Dishonored (PC) - Guest Post

Hello my name is Kraed and I'm not Ray Hardgrit and yet you're reading this on his website. Isn't that weird?

Today I'm going to buck the retro trend and play a modern game. Too many companies have been releasing games that are just dumb action-fests where you travel from set piece to set piece blowing everything up. I've decided to play a game a bit more intellectual than that, so here we go. Dishonored is a game about stabbing people in violent ways.

And yes there will be spoilers (including a small one for Portal 2 perhaps - Ray), though if you can't guess the plot twists in this game I'm guessing you haven't played anything with a story more complex than Tetris.

(Click the pictures to view them in a downright modern 1600x900 res.)

This fine adventure that most certainly won't have anything to do with stabbing starts us off in a casual ride along the river. There's some seriously nice attention to detail in this scene, such as the whaling ships in the background traveling by, and subtle appearances by characters that return later in the game. The ambient sound is near perfect here. Only thing I kind of wish for is being allowed to run your hand through the water as you travel. Why can't games give us experiences identical to real life? Gosh.

Hi, I'm Corvo and I like to grab hold of the Empress' daughter in ways that would get me shot in any other country. They then kiss each other's cheeks. This is one of those weird points in the game that I still can't figure out, after a dozen or so hours playing this. Is she Corvo's daughter? Is he just the guardian? The way they talk and act together is very father and daughter (she even paints a picture and writes 'daddy' on it) but the way others talk about you doesn't make it sound like you are her father. Well in any case I'm sure it's perfectly fine for the daughter of the Empress to run around without protection or escort, nothing possibly wrong can come of this.

The setup for the intro is that Corvo is returning from a diplomatic mission seeking aid from neighbouring countries. He has been away for a couple of months and his news is so important that he has come straight to the Empress upon return to deliver the news personally. However it's not important enough that I don't have time to play a little hide and seek! (Yes, you are actually playing hide and seek this isn't me hiding behind a wall staring at a child!) The first time I tried standing on her head but she noticed me immediately and got annoyed, so I had to play it properly.

Upstairs there is this guy painting a portrait of Snooty McHighbrow in the corner. Somewhat amusingly if you get in the way of the painting he gets pissed off and refuses to paint it anymore and walks away in a sulk. I'm not sure why he's that bothered though because that is clearly a finished painting on the canvas.

Also as an aside I rate a game directly based on how good the beard options are and this guy is strongly tipping the beard scale to the upper percentile. My expectations are, naturally, quite high now.

Moving along I bump into Richard O'Brien from the Crystal Maze. There is absolutely no way that this guy that just argued with the Empress and looks like this is gonna be a villain. Nope. He's totally a nice guy and will just walk away and get on with his life.

This is one of the small points in the game I quite like. When you give something to somebody you actually take it out of your pocket and hand it to them, rather than it magically teleporting between inventories. It's well animated and they actually take it from you properly, rather than an awkward snapping moment where it warps from your hand to their hand. I hope she appreciates the trouble I went through to get her this letter, I've travelled over half the world meeting diplomats to secure this.

H..hey! She threw the damn letter on the floor. That's the last time I do my back in helping you out off camera before the game starts.

Suddenly whilst the Empress is having a moment with her daughter, Ezio decides to join the party and can be seen off in the distance doing a little rooftop surfing. Suspiciously all the guards have disappeared and there is only lil' Corvo there to protect the family from the attackers. They are actually incredibly well animated when they move; they teleport forward several paces as they run and it ends up looking so cool I feel bad for killing them. Unfortunately in this screenshot it looks like he is slipping on bird poo.

After a brief fight where I totally kicked their asses and didn't get my ass handed to me, I'm struck by cutscene incompetence and get paralysed. I would've thought by 2012 the protagonists would have learned to never engage in fighting during a cutscene, but apparently not. Needless to say the Empress gets stabbed and killed, and the daughter is kidnapped. It looks like he is about to grab hold of her ass here, but he actually just gave her a monster of a backhand slap. This is what happens when you throw my letters on the floor.

Oh, would you look at that. Snooty McHighbrow and Richard O'Brien immediately come over here and find the corpse, and accuse me. I'm guilty of murder and kidnapping the princess. I kidnapped her without moving from this spot, because I'm just that damn good. The sad thing is I could easily take these guys without so much as a scratch if I wasn't still plagued by cutscene incompetence. I really hate it when games do that.

Corvo is taken to prison and tortured for 6 months. The day before execution these guys confess their evil plan and rub it in my face. I would've thought in 2012 the Bond Villain gambit would not be used, but then I didn't expect to be caught by cutscene incompetence either. Before I just suspected them of being assholes, now they've confessed to me directly they are responsible for everything. It's like they want me to escape and murder them.

After this Corvo wakes up in Prison, and the game starts proper (the previous section was a barely interactive scripted introduction). This is a Bethesda game, so it HAD to start in a prison. I think Bethesda's shareholders might have heart attacks if a Bethesda game didn't start in prison.

