Shall we gather for whiskey and cigars tonight? Indeed, I believe so.
First played in 2014, replaying in 2025. A strange game to revisit in the post-COVID world, where speculative fiction plot points about plandemics have taken on a very different valence. (See also Utopia (2014).)
For all that, it’s one of the more accurate depictions of societal response to an epidemic that I’ve encountered. Stupid rats… Plague… Elixir… Buncha crap.
Famous for its low/high chaos morality system, and to a somewhat lesser degree for the odd or unpleasant ways that can play out—judging morality based on the act of death rather than, for example, sending someone to a fate of sexual slavery and getting positive morality points for it due to the fact it’s the “non-lethal” option for target elimination.
Also famous for delivering “whalepunk” as a complete-on-arrival, batteries-included aesthetic bearing surface-level similarities with steampunk but with a very different relationship to technology and organic materials, and one that, IMO, ages a lot better than the by-now-much-maligned “hat with a gear on it” cringe. It has had an outsized influence via serving as a major touchstone for Blades in the Dark and, by extension, all the TTRPGs that have come after it.
I have a deep fondness for this game, despite its flaws. It was one of the first “grown-up” (i.e. not a Nancy Drew PC game or on the Wii) games I ever played. It got me into the stealth genre. The vision of Dunwall as a grimy, dystopian Victorian London with less colonialism and Christianity and more whalebone-based occultism is extraordinarily compelling, even if the story beats and dialogue are at times quite clunky. (Not always, mind. It struck me on replay the degree to which the lines given to Daud and the Whalers, in particular, are bangers on bangers.)
The games are also notable for a treatment of historicalish-fantasy-with-less-patriarchy-than-real-life that doesn’t feel totally confusing and internally inconsistent. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone purely on this basis, particularly as sexual exploitation of women is still textually present, but it’s a comparison point against which many other fantasy works published in the last 15 years are found wanting.
The Overseers are quite fascinating to me and I really enjoy them from a lore perspective
“I love that mark on your hand” at the Boyle party, Vera Moray, the barely suppressed presence of Outsider worship in all its ambivalent forms
DAUDDDDDDDDDDD & my journey to becoming a Daud liker