So just yesterday I beat Dishonored, one of the best new IPs to come out of 2012 and a game very similar to Thief and other stealth-assassination games. Backstory: You are Corvo, the bodyguard to the Empress who was sent on a mission to find a cure for the plague that terrorizes your home city of Dunwall. You return empty handed, and as you are discussing your results with the Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, she is assassinated and you take the blame. It is up to you to get revenge upon the men who framed you and to put Emily, the rightful heir, on the throne.
When I first fired up the game, I instantly felt myself drawn into the world of Dunwall and felt the plight of citizens facing the plague. The very first optional mission presented to the player in the game is to play hide-and-seek with Emily, the Empress’s daughter. This is a great minigame as it teaches the player to value stealth as a key tactic in the game and allows you to connect with an important character in the story. I instantly fell for Emily as a daughter/child figure and felt for this poor girl who lost her mother.
Dishonored does a great job of pacing throughout the game, starting off with its tutorial mission that does not feel like a tutorial at all but rather a dashing escape from prison. At first I was a bit frustrated with the controls of the game as there was only one control option that mapped sprinting to a button rather than pushing down an analogue stick, but I’ll chock that up to one of the pains of console gaming. The missions are very thorough, each one providing a multitude of paths and methods to complete them and ultimately take care of our target. I could either take possession of a rat and slip through a small grate to get past the guards, or I could simply jump from rooftop to rooftop.
How can you not love that adorable face?
One memorable mission was “Lady Boyle’s Last Party”, in which Corvo has to assassinate Lady Boyle who is hosting a party. The issue is, there are three Lady Boyle’s and there are hosting a masquerade ball. Because Corvo always wears a mask you are able to enter easily enough, but finding the right Lady Boyle proves entertaining. In my playthrough I schmoozed with the elites at the party gaining information on which Lady Boyle was wearing what color and eventually found her. I offered to go “upstairs” with her and promptly choked her. (No, it wasn’t consensual) I then gave her to a nice gentleman on a boat who loved her and no blood would be shed.
The reason there exist so many tactics in Dishonored is due to the various abilities available to the player. In the game there exist six powers: Blink, Possession, Dark Vision, Devouring Swarm, Bend Time, and Wind Blast. Blink is essentially short teleportation, Possession allows you to control animal and, if powered up, people. Dark Visions lets you see through walls and cones of vision. Devouring Rats summons a horde of rats to devour your enemies. Bend Time lets you slow down, and even stop, time, and Wind Blast is pretty self-explanatory. (shoot wind out of your hands)
Because I was attempting to take the “good” or non-lethal route, my playthrough mostly consisted of Blinking around, sneaking past guards using Dark Vision, and occasionally Possessing a rat to get into a hard to reach room. While Dishonored gives you many weapons such as a sword, crossbows, grenades, and mines, there were only two weapons available to my playthrough: sleep darts and chocking from behind. The worst part is, you can upgrade the amount of darts your crossbow can hold but it doesn’t increase the amount of sleep darts you can hold! I don’t know if that was a bug or a design decision but it certainly makes the low chaos ending harder to achieve. However, that makes it all he more satisfying when you complete the game and I feel that having only those two options did not make the game that more difficult. (I was playing on Hard if you’re interested)
The game’s AI was pretty satisfying, with them appropriately responding to collapsed allies or noises. Dogs especially were annoying, as they were not worth using a sleep dart on but unfortunately you can’t choke out a dog. (Massive oversight by the developers, I could totally choke out a dog.) All of the characters present int he game felt very human and were well written, I could see compassion, greed, nobility, and even a bit of perversion in the characters. *cough Piero cough* The game even introduces religion in the form of “The Outsider”, a supernatural being who can invade your dreams and grant superpowers to those he deems worthy. Books and pamphlets throughout the game also provide a rich canon with many ideas and options open for a sequel.
Overall, I was quite satisfied with Dishonored. The gameplay and missions were all well done and thoughout, the story is engrossing and involved, and the characters are deep and relatable. MY only main gripe would be the disappointing ending, which was not disappointing because it was “bad” per say, merely that it was very abrupt and did not seem to meet the standards that had been placed on the story up to that point. However, I still look forward to another game set in the universe of Dunwall because games like Dishonored as hard to come-by these days. A truly great IP with unique gameplay that I hope to see more of in the future.
The DMG-04 