REC START
[…a slow, swelling hiss of blank magnetic tape…]
Think how many times you’ve pressed New Game; how many times you’ve replayed the same revenge cycle, the same walk through the streets of Dunwall, hoping that this time you’ll feel something different. Our culture is a machine stuck on a single chord. We can’t imagine a new future, so then with obsessive precision we keep remixing the past. Again and again.
We’ve always assumed we were the consumers of that past. But in the universe of Dishonored, the truth is far more frightening. There, someone devours the past quite literally.
[…a brief electrical surge…]
We’ve been taught to see the Void as a magical dimension; an oneiric afterlife torn from a Lovecraftian nightmare. However, the Void behaves like an ultimate server room: a total archive where time does not flow in a line. It accumulates all at once, layered like some data on a corrupted drive. Not a whisper, not a crime, not a single act of mercy from the last four thousand years ever disappears from it.
And at the very center of this archive, a god levitates; a black-eyed curator practicing cosmic doomscrolling.
In Disco Elysium there is a moment when the fallen detective wakes into absolute nothingness and hears the voice of his own primordial apathy:
There are no days here, just black tape spinning, on repeat, until the end.
— Ancient Reptilian Brain, Disco Elysium
In the world of Dishonored, no one wakes up. Here the tape has been spinning for millennia, and the Outsider is its only listener. He dies of boredom staring into the simulation, desperate to find even a single glitch, the slightest anomaly that might wrench him out of the loop of predictability. Let’s listen to the tape from the beginning.
[…a loud, brutal snap of a mechanical key…]
[REC START]
TRACK 1: Whale Blood Hum
[ ————————————————— 7:30]
Dunwall is often lazily tagged as steampunk. That label is a categorical mistake, one that softens the true horror of this world. In steampunk, the fuel is coal: dead matter, geological residue, something that stopped living and feeling long ago. In Dunwall, the fuel is life. What we have here is whalepunk: a parasitic technology that does not extract inert resources from the earth, but cannibalizes living history.
In this universe, whales are not merely animals. They are liminal beings, living on the threshold between reality and the Void. They are carriers of an ancient song and the world’s memory. When the Empire renders them down for oil, it is not simply harvesting energy. It performs what can only be called cannibalism of history: the distillation of a magical creature’s suffering into industrial power.
Every Wall of Light that shields the aristocracy, and every music box playing at Lady Boyle’s party, runs on the same fuel. The whale strung up on hooks in the Flooded District and the masked ball in Dunwall Tower are separated by distance, but energetically they are identical scenes. Dunwall is a city that quite literally burns its mystical past in furnaces to warm the present.
[…static…]
To understand this mechanism of repression, we need Gaston Bachelard’s metaphore of the house. Bachelard divided the home into vertical spheres: the rational garret and the irrational, shadowed cellar. The garret is the space of consciousness which stands for light, order, clarity. The cellar is what has been pushed outside awareness: primitive fears, darkness, the unsaid.
Dunwall is exactly such a house. In the attic we have Dunwall Tower, masked balls, the Academy of Natural Philosophy, and clean streets patrolled by the City Watch. It is the façade of civilization: rational, illuminated, modern.
But the garret exists only because beneath it a monstrous Cellar is at work. The cellar is the Flooded District. The Cellar is the slaughterhouses, where whales are carved apart alive, their cries drowned out by industrial machinery. The Cellar is the slums, where the rat plague devours the poor while the elites upstairs drink wine and discuss art.
The relationship is simple and cruel: the garret can be beautiful only because the cellar absorbs all the dirt, blood, and horror. Dunwall’s elites do not have to look at the death that powers their comfortable lives. The system runs on spatial repression. What is brutal is hidden. What is aesthetic is displayed. This is the essence of necropolitics in this world: the management of death, of whales, of the poor, of those consumed by the rat plague is concealed, industrialized, and turned into a resource that remains invisible to those who benefit from it.
