A few people who know me also might know that Deus Ex ranks as probably my favorite game of all time. The open-ended levels that allow for multiple play-styles, the conspiracy-laden story with a strong cast of characters, the intelligently-applied RPG mechanics put into a first-person perspective, the social and political commentary, and even the inventory management… all of it comes together to make something that has never really been rivaled, even by its own sequels. Along with it, the Thief and System Shock games also stand as my most fondly remembered ever.
Arkane Studios is a developer who, sadly, isn’t as recognized as they should be. For whatever reason, their Dark Messiah (of) Might & Magic hasn’t been so fondly remembered, and Arx Fatalis, one of the finest dungeon crawlers ever made, is rarely even mentioned anymore. Dishonored is their first game in many years, and, led by Harvey Smith of Deus Ex fame, it’s promised to combine the best of those first-person stealth-action/RPG hybrid games with the brutal first-person combat Arkane are known for. Sounds like a match made in heaven for someone like me.
For the most part, it is. Dishonored is a finely-crafted, smart, well-written, expertly-designed game which takes inspiration from some of the best games of all time and, in a few places, even improves on them. The game does have its issues – namely in character progression, underwhelming stealth gameplay, lack of deeper RPG elements, and a slightly “two-dimensional” game world – but makes up for it with some of the best level design I’ve seen in a game, along with stunning art and audio direction. While it doesn’t quite live up to its forefathers, it is the best game of its type made in nearly a decade, and highlights just about everything wrong with modern big-budget games today.
Story & Setting
Dishonored‘s story is a simple one, but the real star of the game is its setting. Taking place in Dunwall, one of the world’s largest known cities and capital of the isle of Gristol, Dishonored‘s is a grim and bleak world – a Victorian steampunk-style fantasy setting complete with a helping of magic and occultism, brought low by the so-called “rat plague” which has devastated the city and killed off half its population. The world is alive and vibrant, and is believable as a place just entering into industrial revolution, with strong contrast between the decadence of the upper class and poverty of the lower class.
You play as Corvo Attano, bodyguard to Empress Jessamine Kaldwin. Upon returning from a diplomatic mission to secure aid against the rat plague (and failing), the Empress is quickly and brutally assassinated, her daughter and heir Emily is kidnapped, and you find yourself held responsible for her murder. After rotting in prison for six months, Corvo is broken out by a band of usurpers intent on displacing the new Lord Regent, Hiram Burrows. It quickly becomes apparent that the Empress’ death was orchestrated by some of the highest members of society, and Corvo, in exchange for his freedom, is tasked with assassinating those involved in order to rescue Emily Kaldwin and place her on the throne.
It’s not an especially complicated story, if you remove all of the strange proper nouns from the mix, however, and while there are plot twists, they feel obligatory rather than shocking. The flat plot is made more vibrant by a fairly large cast of characters involved, most of them fellow conspirators. Thankfully, Dishonored takes the time to explain the motivations, histories, doubts and thoughts of those characters in detail, usually in subtle ways that you will only pick up on through exploration, rather than hitting you over the head with stereotypical traits or exposition dumps. That attention to detail keeps the story interesting throughout, and I was pleased to find that upon a second play-through, many little snippets of dialogue and events were able to gain new meaning in retrospect.
As mentioned, the star of
Dishonored, narratively speaking, is the game world, and how it changes as you play. While previous games like
Deus Ex have dabbled in having characters say and do different things based on your actions, in
Dishonored, the tone of the whole world changes and evolves. Most often, changes are contingent on how stealthily and lethally you play – if you kill lots of people, you will find more and tougher enemies, as well as more security checkpoints, watchtowers, and other obstacles in the environment to deal with. However, it happens in some excellently subtle ways as well, from dialogue that reflects your previous actions, to belated rewards for completing certain objectives, to the state of the city’s plague epidemic as the game goes on.
Dishonored uses its visuals, world design, and game mechanics to communicate story just as much as any cutscenes or dialogue sequences.
However, there are complaints to be made. For one, Corvo is a silent protagonist, yet also has a detailed and established history. You’ll get some choices in conversation from time to time, and characters in the game will speak directly to Corvo, but you will never get a sense for his personality, motivations, etc. There are a few plot holes that could have been answered if Corvo could simply speak for himself, and many scenes lack the emotional resonance they would have because it’s hard to identify with Corvo as a character.
Second, the game’s chaos mechanic, which determines in part the changes that happen in the world, can feel very arbitrary. How does playing violently lead to more plague victims appearing, for example, or make the weather gloomier? Dishonored imposes a right vs. wrong morality system on you based on play-style in a way that doesn’t always make sense. Still, coming back to your home base after every mission to talk to the different characters there and seeing some of the changes in the world reflected in their comments is a pretty good payoff, and at the very least it’s worth playing the game twice to see all the changes that occur.
