for our floors to arrive. They exist well outside of the bounds of architectural and social convention. It was at this point I realized that Dishonored 2’s elevators were special.Įlevators in games as well as real life are inherently liminal spaces. Videogame convention made me consider them indestructible, but the cables gave way easily to a quick sword strike, sending the elevator hurtling down and through the ground floor and opening up an entirely new area that had previously been inaccessible. Glancing to my left at the open elevator shaft bordering the attic, I suddenly noticed the thick cables mooring the elevator to the roof. There was one remaining rune that, for the life of me, I could not find. Aside from the creepy sentimental value, I was using it to spy out the collectible runes and bone charm power-ups scattered around the building. During a recent session playing Arkane’s Dishonored 2 I found myself stuffed into the attic crawl space of the Addermire Institute with my dead lover’s heart in my hand.
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