[…recording continues…]
The Outsider, as a being of the Void, is inseparable from the Cellar. He sees both spaces at once: the garret and the cellar, the masquerade and the whale butcher’s floor. For him there is no repression. Everything is transparent, accessible, recorded on the tape for four thousand years. And that is why the Outsider knows that Emily Kaldwin’s “golden age”, if it arrives along the low-chaos path, is, in truth, merely an era in which the slaughterhouse runs at peak efficiency. The Empire does not stop killing whales. It simply does it so smoothly that death becomes invisible. And this system, this mechanism of repression, this symbiotic relationship between the garret and the cellar repeats itself across millennia. The Outsider has watched hundreds of “golden ages.” Every one of them was fueled by the same blood. \
[Track fades into a loop…]
[ ————————————————— 7:30]
LOOP 1
[…tape rewinds…]
So here’s the question: did I manage to slip out of the archive in writing about the Outsider trapped inside that archive? Or did I only expand it, add another shelf, another reel? \
And you?
After you finish this, will you reload a save and play it again?
Or will you press [ERASE].
Time doesn’t flow here from beginning to end.
The tape is searching for the right place.
[…loop continues…]
TRACK 2: The boredom of a God
[ ————————————————— 12:45 ]
The Void in Dishonored is an infinite Netflix, an endless Spotify, a bottomless YouTube feed. In truth, it is a total archive in the understanding of Simon Reynolds’s through his Retromania. It is not merely a “magical place,” nor simply another dimension the Outsider happens to inhabit. In the Void, no information is ever lost. Every murder, whisper, betrayal, ritual, and theft committed over the last four thousand years has been saved and uploaded into a cloud of data. And all of it remains available to the levitating god.
This is also the Outsider’s deepest agony. He is cognitively bored, because for four millennia he has seen everything there is to be seen. As the curator of the total archive, the Outsider searches the world for anything that might still surprise him. The absurd boredom of having watched every possible variation of revenge, greed, and good deed produces a desire to escape. And in the Void itself, time is not linear but simultaneous: the past displaces the present, leaving no room for anything original. Everything lies within reach of the black-eyed god. He sees the possible branches of history, but he sees them as an endless chain of repetitions and remixes. He knows every revenge motif, every arrangement of betrayal.
So what is he looking for? He is looking for a premiere; that is a moment that isn’t simply the replay of an old script. In a world of total archiving, where everything has already happened, the only value left is what Reynolds would call an impossible newness. The Outsider longs to witness a track that doesn’t yet exist in his database.
[…the tape hiss intensifies…]
That is why the Outsider hands out his toys in the form of the Mark. It is not the gift of a benevolent deity. It is not a reward for good deeds, nor a punishment for wrongdoing. It is the act of a desperate, bored interactive spectator; one who slips his actors a new prop. The Mark is an attempt to force an error in the system. The Outsider is searching for someone who will play against the algorithm he knows by heart. He might as well say, to every chosen one, “Surprise me,” as a farewell.
It is a quiet request yet also a pleading one: a wish to break the loop of predictability. That is why, when Corvo spares Daud at the end of The Flooded District, the Outsider says:
And Daud - the man who killed the Empress. You had him in the palm of your hand, and you let him walk away? You fascinate me.
— The Outsider, Dishonored
In that precise moment, the Outsider is genuinely surprised. This is the kind of rupture he wanted. But it is only a partial rupture. Just a small dent in the vast building of Dishonored’s simultaneous history.
And this is where we enter. Whether as Corvo in the first game, or, by choice, as Emily in the second, we arrive as a tabula rasa. The Outsider appears with his black-eyed stare and a brief, almost casual: Surprise me. The spectator counts the seconds and waits for a new quality, a new angle. And yet the game’s core mechanics, along with its Low/High Chaos narrative split, turn out to be a trap with no exit, the very trap Simon Reynolds diagnosed in pop music. New songs are addicted to their past. There is no fresh wind of the kind once carried by jazz, rock’n’roll, or electro. Pop is endlessly ground down, recycled, archived, remixed. The same familiar cliché plays on repeat. And the Outsider knows it too.
[…distorted recording…]
High Chaos is carnage. A slasher film. Killing, burning, flinging blades. None of it truly changes the structure. It is a bloody remix of an old track. The system remains the same; it simply screams louder, and the stage is covered with blood. The foundations do not shift. As players, we move inside a revenge narrative, only played with more speed, more spectacle. This is not a road into a new future. It is the aestheticization of old violence in the name of restoring the “rightful” owner to the throne or restoring the self.