Third, early in the game, Corvo encounters the Outsider, the game’s equivalent of a trickster deity. Considered more or less the devil by the established religion of the world, the Outsider is a seemingly neutral figure who grants Corvo supernatural powers, because he is an “interesting” person. Unfortunately, the presence of the Outsider in the game feels very arbitrary and is never substantially developed beyond a few vague hints. I got the sense the game was building up to something with the Outsider, some great reveal, but it never came, which makes me wonder if some of the ideas here were cut due to time or budget constraints.
Finally, it might be unfair to do this, but while Dishonored has a lot of interesting themes, it doesn’t really have anything especially interesting to say. Whereas Deus Ex had lots of political and social commentary that gave its otherwise entertaining story a layer of insight and maturity beyond itself, Dishonored is more of a “weird for the sake of weird” game. Beyond the idea that killing whales to harvest their technology-powering oil is bad, there is little intellectual meat to chew on. Obviously not every game needs to to be profound and meaningful, but unlike Dishonored‘s inspiration, it goes for style over substance, even if the style is handled quite well.
Stealth & Combat Gameplay
As I’ve alluded to, Dishonored plays like a combination of Deus Ex and Thief, with some notable influence from more modern games like BioShock such as in how health, upgrades and inventory (or lack thereof) work. For each mission, you’ll be inserted into an area via a boat ride, and will be given free reign on how to reach your target, whether that’s sneaking about, killing everything in sight, or a little of both. Although you are encouraged to take out your targets lethally, each mission has a few optional objectives, one or two of which will reveal ways to take out your target in an alternative way (sometimes earning them a fate worse than death). Levels, overall, are fairly varied – some take a more hub-like approach, while others are more linear – but they do get a little less dense later on, with fewer books and notes to read, fewer optional objectives to complete, and so on.
Stealth is clearly the game’s emphasis much of the time, and it’s here where things are both fun and a little disappointing. The good news is that the level design is set up excellently for stealth. Far from Deus Ex‘s “find the vent” design, instead Dishonored is closer to Thief, with multiple routes and opportunity spots throughout each area. In any given location, you might be able to crawl through the sewers, Blink from rooftop to rooftop (more on that shortly), climb up some pipes, or use ground cover. The levels have many more vertical elements than most other games, and many of the best paths to take are over rooftops or from window to window. Even if you play lethally or ultra-violently, these aren’t so much “stealth options” as they are just options for any play-style.
Where stealth is let down a little bit is mostly in what it’s lacking. The guards you’ll need to avoid are generally pretty intelligent, investigating missing patrols, checking corners and spotting you at a distance, but they have a tendency to almost never look up, especially on the normal difficulty, which leads to situations where it’s possible to perch yourself on objects just a foot or two above their heads and go completely unnoticed. Enemies also have an annoying tendency to instantly alert everyone in the area as soon as you are detected, as well, and they all magically know your exact location, making save-scumming far more preferable than trying to escape or hide if you want to avoid killing.
You also generally have fewer options available than in Thief for stealth. Light and shadow play a part, supposedly, but it is very inconsistent – hiding in shadows will rarely save you from detection, and there are precious few opportunities to manipulate lighting yourself. And, unlike Thief, the game lacks a lot of tools and toys to make sneaking interesting. There are no noisemaker, water or moss arrow equivalents, no gas grenades to knock out enemies – you’re limited to tranquilizer bolts for your crossbow and silently choking people from behind. Thankfully, hiding bodies is still an important consideration.
In outright combat,
Dishonored plays fairly well, though simply. It’s here where you will be able to use all your interesting equipment, from various types of crossbow bolts, flintlock pistol, a few different grenades, trip-mines, and, of course, your sword. Weapons are all satisfying and fun to use, with good drawbacks and upsides to each one. They can also be upgraded for more ammo capacity, firing distance, and that sort of thing, which gives them a layer of RPG-style depth that the stealth gameplay does not have. While you would expect sword-fighting to be tactical and involved like Arkane Studios’ previous games, in practice this isn’t really the case. Melee combat is fast, and rather challenging, but aside from blocking and timing strikes, there isn’t as much depth, even if the kills are still flashy and gruesome.
Magic & Character Progression
Last, making up the game’s more supernatural side, as well as most of the character progression, are bone charms and runes. These are found throughout the environment and are created by the Outsider’s followers. Runes are a currency used to unlock new powers and upgrades, while bone charms provide passive bonuses such as extra health, quieter movement, and so on. The first times I summoned a swarm of rats to devour a patrolling guard alive, or possessed a fish to swim inside a fortified building via the drain, I grew a huge smile across my face. Their impact is just as big as the augmentations in Deus Ex, if not more so, and they are all fun and useful in their own ways.
The powers have a pretty big impact on playing the game, but one in particular stands out: Blink. Though commonly seen in more modern RPGs, the idea of teleporting quickly from place to place has never been done so well in a first-person title before. While it takes time to get the hang of Blink, it soon becomes indispensable for traversing the environment, sneaking up behind enemies quickly, or gaining better vantage points to rain death down from. It sounds like marketing, but Blink really is game-changing and Dishonored has been constructed with it in mind at every turn – it does not make the stealth too easy, nor can it be spammed endlessly in time-critical situations like combat. Rather, it constantly opens new paths for you, and reduces the methodical pace in stealth that some modern gamers might be averse to. Overall its implementation is highly successful and really does become second nature after an hour or two.
