Looking at: Dishonored

Arkane Knowledge

The art style of Dishonored is reminiscent of England in the 1600's, if they were drawn by Norman Rockwell

Creator of Deus Ex, Warren Spctor, once theorized a game that took place in a completely perfectly realized city block or apartment building. A game where everything was reactive to everything else, and every choice created a different outcome. Deus Ex explored this idea back in the mid 90's, but it's 2012's Dishonored that might be the closest to this idea we've ever seen.

Arkane Studios is a company who's work I love, but no one has heard of them. That's fair, since their catalog consists of four games: Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Dishonored, and the upcoming sequel to Dishonored. That's not exactly a great lineup, but whereas some companies need several games to get anything right, Arkane has always been great at making a specific kind of game, namely ones that give the player complete freedom withing enclosed spaces. Does Dishonored continue the grand tradition of open-ended stealth, or does this game deserve a dishonorable discharge?

Frame Job

The world is completely realized, right down to battling religions like the cult of the Outsider.

Dishonored is an open-ended stealth game in the same vein as the old Thief titles. No, not that Thief game, but the good ones, namely Thief and Thief 2. The levels are massive and exploration is encouraged as you search for cash, equipment, and upgrade schematics, all the while dealing with the guards in your way.

The important distinction between Dishonored and Thief is that Dishonored is all about killing people. Sort of. You play as Corvo, former body guard to an Empress who's been accused of her murder. Six months later, you break out of prison to exact revenge on those who wronged you, while trying to rescue the true heir to the throne, the Empress' daughter Emily. Along the way you'll interact with a variety of characters, and while the plot it self isn't anything great, the people you meet feel three dimensional and they all have believable motivations and quirks.

All of this is set during a city-crippling plague which has rendered everyone either dead or turned into a zombie-like weeper. Those who aren't diseased are battling over control of the rest of the city, tossing the whole of Dunwall into complete chaos. This servers a great background, as you enter into the picture on the outside fringes, and you're free to experience the city from all angles as you learn the truth about what happened to the Empress.

More important than the people you meet are the people you kill and, depending on how you approach Dishonored, that can be a lot of people. You are an assassin, and that means you're objective is, with one exception, killing anyone you need to, however you need to. It's in this idea that the true brilliance of Dishonored begins to shine through.

Death from Above, and Below, and Everywhere Else. 

Occasionally your grasp on reality loosens as your powers grow.

Dishonored has some of the most creative, and often hilarious ways of killing someone, thanks to the myriad of tools it provides you to complete your missions. Sure, you can just shoot and stab your way through, or you can stop time, posses a guard, and make him stand in front of his own bullet, or you can knock out one guard, attach a mine to him, then leave him as living bait. There are ways of killing people I still haven`t come up with after almost sixty hours of playing.

That`s the important thing in Dishonored, is the gameplay. It`s awesome. The controls are great, simplistic, and easy to learn, not to mention remapable on PC. The actual game itself is smooth as can be, and it's easy to feel like a complete badass as you zip around the city dispatching targets as you wish. It's fast and fluid, and combo-ing together jumps, slides, and the various powers feels amazing in a way that most stealth games can't match.

There are plenty of tools to use in order to complete your mission, and part of the fun of Dishonored is finding different ways to make them work together. You can re-wire enemy traps to work for you, use grenades and tripmines to eliminate groups of enemies in short order, or stick to your pistol or crossbow and keep some distance. Never mind the sword fighting itself, which is fast and fun, and requires just the right level of skill so actually taking down and enemy or group of enemies feels like a fair fight, provided your not slitting their throats from the shadows.

The gimmick in Dishonored is Corvo's bevy of skills, bolstered by the game's RPG system. The basic spell is blink, a short range teleportation that lets you move around the city free from the confines of the ground. There's other abilities too, like the power to possess any living creature, detect movement, blast wind, slow time, and summon a horde of rats. All of these are great on their own, but again it's finding out how to combo them together that makes them great, like slowing time, possessing a guard, and making him shoot himself, or summoning rats, then possessing one to get through a building grate. Combine this with bone charms that grant small bonuses to seemingly every act you can perform, and there's a good deal of customization to fit your need.

Intricate Skill

Chloe Grace Moretz as Lady Emily, likely the most important character in the game.

