inFAMOUS 2: The Real New Orleans Behind New Marais

New Marais is fictional, but it begins in a real landscape: the game opens at the Swamp Blockade, an island northwest of the city, in the middle of the Louisiana bayous. Cole, Zeke and Kuo have sailed south after the Beast destroyed Empire City; later, when Wolfe is taken, Zeke suggests Kuo may be in the marshes, and Cole meets the Conduit Nix there. The swamps have little electricity for Cole to draw on, and the water hurts him. Bayou St. John, a surviving bayou inside New Orleans, drained much of the city's early swamp into Lake Pontchartrain, and a French fort guarded its lake end from 1701.

Location precision: New Marais's swamps are fictional; the pin marks Bayou St. John, a surviving Louisiana bayou inside New Orleans.

Visitor guidance: The bayou's banks form a narrow park space in the city.

Ville Cochon is New Marais's red-light and entertainment district, the busiest part of the city and the one Sucker Punch built with many parallels to New Orleans' French Quarter. Cole arrives to find the anti-Conduit demagogue Joseph Bertrand III already in control, his Militia running the streets. The French Quarter is the oldest neighbourhood in New Orleans: the city grew around the Vieux Carré after its founding in 1718, and most of the surviving buildings date from Spanish rule or the early 19th century. Bourbon Street is its best-known strip, and the whole district is a National Historic Landmark.

Location precision: New Marais is fictional; the pin marks the French Quarter, which the game's Ville Cochon explicitly parallels.

Visitor guidance: The French Quarter is a walkable National Historic Landmark district in central New Orleans; Bourbon Street is its busiest strip.

Ascension Parish is the oldest district in New Marais and its historic quarter: a cemetery, a cathedral, a colonial-era fort and antebellum plantations all sit inside it. Cole fights through a blackout zone to restore its power, and when the last transformer comes back, the parish lights up. The city's cemeteries are the model: most graves in the St. Louis cemeteries are above-ground vaults from the 18th and 19th centuries. St. Louis No. 3, opened in 1854, fronts Esplanade Avenue near Bayou St. John; its marble tombs are more elaborate than the others, and it flooded badly after Katrina but its tombs survived.

Location precision: New Marais is fictional; the pin marks St. Louis No. 3, one of the city's above-ground cemeteries.

The game's Ascension Parish also holds old plantation houses, one of the New Orleans ingredients Sucker Punch listed alongside the French Quarter and the above-ground cemeteries. Oak Alley is the classic example: a sugar plantation on the west bank of the Mississippi at Vacherie, named for the double row of live oaks, about 800 feet long, that leads from the house to the river. The Greek Revival mansion was finished in 1839, with 28 Doric columns to match the 28 oaks. Josephine Stewart left it to the Oak Alley Foundation in 1972, and it opened to the public.

Location precision: New Marais is fictional; the pin marks Oak Alley, a preserved Mississippi sugar plantation.

Visitor guidance: Oak Alley is at Vacherie on the west bank of the Mississippi; the house and grounds are open to the public.

Ascension Parish has a fort, and late in the story Cole and his rebel allies storm it in several waves. The first job is to knock out four turrets in the middle of the fighting; after the fort falls, Cole chooses between Kuo's ice powers and Nix's fire powers. Fort Jackson is a real example of those Civil War forts: a masonry fort built between 1822 and 1832 to defend New Orleans, 40 miles upriver from the Mississippi's mouth. In April 1862 Farragut's fleet besieged it for twelve days, and Katrina later put it under more than 30 feet of water.

Location precision: New Marais is fictional; the pin marks Fort Jackson, a real Civil War fort built to defend New Orleans.

Visitor guidance: Fort Jackson is about 70 miles south of New Orleans in Plaquemines Parish; the grounds are open and the interior only occasionally.

Flood Town, once called Bellevue, is a residential district left flooded and ruined by a hurricane four years before the game; the water is still deep enough that Cole, crackling with electricity, is in constant danger there. A reviewer called it Katrina-ravaged, and the pin marks its closest real parallel, the Lower Ninth Ward. On 29 August 2005 Katrina's levee wall broke in several places and flooded the ward; nowhere in the city was the devastation greater. Seventy-two bodies had been found there by December 2005, and households fell from 4,820 in 2000 to about 1,060 in 2010.

Location precision: New Marais is fictional; the pin marks the Lower Ninth Ward, the district Katrina flooded worst.

Visitor guidance: The Lower Ninth Ward is in eastern New Orleans, across the Industrial Canal.

The game's cathedral is St. Ignatius, and in Festival of Blood Cole goes underneath it and is bitten by a vampire. In the main story the last fight climbs to a church tower, where Cole activates the RFI and ends the game. In the good ending he dies, and New Marais names him its Patron Saint. St. Louis Cathedral is the real New Orleans cathedral: the first church on the site went up in 1718, the present building dates mainly to 1850, and it faces Jackson Square and the Mississippi. It is the oldest cathedral in continuous use in the United States.

Location precision: New Marais is fictional; the pin marks St. Louis Cathedral, the real cathedral of New Orleans.

Visitor guidance: St. Louis Cathedral faces Jackson Square in the French Quarter.