Dishonored is a game made by Bethesda (the bigwigs behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallouts 3 & New Vegas) and Arkane Studios, and it is one that I was sure was going to suffer from "Rage" syndrome. Now, when I say "Rage" syndrome, I don't mean "Rage" as in anger, I mean "Rage" as in another game with Bethesda at least somewhat behind it; and the syndrome that I'm talking about is when a game is incredibly random and doesn't have much of a point to it. I sorta/kinda enjoyed Rage when I played it, but I did notice that it was incredibly random and had no point, like the entire thing was a huge waste of time. But, I'm getting off track, this review isn't about Rage, it is about Dishonored: a game that I thought was going to suffer the same fate that Rage did. I was wrong about that, and as I'll go on to mention, some of Dishonored is kind of random and pointless, but it is a fantastic game.
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| Corvo Attano (1) |
In Dishonored, you play as Corvo Attano, the Royal Protector (the bigtime personal bodyguard) of the Empress of Dunwall, the sort of city-state type thing that you spend the game running around in. The thing that I love about the opening sequence is that is very clearly sets up the type of relationship that Corvo has with the royal family, which is basically Empress Jessamine, the popular caring about the poor kind of ruler who is about your age I'd assume, and her daughter, Emily, the heir to the throne, who is about ten years old I think. The opening lines are spoken by the Empress against a completely black screen, and she talks about how she regrets having to send you out to the other cities to see if there is a cure for the plague that has been destroying Dunwall, and how she can't wait for you to be back home. So, automatically you know that in the eyes of the Empress you are more than just her bodyguard, and it isn't anything romantic, but it does help to set up a much closer relationship so that when everything really goes down the drain there is a bit more driving force to your quest to clear your name. And you are held in even higher respects in the eyes of Emily, the daughter of the Empress, who is anxiously waiting at the gate when you arrive at the palace. The minute you walk through the door, your name is yelled with excitement and Emily leaps at you, and you toss her up playfully once or twice like a father would. You then have the option of either heading straight to your meeting with the Empress, or taking Emily up on a game of hide and seek first. And this really has no effect on the plot or the game whatsoever, but it does help to give you an idea of the way that Corvo and Emily interact.
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| Lady Emily (2) |
I'm going to go off track for a moment to talk about Emily some more, because she is really a well-crafted character, and that is a big deal for me. She is like, ten years old, but she is the heir to the throne, a noble who is supposed to know how to behave in public, and the developers really get this across, because when she talks to anybody except for you she speaks with eloquence well beyond her age, she uses flawless grammer and uses large words, and when she talks to you she is more like a child again (as evidenced by the opening sequence, where, on your way to the Empress, Emily skips playfully along the stones behind you and asks, "if you won't marry mother, will you marry me?"). Normally, I have the bad habit of reading between the lines too much and coming to conclusions like this, but this is not something that I am assuming. There is a distinct difference in the writing when she speaks to others and when she speaks to you, the difference is far too large for it just to be a coincidence, and I absolutely applaud Bethesda and Arkane for thinking that through, it is a level of detail that is not usually present in even the best-written games. And it goes even further than that in detail. At the end of the opening sequence, Emily has to watch as her mother is stabbed through the heart, and then she is kidnapped and held prisoner by a cruel pair of twin brothers in a whorehouse, a place that she can't wrap her mind around, a place where, as she puts it, "the women are called princesses but the men don't adore them." This child has been through some hard times recently, and eventually you break into the whorehouse and come to her rescue. Needless to say, in the next few segments it is mentioned that she has horrible nightmares, and after one particular segment you wake up from your night's sleep and find her standing by your bedside, and she confesses to sneaking in and sleeping on a small cot (I think...I didn't have subtitles on at this point, but that is what I'm assuming from context clues) in your room, just like an actual child who has a nightmare and goes to sleep in their parents' room, as some people are guilty of doing. Long story short, whoever was in charge of writing Emily deserves a raise, because given the incredibly weak nature of every other character in the game, it is incredibly refreshing to see a character so well crafted.
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| Prison...you go there. (2) |
But, back on track: the story of Dishonored. In that opening sequence, after the hide and seek game and the walking along the stone path you meet with the Empress and give her your findings, at which point assassins pop out of nowhere and the royal family ducks behind you and you go to do your duty as Royal Protector. You kill a few of the assassins, but then one of them uses some sort of magic to keep you still, and the Empress is murdered and Emily is kidnapped. And can you guess who is accused of killing her? That is right! Its you!
Not a new story, obviously, but it is one that is relatively well-handled. You are put in jail for six months, and then you are given your food on the day before your execution with a key in it and instructions on where to go. You escape from prison and go through all the tutorials along the way, and you meet a group of people called "The Loyalists," a group dedicated to protecting the empire, and in this case that means rescuing Emily, putting her on the throne, and kicking the Lord Regent, the man responsible for everything that happened to the empress, off of it.
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| Admiral Havelock, leader of the Loyalists (2) |
Here is where my qualms start. Every last one of the loyalists are weak characters. Every. Last. One. The only one with a sliver of personality is Piero, the inventor who you occasionally catch looking through the keyhole of the bathroom when one of the women of the group is bathing. Yep. That guy is the only one with a personality. And the same goes for literally everyone that you are set out to eliminate. Now, Bethesda has never been particularly good with character development, but given the strength of the royal family characters, I figured that they might put forth the effort to make the people you actually spend the game with interesting or at least three-dimensional.