You only need to look at what the Outsider says to Emily on the High Chaos path during Death to the Empress:
Moving through Karnaca, you left a trail of corpses at your back, but in Dunwall, Delilah has amassed her own pile of bodies. All hail the empress, assuming there are any subjects left to rule.
— The Outsider, Dishonored 2
Here the Outsider places Emily’s actions in Karnaca beside Delilah’s actions in Dunwall, implying an equivalence between them. In his eyes, High Chaos Emily becomes just another tyrant, only marginally more dynamic. Her reign and solutions are built on violence. Emily becomes Delilah’s mirror. If the Outsider was searching for a glitch, for a break in the loop, he does not find it on the High Chaos path. Bodies pile up, and all it does is confirm what he already suspected. Instead of fascination and surprise - the tone he uses in Low Chaos - we get a bitter summary of slaughter. It is also, verbally, the shrug of a cosmic deity bored to death: the actor chose the most familiar script.
[…rewinding to the start…]
Low Chaos, meanwhile, is widely regarded as the “good ending”; a glorious triumph of what Svetlana Boym would call restorative nostalgia. Our goal as players is to clean up the mess and restore the status quo. This time we do not stage a massacre; we move quietly, on tiptoe. On the Low Chaos path, the world returns almost unchanged to the shape it held before the game began.
In the first installment, Emily returns to the throne from which the Lord Regent had cast her down, and before that, her mother. The Flooded District is drained. Gangs are suppressed. The city returns to order. In the second game there are more options, but the outcome is still gentle, just, and broadly wonderful. Emily receives her epithets: the Just, the Clever. Karnaca begins to recover. These are unambiguously good developments, and yet they fit perfectly into the cycle the world has already taught us. After the storm, the expected looped state returns.
And yet the Outsider, in his own way, prefers the Low Chaos solution. As he admits in Return to the Tower, when Burrows is arrested:
I’ve lived a long, long time, and these are the moments I wait for.
— The Outsider, Dishonored
Why this fascination, when the end state is so predictable? Because it is the method, not the outcome. For a bored god who has watched thousands of blood-soaked revenge scripts, the refusal to kill is a behavioural anomaly. Low Chaos is a glitch in the algorithm of human nature. Mercy is revolutionary precisely because it steps outside the species-determinism of the revenge story. The Outsider does not rejoice at peace; he rejoices because his “actor” improvised. Because the actor refused to play the standard role.
More than that: our obsession with the perfect run – the famous Ghost/Clean Hands – becomes the final proof of our imprisonment in the archive. The Outsider does not only see our successes. He sees our reloads. Every quick load is an act of censorship. We erase mistakes, rewind the tape, edit reality until it matches a nostalgic image of the perfect hero. For the Outsider, our “ideal playthrough” is, in fact, pop culture at its most manipulated and artificial stage.
And here we reach the Outsider’s tragic irony. The very glitch that fascinates him, the revolutionary gentleness, ultimately repairs the world and seals the loop. The interesting route (Low Chaos) leads to the dullest destination: a stable empire in which there is no longer room for divine interventions. By satisfying the Outsider’s curiosity, the player simultaneously deprives him of a reason to keep watching. The anomaly is absorbed into the archive. The world returns safely to its starting point, ready for another identical cycle.
[Track fades into a loop…]
[ ————————————————— 12:45 ]
LOOP 2
[…tape rewinds…]
So here’s the question: did I manage to slip out of the archive in writing about the Outsider trapped inside that archive? Or did I only expand it?
And you?
After you finish this, will you reload a save and play it again?
Or will you press [ERASE].
TRACK 5: The Anniversary Loop
[…the tape counter jumps…]
[ ————————————————— 24:45 ]
[…record skipping… the same fragment playing over and over…]
Imagine the Outsider getting a push notification instead of levitating in the Void: \
Hey. It’s been ten years since Dishonored. Remember?
That is what an anniversary post really is. It isn’t a celebration of history. It is the archive sending a signal to its users: check whether you’re still inside.
