They are an id to the ego of the streets. Unlike the tombs and dungeons of tabletop RPGs, sewers exist alongside our daily urban life but unseen, like the city’s subconscious.
We see the flows in, the flows out, and the processes they undergo. As we navigate the space, we glimpse something larger than us. A good sewer level is also environmental storytelling at the scale of systems.Instead, a good sewer level is subtle in its mastery of the craft: geometry, lighting, and textures working in unison. This isn’t the place for the one-off scripted sequence or the expensive art setpiece. In its tunnels, there is quiet and refuge which invites introspection. A good sewer level is a moment to breathe.Yet, there is an appeal to sewer levels that is so hard to achieve: At their worst, a sewer level drags with no end in sight and stretches a game thin. They are the antithesis of playgrounds and sandboxes. They limit the range of gameplay systems and require one right way to play. Too often they are cramped, repetitive, and disorienting. The lighting is also another source of reference from film noir, using diagonal spotlights with sharp parallel lines cutting across it in bars, like The Third Man or Touch of Evil. We also see natural light in neutral white and subtle blue tones, which is there to remind us of the sewer’s relationship to the city above. We see the electric blue lighting of authority playing against the flickering warm light of lamps placed by civilians attempting to live in the sewers.
Lighting creates a dialogue between the forces intersecting with the sewer.This ties into film noir themes of the antihero delving into the shadows. But as we move through the sewer, we see the rot beneath the city, how the dead become food for rats. For those who live on the surface, the sewer is out of sight and out of mind, a dumping ground without consequences. The two run in parallel, and the player must understand this truth about the sewers in order to see the city of Dunwall for all it is. The sewer is interlinked with the city above it.In the earlier parts of the tutorial, we heard about the rat plague, but here through the sewers we see what it means and what it is doing to the city. This is where the game introduces the consequences of the rat plague and shows the rats aren’t just woldbuilding and backdrop, but rather a real system that responds to the player. Several concepts recur throughout the video:
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