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. 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. There was one remaining rune that, for the life of me, I could not find. Glancing to my left at the open elevator shaft bordering the attic, I suddenly noticed the thick cables mooring the elevator to the roof. 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. It was at this point I realized that Dishonored 2’s elevators were special.
Elevators in games as well as real life are inherently liminal spaces. They exist well outside of the bounds of architectural and social convention. Forced inside these cramped spaces, we struggle at awkward, stilted conversation as we wait interminably for our floors to arrive. Elevators are spaces that are extraneous to where we want to be and what we want to be doing.
Games tend to uphold this understanding of elevators by employing them by and large as punctuation between levels. Portal uses elevators as a literal demarcation between one test chamber and the next. Mass Effect infamously features over-long elevator rides complete with muzak and strained conversations. 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.
Dishonored 2 does something different with its elevators. With few exceptions, the elevators in the game, in accordance with its Victorian aesthetic, are antique-looking cage elevators. By their very design, they are open and exposed to the level. Closing the doors does not mean sealing yourself in, as much as briefly containing your movement within a loud and conspicuous box. When you arrive at a floor, the doors open with a cacophonous ding and can often alert nearby guards. Luckily the maintenance workers of Serkonos are all equally absent-minded and you can beat a quick escape through the roof hatch and over the heads of the oblivious sentries. Better still to use the loudness of the elevator as a distraction by sending it to a floor you aren’t on or even crashing down the shaft. …continue reading on Paste