Immediately I started looking for a bundle of straw to set on fire to lure a guard inside, but I could not find any. How am I meant to escape from prison if there is no straw to set on fire? Actually you probably already know because I write these captions under the pictures, but the key was just sitting at the end of my cell, under a bit of bread. It's a 60s cop show escape.

I should add at this point that Dishonored is a game that treats the player like an absolute idiot of the lowest calibre. It's insulting in the way it tells you how to do things (this will come up again later).

Immediately outside my cell there are no guards, but there is a table with a sword on it. I'm the guy that allegedly murdered the empress and I'm being held in a prison that even Ray Hardgrit could probably break out of (well.. maybe). The player really isn't challenged here at all, this 'escape' requires no thinking.

And now what we've all been waiting for. Here's a picture of me stabbing an innocent guard of the watch, and his buddies seem completely oblivious to it. A nice point in the game is that if you get blood on your sword it stays on your sword.. for the whole game. It doesn't fade over time like most games, so you end up with a pretty darn bloody sword.

Did I mention that Dishonored is a game about stabbing people? These kills are incredibly fast, with the animation barely a second long. They feel so brutal when you perform them. Note how this guy appears to be bleeding out of the side of his neck and his forehead, but not where I stabbed him. Science!

In the next room there's a completely unguarded rack of weapons with extra pistols and a health elixir. There's no way sticking the armoury next to the cell of the most dangerous criminal ever will end up being a bad thing. This jail feels like it was made in one of those rubbish Prison Tycoon games.

A little further along and there's some explosives in an unlocked safe. Seriously what is wrong with these people? Why do you have explosives in prison unguarded? The game handwaves it as being planted to help me escape but that doesn't change that it's incredibly silly.

Then I stabbed a guard because, y'know, game about stabbing people. Spoiler: there's a lot of stabbings.

Here you can see how the game gives you options to get through situations. I could sneak through/beat up the guards and go into the office on the left to open that door, or I could scale to pipes on the right and just go over the top of the door without ever having to open it. It's nice they thought of the stealth option, but immediately on the other side I'm about to blow up the exit. I'm pretty sure they'll notice that, but maybe they are stealth bombs.

In case you're wondering you don't have to stab everyone in sight. You can also strangle them from behind (but only if they don't know you are there), or later use tranquillizer darts from a crossbow. Rather disappointingly that's your entire arsenal of non-lethal gear in the whole game. Like most stealth games you get dozens of gadgets and weapons but they are all fatal when used. The gear you have and the gameplay never seems to gel right; if you're being stealthy you don't want to get seen but all your gear is about killing people in increasingly violent and loud ways. It's a flaw of the genre in general and Dishonored isn't the one to change it.

After blowing up the wall I escape the prison into Goldeneye 64's Dam level, complete with jumping off the edge of the platform. Sadly this is not as cool as Pierce Brosnan and involves plunging into sewage, rather than bungee cords and grappling guns. You win this round Bond...

After swimming through the sewers you come across these poor guards. They're having a chat about guardly things when a bunch of rats swarm them, kill them then devour their entire corpses. Once they are done there is absolutely nothing left of them. The game doesn't gloss it over behind closed doors either, it's utterly sickening to watch.

Immediately in the next room there is a bunch of rats eating a corpse. Okay now why does it feel like a tutorial? First I see these rats kill people, now I'm being shown if there is a corpse they will eat the corpse instead of eating me.

And immediately after that I'm given a room full of rats by a valve I need to turn, and corpses on the platform. Gee, I wonder how I distract those rats. There's also dead obvious hints from guards above you telling you to throw the corpses to the rats. I like the idea here of having to think to get past the rats, but this is pretty much the only time in the entire game this gameplay mechanic is ever used and it's really in-your-face aout it. It reminds me of Dead Space when the game was screaming at you CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS!!! so many times you had no chance to work it out yourself.

Once you escape the sewers the game world opens up and gives you more options to do things, but the sewers are completely linear with one (and only one) way through, and it's really bizarre why they decided to have this as the first level. Then again, it's Bethesda and you could say the exact same thing about Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim too.

After that another few guards got stabbed. Yeah, you get the idea. It's a lot more satisfying to get stealth kills like this, as the combat in the game is really clunky and awkward. Also there's a guard standing three feet away from me here and it didn't notice this at all.

After that I escape the sewers into glorious sunlight and freedom. I like how the game talks about this being an abandoned part of town with nobody living or working here, and then the first thing you see is a factory with the smoke stacks churning out pollution.

This area acts as the staging area between missions for a large part of the game, and has a rather diverse crew of odd people working together to Save The World. These are my benefactors that helped Corvo escape prison but I'm not convinced. Never trust a guy that greets you by immediately holding his gun.

Problem solved! I decided not to take any chances and kill them now, unfortunately the game decided "Kill the plot critical NPCs" as a bad thing to do and rewarded me with a game over screen. Maybe Corvo died of shock after seeing the gore from decapitation.