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| The Mark of The Outsider (2) |
But, moving on, after you've met the loyalists, you go to sleep and wake up in a different world-type thing, and you meet a figure called, "The Outsider," another incredibly weak character with equally weak voice acting. The Outsider gives you his mark and endows you with the ability to do magic...for some reason, because you're chosen or something like that.
Then you use your magic to do all your missions and yadayadayada, you know how it goes. You go and eliminate this guy, and then this one, and then this one, and so on, up until the most predictable plot twist of all time. Not only is this plot twist predictable, but a reason is given for it, and that reason doesn't even remotely make sense. It is as if they knew that the game was going to be too short as it was, and they needed to make it longer, so they just decided, "lets do this and add a whole bunch of filler missions! Its not like we could have made this game longer by adding big dialogue sequences with Emily, who might need her role model to talk things over with her so she isn't completely scarred when she is older, or by adding some other companion missions that would be completely optional!" The entire section of the game after the plot twist somehow manages to be completely slow, but rushed as well! These sections creep by, and they were hastily put together. And all of this leads to my biggest qualm: the ending, but I'll get to that after I talk about gameplay.
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| You wouldn't think scenery matters while mowing down guardsmen, but it does! (3) |
The city of Dunwall is incredibly immersive. There are so many different routes to wherever you need to go, and most of the time what this means is "x route and y route," but there is a whole boatload of room for improvisation in reaching goals. Most of the time I chose to teleport across rooftops or itty bitty beams above the city watch's head, but when that didn't work, there was always a sewer grate or a body of water that I could swim across to get to where I needed to be. I loved exploring Dunwall, and the entire time there were enemies, so I had to be on my toes the entire time, and this made it all the more immersive. And on the note of enemies, there were always two options to dealing with enemies, even the big marks that you were sent to eliminate: lethal and nonlethal, but I'll get to that in a moment.
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| One particularly helpful stealth tactic is looking through keyholes. (4) |
The stealth gameplay is superb in Dishonored, and I am a huge stealth guy, so that was a big point winner for me. All of your powers made stealth manageable, and if you were caught, you could handle the fighting the ensued. Whenever you killed or knocked an enemy out, it would always be a good idea to hide the body somewhere so that patrolling enemies wouldn't find it. Really, stealth is the goal of the game, you can rush into battle slaughtering everything in your path if you want, but stealth is the goal, and it is entirely possible to make it through your missions without killing a single person. I personally made it through one mission without even knocking anyone out.
With the big marks, the nonlethal option was always harder, and they often involved walking right into the place where the mark was and taking something from them, but there was sort of a sense of accomplishment when I did that.
But, back to the nonlethal/lethal thing. There is a really interesting and creative mechanic to the body count you pile up. There is a plague on Dunwall, and it is carried by rats. The more dead bodies there are, the more rats there are, the more rats there are, the more plague there is, the more plague there is, the darker the outcome. I thought that was incredibly creative, because it made sense and it gave incentive to take the nonlethal approach as often as possible, because I wanted to get the good guy ending. And now, my largest qualm with this game: the ending.
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| The fact that they look like they're shrugging from the distance from me to the computer screen pretty much sums up my thoughts. (5) |
The ending to Dishonored is worse than the ending to Assassin's Creed 3. Yes, it is that bad. The cheapest, most rushed, laziest ending I've seen in a while. You kill or knock out the bad guy, who keeps his back turned to you the ENTIRE TIME, so it is really a no-brainer to do anything to him, and the other bad guys who are with him are either dead or passed out drunk, it isn't really shown, but it was too easy to get rid of this guy. You get Emily out of a closet where she is being held, and all that writing I was talking about goes down the drain as she greets you and simply asks "will I be Empress?" and then the screen goes to black. Then there are a bunch of still frame snapshots of the future of Dunwall with the Outsider talking about all the good things that are happening because you didn't kill a whole lot of people. Let me make something clear: I didn't load and load and load my saves over and over again trying to not kill anyone so that I could listen to somebody talk about stuff. And I most certainly didn't want to just get rid of the bad guy super fast and have Emily speak one line and have that be the end of it beforehand. It is without a doubt one of the most disappointing endings I've ever experienced, and not only that, the credits had an actual song in the background. That is hardly ever justified, and it most certainly wasn't here. And then, after that song, total silence. Total silence...during the credits. Umm...correct me if I'm wrong, but in my experience, the credits is supposed to be the time where the best pieces on the soundtrack play, because that'll really grip your audience and distract them from the ending if it sucks.
Ultimately, Dishonored was a fantastic game, but that entire final section was a travesty.
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| The drawing that Emily makes for you (2) |
So, to review: Dishonored is a game with fantastic immersion factor, a creative body count mechanic that didn't make much of a difference in the end, but it was creative, great stealth gameplay, one particularly well crafted character, a whole boatload of weak characters, one of the stronger opening sequences I've experienced, but one of the weakest endings as well, and a plot twist that was predictable and unjustified.
Despite the flaws, this is a game worth spending money on and playing.
8/10
Nice work, Bethesda and Arkane.
Picture sources:
Cover:
www.egmnow.com
(1)
www.social.bioware.com
(2)
www.dishonored.wikia.com
(3)
www.gameinformer.com
(4)
www.videogamewriters.com
(5)
www.tumblr.com
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