There are a few places where this aspect of the gameplay stumbles. The first is that runes are very easy to find early on, and the limited number of powers meant that I had unlocked everything I really needed by only a few hours into the game (around the second mission). Although it takes some exploration to find all the runes and bone charms, there’s no real need to collect all of them unless you want to chase down achievements. Furthermore, because the bone charms you acquire are provided in a random order, and you can unlock any skill from the beginning of the game, the game can never really force you to use your powers in interesting ways to win, and rarely locks out content from you if you don’t have a given power.
The lack of more secondary RPG elements is also something of concern. There’s no inventory system – you can carry every gun and all the ammo you can find no problem – and junk items you collect are instantly converted into cold, hard cash as soon as they reach your grubby palms. Unlocking doors and hacking machines also isn’t tied to any upgrade system, but rather items (keys and hacking tools) and I think the game could have benefited from expanding on these ideas – it only further contributes to that lack of character progression that sets in after you’ve played a mission or two.
Presentation
Dishonored is one of the most beautiful games I have ever seen. It’s actually not too impressive by modern standards in terms of raw graphics capability – the game has its share of blurry and lower-resolution textures, for instance. However, the styling and composition, provided in part by Half-Life 2 art director, is impeccable. While similarities with Half-Life 2 are quite common, the game has a rich, hand-painted watercolor look to it, with nicely-complementing colors, beautiful urban vistas, and an incredible attention to detail around every corner. This is a game where the artists’ concept feels fully realized in-game, and it’s refreshing to see a game where technology is used in service of an artistic vision, rather than to cram in as many visual gimmicks as possible.
The game’s audio also does not disappoint, for the most part. The sound effects, from bleak background atmosphere in the near-post-apocalyptic Flooded District, to the mechanical thudding footsteps of the “Tallboy” stilt-walking guards, are all as fitting as can be. The ever-present drone of Dunwall’s propaganda broadcasts, while cribbed from Half-Life 2, also creates a growing feel of oppression and paranoia throughout the game, as well as providing story updates. The soundtrack mostly stays in the background, with subtle piano melodies creeping in seamlessly with the background ambiance. Voice-acting is competent, but a few actors feel miscast and a lack of variety in actors means you will hear the same voices over and over again.
On a pure technical level, Dishonored is solid, but does have a few issues. A few missions bugged out on me during the game, requiring me to restart a level one time and fail a couple more optional objectives. The game, at least on PC, has just about every option you could want, from being able to turn off tutorial pop-ups, objective markers, and other prompts, as well as equally important but rarely-provided camera bob and field-of-view settings, which I am very grateful for. When playing stealthy and going for a completely non-lethal run through the game, eventually I had to give up because unconscious bodies had a tendency to fall through the ground, or drop into water below, or land on top of lit fires, registering as deaths. The PC version also requires a Steam account to play, and features the now-standard suite of Steam features, but unfortunately those who don’t like Steam are out of luck.
Conclusion
Dishonored is one of my favorite games so far this year. It is well crafted almost all the way through, with consistently excellent level design providing more options to explore, sneak through or take out your enemies within than just about any other similar title, an interesting world and set of characters you’ll grow to like over the course of the game, and visual direction which makes me wish developers would just abandon their tireless quest for “realism” right now. What’s more, it’s a game where player choice directs gameplay, and where the most fun moments don’t come from watching cutscenes play out, but from actually engaging with the mechanics and systems on offer, something that is almost impossible to find in action games and shooters these days, and even many full-on RPGs for that matter.
However, Dishonored does have its share of faults, namely in that its stealth gameplay is a bit underwhelming compared to its inspirations, its RPG-like character progression is lacking, it starts to run out of steam a bit towards the end, and the story simply does not have the same intellectual themes to it that gets you thinking about bigger issues once you’ve turned the game off (something Deus Ex: Human Revolution managed far better last year). As much as I liked it, and will play through it at least once or twice more, it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed where potential wasn’t realized, mostly in the RPG qualities that it’s dropped over its predecessors. I could have been an “instant classic” for fans of hybrid shooter/RPG titles, but instead it’s merely “pretty good.”
In short, if you are a fan of games like Deus Ex, and missing out on an inventory and skill points doesn’t bother you, you should probably pick up Dishonored – not only is it a great game that you’ll get at least a couple of play-throughs out of, but it’s the kind of game that I think the games industry desperately needs, one that doesn’t take its audience for morons and lets the gameplay shine, not the scripted cinematic sequences. It’s not the best game of its type, and to some it will probably even be disappointing given the hype around it, but in an age where multiplayer shooters and MMO cash cows dominate, Dishonored is yet more proof that few things can top a thoroughly engrossing, offline, mechanics-driven game.
