The origins of this mongrel style begin to emerge when I speak to art director Sebastien Mitton. Its use of art nouveau comes alongside hints of art deco, layers of gothic revival, all amid designs cribbed from Victorian industry and colonial extravagance. Yet this does not describe Dishonored 2 ’s Karnaca. In this turn, art nouveau architects would, for a short 30 years or so, fill their cities with curving, imaginative forms.
They are an unmistakable signature of art nouveauĮach gestures towards the focused aesthetics of art nouveau, marked by a turn away from the academic and scientific towards expressive ornament. It’s a style that is echoed across Karnaca, from counterweighted table lamps to the strange typewriters that perch mantis-like on lacquered desks. They are an unmistakable signature of art nouveau, that total style of decoration and design whose organic forms and undulating curves flowered in the late 19th century. Take those curved mullions, set three quarters of the way up the sash windows of Karnaca’s sheer-faced blocks. They gather to form a visual map imprinted piece-by-piece in the player’s mind, as they turn the camera this way and that, down back alleys and up toward balconies, on their restless journey.īut the pieces that make up this image aren’t just fanciful shapes, picked from thin air by a designer’s idle mind they are instead extrapolations of images and ideas that lurk all around us.
Like a thousand other details that litter the streets of this imagined city, Karnaca’s arches, windows, and alcoves conspire to create a distinct sense of place. You might not notice them when you first set foot in Dishonored 2 ’s Karnaca, but you’ll sur ely feel them. Those curves lend a romantic lightness to the architecture they are set into. I first noticed it in the windows: their subtle, curving mullions that rise and fall like waves.
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