The other part of Dishonored that works well is the world itself, both mechanically and artistically. The city of Dunwall is a great big toybox for you to figure out, with crumbling towers, shadowy back alleys, and wide open streets for you to explore and exploit. Dishonored might not be an open-world game, but the levels it offers up are massive and beg for you to explore ever corner, every nook, and every cranny just in case you missed something.

Graphically Dishonored is serviceable. Nothing looks bad, but it's unfortunate how much of the game is static and unchanging. Lighting is great, but it never changes, an oddity in a stealth game, whereas games like Metro: Last Light or the Splinter Cell games always let you manipulate the lights to create shadows. Even the old Thief games had the infamous water arrows to let you dowse torches or firepits, so it's weird that Dishonored elected to have completely static lighting.

Where Dishonored makes up for this in spades is it's artistic direction, which is nothing short of amazing. It's sort of hard to describe the world of Dunwall, think Victorian England, by way of the Dutch West Indies, by way of George Orwell? That's sort of the best I can think of. Let me make this clear, this is not a steam-punk game, despite the mixture of medieval technology and more modern tech. Rather, it's something called whale-punk, specifically because all of the tech in Dunwall is powered by bio-luminescent and chemically unstable whale oil. The overall art direction is so completely weird and awesome that it needs to be experienced to understand.

Character models and animations fare well too. There's a lot of details in the various NPC's from the random people on the street to the disgusting weepers that wander the underground. It's unfortunate that's there's only a small handful of enemies to fight, but the one's on offer each have their own level of skill to contend with, and any more might have thrown off the balance of some fights.

On the audio front Dishonored does a great job of creating the city of Dunwall and bringing it to life. There's a lot of work put into the background sound effects of every small object, and the amount of reactionary audio, both in terms of clangs and bangs to actual dialogue is amazing. Speaking of dialogue, while the script might not always be amazing, the delivery is, with a massive voice cast including talent from Susan Sarandon, Lena Headey, Carrie Fisher, Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Madsen, and Mad Men's John Slattery. All of them give great performances, and help sell their characters, but it's Grace Moretz as Princess Elizabeth that deserve particular mention for her great performance, making you really care about that character.

the most impressive thing about Dishonored is probably it's intricate subsystems that operate behind the scenes throughout the game. Dishonored tracks almost everything you do, and for every action there's a stat associated to it. Specifically how many people, innocent or otherwise, you choose to kill. Run around like a psycho and the world becomes dark and filled with horrors and disease. Choke people out and put them to sleep and Dunwall slowly starts to recover. There are five or so different ways to finish the game, ranging from not killing anyone, to killing everyone and their dogs, so replaying and finding new ways to abuse the system is encouraged.

Other Side of the Coin

Playing as the assassin Daud gives you a new perspective on the game.

As if the basic game wasn't great enough, Dishonored's DLC packs do it great justice by building on the already great ideas present in the vanilla game. In these adventures you play as Daud, an assassin that plays a major role in the main story, exploring his own path and mysteries parallel to the main game. The adjustments made for Daud are awesome, like a blink move that slows time, allowing for better control of your movement, or an expanded roster of non-lethal weapons. Most importantly, Daud speaks, unlike Corvo, making his story much easier to get into and follow, and creates better investment for the character.

There's another DLC that offers several challenges. It's fun enough and offers a good deal of challenge in order to unlock a three star rating, but it doesn't do anything new or exciting. It's similar to the Riddler challenges from the Batman Arkham games, and at the very least offers more Dishonored, which isn't a bad thing at all.

Dishonored is an incredibly rare breed of game, being a stealth action game that actually successfully offers stealth and action in equal measure. More then that, it's one of the most intricate and interactive games I've seen in a long time, letting you have fun with it, and even more fun breaking it. It hearkens back to games that made the stealth genre what it is, like Thief or Deus Ex, and as a spiritual successor to those titles it's amazing.

Dishonored is easily one of the best stealth games on the market today. It's fast, fluid, and fun beyond what the genre usually allows, and that's just enough to set it apart and above a lot of it's own competition. A sequel was announced at this year's E3 and I'm hoping it's going to address some of the minor issues found in the first game. Till then, I'm going to keep on blinking, stabbing, and absolutely breaking this amazing stealth adventure.