The algorithm doesn’t ask what you’ve done with those ten years. It asks whether you still feel the same as you did back then. Whether you are still the same player, the same consumer, the same data point. And we answer en masse. We comment: \
They don’t make games like this anymore. I’d play a remake.
Every such comment is an act of archiving your own identity. We throw ourselves into the Void. We freeze the moment when we were younger and something moved us and we treat that freezing as a substitute for moving forward.
This is what Reynolds called retromania: a condition in which culture can no longer produce a present. It produces only anniversaries. Anniversaries are the Void’s infrastructure in the real world, places where time officially stops, and everyone pretends it’s a feast.
The Outsider would understand. He has been stuck in one vast anniversary post for four thousand years.
[…the sound of a clock ticking, but not moving forward…]
And now we come back to you again – an Outsider in front of a screen. You are the one who clicks Like. You are the one who shares the post, feeling that sweet sting of sadness for the time when you were younger. You are like an aristocrat at Lady Boyle’s party: having a wonderful time, ignoring the fact that the music you’re dancing to was composed a decade ago, and no one has written anything new.
Anniversary posts are proof of the victory of capitalist realism. We have convinced ourselves the best has already happened. That the “golden age” is over, and all that remains is archiving and remembering. That nothing better than Dishonored can be imagined now, so we must celebrate its birthday until the end of the world.
[ ————————————————— 25:30 ]
[…loop continues…]
LOOP 3
[…tape rewinds…]
So here’s the question: did I manage to slip out of the archive in writing about the Outsider trapped inside that archive? Or did I only expand it?
And you?
After you finish this, will you reload a save and play it again?
Or will you press [ERASE]. \
TRACK 4: The hard reset
[…seeking… seeking…]
[ ————————————————— 21:15 ]
[…mechanical grinding… the sound of a tape jamming…]
The world of Dishonored keeps circling the same axis, no matter whether you choose High or Low Chaos. It is a macro-loop. The system needs a third exit. Not revisionism, but revolution. Not the aristocracy returned to the throne, but someone who has nothing at all.
Billie Lurk marches in. A character with nothing to lose, because she owns nothing. She is not an aristocrat fighting to reclaim ancestral treasures. She is an error in the system. Billie does not want power over the Void’s total archive. She wants to pull the plug.
The final choice – to kill the Outsider or to spare him – is morally secondary. What matters is the ontological effect: the loop is broken.
Benjamin had his Angel of History: a being flying backwards into the future, face turned toward the ruins. It would like to stop, to clean up, to stitch things back together. It cannot as the storm carries it onward; the storm we call progress.
The Outsider is an angel the storm bypassed. He stands. For four thousand years he has stood and watched ruins that keep accumulating, yet never carry him forward. The Void is the place where progress loses continuity. That is why the Outsider does not long for the future. He looks at the present with the boredom of someone who has watched it a thousand times.
As long as he watches, the world is condemned to hauntology: to whale oil, to magic as fuel, to Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” as the only available horizon. The Outsider is the guarantee that the future remains cancelled.
Billie Lurk does not kill a god. She lets him go, returns him to the stream of time that has flowed past the Void for four millennia. Or she simply switches off the tape.
[…the audio warbles, slowing down…]
Look at his clothes. Four thousand years have passed, and the Outsider still looks the same as he did on the day of the ritual. His outfit is not even out of step with contemporary Dunwall fashion. Why? Because in this world, time is not linear. It is Simon Reynolds’s dyschronia: a state in which the past devours the present. The Void froze the world’s aesthetic at the moment its god was born. The Outsider is the embodiment of history’s recycling, a living proof that civilization has stopped developing.
Billie Lurk, armed with a twin-bladed knife, does not commit a Greek-style deicide. She formats a drive. Whether she sinks steel into the god’s heart or restores his name, which is his most archaic trauma, the effect is the same. The witness is removed. The record on history’s turntable, the one that has been playing the same track for four thousand years, is smashed.
The simulation powers down. Runes become ordinary bones. The fantasy overlay vanishes.
[…absolute silence… the background hum stops…]
What remains after the format? Ontological homelessness.
