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Featured reader review by Suskie
October 12, 2012 Every time I play Deus Ex, I find myself wishing there were more games like it. Well, now there's at least one more.Dishonored isn't quite an RPG, but it's enrolled in the same school of game design that gives players a bevy of options and then caters to each and every one of them. It's a game about choices, and not the hollow, color-coded sorts of choices usually restricted to dialog trees, but ultimate freedom over where you go, what you do, and how you go about doing it. It's hardly a fresh concept – the game we're all comparing this one to is over a decade old, after all – but rarely do developers attempt it, and even less frequently do they pull it off as well as Arkane Studios have here.
The game is set in the bizarre ye olde industrial city of Dunwall, in which technology is relatively modern but people still dress and arm themselves like they're living in the 18th century. You play as Corvo, a former bodyguard who's framed for the murder of the beloved Empress, stripped of his title (dishonored, even), and forced to assassinate his way to the center of a massive political conspiracy and so forth. But that's not important. What's important is that you kill people. What's even more important is that maybe you don't. You know a game is up to something when it offers you an achievement for getting through the entire campaign without a single death on your hands, and with Dishonored, that challenge extends to your actual targets. How's that for choice? Here's a game so obviously about killing people that the protagonist wears a freaking skull mask, and you can actually seek out non-lethal methods for making every one of your high-profile hits disappear.
One of the reasons that the kitchen sink approach to game design rarely succeeds is that it multiplies the workload. It's tough enough to make a decent stealth game without having to worry about making a decent shooter at the same time. Predictably, very few of Dishonored's individual ingredients stand up to close scrutiny, but there's a certain newness to the way its elements complement one another. There's a magic system, for example, and the first spell you learn is short-range teleportation: hold the left trigger, point to a location, release, and you're there. It's like parkour without all of that silly climbing – simple, yet it doesn't quite feel like any other platforming mechanic I've ever used and gives Corvo a sense of identity through his mobility. (Good thing, too, since he doesn't talk.) The level design follows suit, as your deceptively uncomplicated objectives are usually embellished with sprawling, open-ended environments that are often delightfully three-dimensional in scope; it's possible to clear large stretches of Dishonored without ever touching the ground, instead creeping across rooftops, over lighting fixtures and through open windows.
While Corvo has enough weaponry to make strightforward combat a possibility, most people will play Dishonored as a stealth game. The RPG elements here appear thin at a glance, but every upgrade you unlock is a potential game-changer that opens a realm of new possibilities as to how you approach an obstacle. A passive ability that turns your victims' corpses to ash, for example, means that you can freely slit people's throats without having to worry about hiding those pesky bodies. While it's a bit cumbersome that weapons and spells can't be dual-wielded (with your sword permanently adhered to your right hand), anyone who makes the effort of combining abilities will stumble upon unconventional solutions. Having the power to stop time in a stealth game has plenty of obvious applications, but one significantly less obvious use is to freeze the world around you, fire off a few well-aimed shots with the crossbow, and watch as your arrows simultaneously lodge themselves in your targets' heads. Bam. You just cleared an entire room full of guards before any of them realized that they were under attack.
It's moments like that – using the tools and paths available to concoct creative means of overcoming challenges – which make it easy to forgive the game's lack of refinement. It's not the shooting or the sneaking or the cutting of throats that makes Dishonored fun. So many games are all about figuring out precisely what the developers intended for you to do. In Dishonored, you'll frequently do things that the developers didn't intend, but it'll work anyway, and it'll be awesome.
But it still leaves us with a game that's unpolished, and I won't act like that's not a problem. As much as I love the teleportation spell, for example, it has a nasty habit of assuring you that you'll land in such-and-such spot only to have Corvo come up a few inches short, fall to the ground, and injure himself in front of a few now very alert guards. The physics system in general has a bad habit of making your best-laid plans go awry, my favorite being when a death-from-above "drop assassination" attempt inexplicably sent me bounding across the room while leaving my intended target unharmed. You should save frequently in Dishonored, partly because it's easy to screw things up, and partly because you never know when the game will screw things up for you.
The bigger issue, or at least the bigger oversight, is how the player's varying levels of aggression affect the direction of the story. Arkane shoehorned an unnecessary moral slider into here, and the game blatantly tells you that more violent behavior will lead to a darker finale. I don't mind multiple endings per se, but each of them needs to provide an appropriately satisfying conclusion to the story. In Dishonored's case, one of the endings is very obviously the one the writers intended for you to see, while the other is, frankly, kinda half-assed. In a game that puts an enormous emphasis on letting players have it their way, it seems awfully contradictory to punish a fair portion of them for doing precisely that.
If there's any upside, it's that the story is weak enough that I didn't particularly care where it wound up to begin with. The inhabitants of Dunwall seem to have no trouble believing that the Empress's most trusted servant would murder her in broad daylight, kidnap her daughter, and then return to the scene in the span of about a minute, and Corvo himself never objects to any of this for the simple reason that he can't talk. Ah, yes: the silent protagonist, the crutch that lazy storytellers have been employing since the video game equivalent of the Bronze Age. This is the scene from which the game derives its very title and already we're rolling our eyes. From there, the game's cartoonish visual style proves deceiving, as there's no wit or spark in any of the dialog to match. Dishonored's look, as vibrant as it often is, feels less like an artistic choice than it does a wasted effort to give Dunwall some degree of distinction.
The good news is that none of this really matters. Plenty of AAA titles these days dump so many resources into overachieving set pieces and big-name actors that they forgo depth and complexity in the process, and as such, it's a satisfying relief to play something that succeeds simply on its own terms, by being creative and intricately designed, and for making players feel intelligent and powerful at once. I wouldn't want every game to be like Dishonored, but I certainly wish more were.
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