Just as gaming’s best stab at New York lies not with Crysis 2 but in the profound greys of Liberty City, London’s finest digital incarnation is known by another name: Dunwall. Dishonored’s steampunk clock towers and dilapidated docklands are ripped straight from the capital – and what is Samuel the Boatman but a transplanted cabbie?
In acknowledgement of the game’s debt to the city, Arkane art directors Viktor Antonov and Sebastien Mitton have applied Dunwall’s aesthetic and thematics to real-life LDN skyscraper/obelisk The Shard. See the results after the break.
Of particular note are the building’s new metal face and cathedral-like steel buttresses – the industrialised signifiers of creeping totalitarianism that have turned up time and again in Antonov’s work since Half-Life 2’s City 17.
In the spirit of Dishonored’s verticality and freedom of movement, you’ll need to scroll down to see the design in its entirety.