All through the series we have lived in two houses. The first was “Mother’s House” – the Empire and its social structure. The second was “Father’s House” – the Outsider, a comfortable scapegoat and a supplier of toys (powers). When Billie Lurk makes her cut, both houses cease to exist on the metaphysical level.
We lose the magical patron. We lose the excuse: the devil made me do it. A world without the Outsider becomes unbearably material, grey, and… final. But it is precisely at this moment that Mark Fisher’s curse is broken. The future stops being cancelled.
Homelessness is terrifying because it means there is no shelter in the familiar patterns of the past. There is no return to the “golden age” (Low Chaos). There is no romantic rebellion (High Chaos). There is only the raw present. Time, which until now stood still or looped inside the Void, finally begins to move forward, linearly.
The people of Dunwall and Karnaca wake into a world where there is no magic to fix their mistakes. They must invent tomorrow, because yesterday has just ended for good. And that is the only true victory available in this world: not winning the game, but ending it.
Billie Lurk gives us that “end of the world.” But cutting the power in the Void is not an apocalypse. It is an act of the highest emancipation. With the Outsider’s death, the people of Dunwall recover something the system hid from them for millennia: political and historical agency.
Ontological homelessness is the price one pays for freedom from the algorithm.
[ ————————————————— 21:15 ]
LOOP 4 - CORRUPTED
[…tape rewinds…]
So the question is: in writing about the Outsider trapped in the archive, did I manage to…
[…static…]
[…corruption detected…]
ERASE
After four thousand years, the Outsider stops watching. The tape is erased. The Void falls silent. For the first time in four millennia, the world of Dishonored has a future.
Dishonored was released in 2012.
Dishonored 2 was released in 2016.
Death of the Outsider was released in 2017.
I am writing this essay in 2026.
This, too, is a kind of anniversary post. I’m rewinding the tape as well. So the question returns: did I manage to slip out of the archive in writing about the Outsider trapped inside that archive? Or am I only adding another soundtrack to the Void’s looping track?
Press [ERASE] and begin again.
[…the tape hiss fades…]
[Silence.]
[…]
[REC]
Bibliography
These particular books affected the overall shape of the article
- Mark Fisher - Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
Fisher’s concept of “hauntology” is the theoretical spine of this essay. The essay argues that Dunwall exists in a hauntological state where the past refuses to die and the future cannot arrive. Fisher’s “slow cancellation of the future” describes both the Void’s temporal structure and our contemporary gaming culture’s inability to produce genuinely new experiences.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Fisher’s diagnosis of “capitalist realism” - the widespread belief that there is no alternative to the current system—frames the essay’s analysis of Dunwall’s necropolitics. The essay argues that as long as the Outsider watches, the world is condemned to this condition: whale oil remains the only fuel, and every “golden age” is simply a more efficient slaughterhouse.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Simon Reynolds - Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
Reynolds’s concept of the “total archive” is essential to understanding the Void as an infinite Netflix where nothing is ever lost. The essay uses his diagnosis of pop culture’s addiction to recycling to analyze both the Outsider’s boredom and our gaming culture’s obsession with remasters, remakes, and anniversary posts rather than creating new futures.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space
Bachelard’s metaphor of the house divided into rational garret and irrational cellar structures the essay’s analysis of Dunwall’s necropolitics. Track 1 uses this framework to expose how the city’s beautiful façade (Dunwall Tower, masked balls) exists only because a monstrous cellar (slaughterhouses, the Flooded District) absorbs all violence and death.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Walter Benjamin - Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Benjamin’s image of the Angelus Novus - the angel of history with face turned toward the past, unable to stop and repair ruins - is invoked to explain the Outsider’s ontological condition. The essay argues that the Outsider is an angel the storm of progress bypassed: he stands for 4000 years watching ruins accumulate, unable to move forward.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Svetlana Boym - The Future of Nostalgia
Boym’s concept of “restorative nostalgia” - the desire to reconstruct a lost homeland—is used to analyze the Low Chaos ending. The essay argues that restoring Emily to the throne is not revolutionary but nostalgic: a fantasy of returning to an idealized past rather than imagining a genuinely new future.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link