The question posed during Dishonored 2’s development which best summarises the end product’s probably “could we do both?” Its levels are ambitious conceptually, but stifle their potential in practice by having to accommodate two characters’ different sets of powers, plus players who forego powers altogether. Its premise tries to expand Dishonored’s world by taking us to a new locale, but ultimately makes it feel smaller by having it revolve around the same five or six people as before. It stresses player agency, but hamstrings it via more rigidly characterised protagonists coupled with a more intrusive focus on clumsier storytelling. Even the box art evokes the root of most of its issues: pulling itself in two directions.

Playing it back-to-back with its predecessor makes this especially apparent in terms of movement. Dishonored 2 adds uncancellable animations to lots of mundane actions which were instantaneous before – e.g. keyhole peeping, vaulting over or on top of obstacles, sliding – and/or makes them more restrictive, significantly limiting the directions in which you can sprint as well as adding roughly a full second of input delay to crouching and standing back up. Assuming immersion was the goal, because it’s hard to imagine what else could be the rationale behind making it so stoppy-starty, these changes only serve to produce the opposite effect; I’m less drawn into the game by a few minor features arguably feeling slightly more tangible than before and much more taken out of it by wondering why superhuman acrobats Emily and Corvo forgot how to jog anywhere but directly forwards, come to a screeching halt whenever they lightly brush against a railing or are only sporadically able see their own legs. Raphaël Colantonio, who conspicuously didn’t direct this game, once discussed how Arkane intentionally avoids putting ladders in their games because they don’t want players to feel like they’re stuck in “modes,” i.e. states in which their options are arbitrarily restricted. That approximate situation’s happening every few steps in Dishonored 2, however briefly, and cumulatively makes for an experience that controls like a boat compared to the first Dishonored’s butter.

To some extent, Dishonored 2’s addition of several new nonlethal tools assuages the constrictiveness brought about by this, but it also unfortunately makes lethal and nonlethal playstyles much more samey. You can now use melee to knock enemies out through several conditions after they’ve spotted or even engaged combat with you, as well as KO them from above with a nonlethal counterpart to drop assassinations – as a result, what little resource management there was is diminished (since this eats into the niche of sleep darts), the degree to which players have to navigate levels differently depending on their lethality’s reduced (counterproductive to how it adds or subtracts the amount of bloodflies and guards) and a nonlethal player generally doesn’t have to worry about any scenarios which a lethal player also doesn’t. Low Chaos runs are no longer about being the bigger man and abstaining from the temptation of inflicting avoidable harm onto those who’ve dishonoured™ you, because Dishonored 2 covers you with a safety net in the name of convenience and lets you do so without worrying about its potential consequences.

This toothlessness extends to its writing and the whiplash-inducing contrast between how little it respects the player’s intelligence versus how much playing it still ultimately does. You’re frequently beaten over the head with definitive, unprompted, often incredibly lame answers to most of what had even the slightest room for interpretation in the first game, a big part of why I found Dishonored’s world so captivating. The Outsider, now recasted to an ill-fitting voice actor who sounds much less characteristically indifferent and aloof, quashes all mystery surrounding his esoteric origins by explaining to you that he’s just some goober who got murdered by a cult some years ago. Jessamine’s spirit now appears to either protagonist of your choosing to confirm that the Heart is hers, because you aren’t trusted to have sussed that out from it sharing her voice or how heavily it alludes to being familiar with them both. The now-voiced protagonists comment on and spoonfeed you everything, delivering such insights as “Corvo must’ve lived here” seconds after CORVO ATTANO’S ABANDONED HOME flashes up on the screen or moping about who manufactured their door locks for some reason, usually within earshot of guards whose selective deafness sticks out like a sore thumb due to how otherwise impressively perceptive they are (exacerbated by the first game’s Daud DLCs not having this problem). It’s distractingly discordant with the hands-off, let-the-player-fill-in-the-gaps style of game design stemming from its Looking Glass lineage and doesn’t make up for it with any layers that even the first game’s fairly straightforward plot still managed to have – for example, how Daud’s guilt-stricken actions indirectly lead to the rat plague being cured.

It'd be fair to say you don’t play Dishonored for its narrative if 2 didn’t emphasise it so much more than its predecessor that it bottlenecks its own mission structure. Being whisked away into unskippable cutscenes for Delilah to deliver spontaneous monologues retconning her own motivations is one thing, but outright preventing the player from progressing through a level’s objectives until they’re forced into an unavoidable encounter with its target (as first occurs in The Good Doctor) is just poisonous for this genre. This is the sequel to a game which has an achievement for pickpocketing a major antagonist unnoticed and without harming him, just to taunt him about how much better of an assassin you are – to picture what it’d be like if that level were in Dishonored 2, either completely remove or lock about a third of its optional areas behind unbreakable doors whose keys are on the opposite end of the map, make obtaining Corvo’s stolen equipment mandatory, forbid the player from completing any other objective until they do, have Corvo moan about how wet it is after looking at a visibly flooded vista and create an unskippable sequence where Daud scuffles with him before subsequently forgetting he was ever there.

Even more than how palpably confused it is, Dishonored 2’s most deflating in its fundamental lack of imagination. Some eejit with a gamerboxd account has no business suggesting what a game with this much talent and money behind it should’ve been about instead, or whether Arkane even had the creative freedom to choose its premise, but this world and a character like the Outsider beg for an anthological approach. All of these issues could well’ve been more tolerable if they were present in a game more interested in its own setting; say, one about an Overseer missionary to Pandyssia who has to balance his faith in addition to the region’s Chaos level or a disgraced captain of Tyvia’s secret police. Of all the avenues they could've explored, how they landed on essentially rehashing the first game’s DLCs is anyone’s guess.

I’m fortunate that revisiting a game’s never once made me think less of it, but this is also the first time where it’s not helped me find anything further to appreciate. I don’t regret playing Dishonored 2 and continue to recommend it to the curious, but these are mostly because (respectively) it’s disappointing on so many levels that it caused me both to reevaluate what I want out of games in the first place as well as be wary of any sequels commonly referred to as better than the original in every way(!!!), and there are so few similar games that you might as well try it anyhow. As a baseline, the industry would be a better place if more games were like it, but it’s only that – both flavours of Arkane proved several times before, and particularly just the year after, that they’re capable of far more than this.