This guy is the obligatory quirky weird inventor guy. He makes all the gear for Corvo and essentially just acts as an eccentric shop, much like the fences in Thief 3. That mask he's working on is the iconic mask you've probably all seen on the posters and boxart (do they have posters anymore? I miss posters). The mask is meant to disguise who you are but almost every single person you talk to during missions knows who you are anyway/works it out instantly, so there's a bizarre disconnect. Later on you use the mask to disguise yourself by cosplaying yourself, which made me laugh.

He tells me I should sleep before I go on a mission, so off to bed I go.

This just cracks me up. "SOMEWHERE ELSE..." is too perfect. I guess I'm getting supernatural powers, thanks for the spoiler loading screen.

And this one is great on the same lines of Somewhere Else. When you wake up you leave your bedroom and enter this place, instead of the pub you are sleeping in. In the corner of the screen you get an objective update "Something's not right...". Corvo can't work it out though, there's something weird about the floating land and lack of buildings... but can't place what it is exactly.

This was actually kind of cool though. When you're inside your room everything is sort of normal, except there's a bowl of water that is dripping upwards onto the ceiling, rather than the ceiling dripping into the bowl. If you notice it without blindly charging out of your room it's pretty neat.

This area is full of freeze frame moments of people and various props, mostly foreshadowing things that are going to happen later. This one is my particular favourite. The guy is clearly playing Fable 3 there, but he's so outraged by the game he's throwing the buildings around in disgust. I'd probably react the same way too.

Then there's this wicked action scene which I captured perfectly. But it's also another freeze frame of people so it wasn't that difficult to screenshot - unlike those damn assassinations! These guys appear much later in the game as enemies, and to be frank I'm really disappointed by them. The game has a very Half life 2 style to it, the guards being a less-futuristic Combine with all their barricades and oppression. The city definitely feels an awful lot like City 17, but less scripted and more plaguey. Adding in long-legged enemies that shoot at people from afar is kind of a step too far for me. At least they're modelled nicely.

I like the 'A Bit Of a Challenge' objective marker on the edge of that cliff. I don't know why it says that and it disappears without word as soon as you warp onto the cliff. Oh yeah, you can teleport now. Probably should've mentioned that.

This place also has this guy. He has black eyeballs and gave me a gift literally called 'a heart of a living thing', without specifying much further. It's kind of weird and gruesome and goes firmly in the 'awkward unwanted christmas present' box.

The heart acts as a sort of spiritual guide, helping you to locate trinkets in your local area, as well as giving you insights into people and places when you talk to it. A strangely wired up potato shaped object you carry around with you that houses a woman's soul, and she makes snarky comments about people you bump into, why does that sound familiar to me?

Portal 2 (PC)

Oh, right. Yeah.

Going through this little area opens up the powers, which you can unlock with runes that are scattered throughout the missions. When I first got blink (short range teleport) I thought these abilities would totally ruin the game, but they definitely make it much more fun to play. You only get so many runes to play with though, and blink, dark vision and agility are pretty much necessary to upgrade to max if you want to find things and get places. A lot of alternate routes cannot be reached without them maxed out.

Sadly the other abilities have almost no use at all. They are too expensive (both in your limited runes and in mana use) and situational, and mostly involve killing people in incredibly loud, noticeable and violent ways. Possession lets you access new areas by possessing animals, but I always found an alternative path to the same places. Bend Time slows/stops time, but makes the game so hilariously easy it feels like you just plugged in a GameShark. I suppose it's like Bioshock where you do get a ton of extra attack options with your plasmids... but none of them are really any use beyond the initial couple you get.

After chatting up the servants at the pub I left for the first mission and started stabbing people. You didn't think the stabbing had stopped did you?

Shortly into the start of the mission you come across a wall of light (see below) and this tutorial prompt pops up. This is what I was saying before about how the game treats you like an idiot. There is no fun to be had finding alternative routes when the game tells you what all these routes are. We aren't stupid! Lets us discover this stuff ourselves! There's 3 or 4 of these screens that pop up over this mission and the next, forcibly reminding you that there is multiple paths through areas. We get the idea! Stop it already.

This persists throughout the whole game and can really ruin the enjoyment factor by a huge amount. I worked out how to do the first assassination subtlely by overhearing some guards talking about a way to banish people from the city forever. However instead of the game allowing me to be smart and try and work out how to perform this action, it told me how to do it and updated my objectives and quest markers immediately upon hearing it. When I heard the conversation I got excited about trying it, but when the objectives popped up without letting me work it out my heart sunk. To make it even worse it will tag the objectives with (non-lethal) on them so you know for sure what the plan is to get through without killing.

It's an absolute stinker of terrible game design and it's the number one thing I hate the most about Dishonored.

Back to the wall of light. The wall of light has three methods to disable it: you can throw objects into it repeatedly until it drains all the power, then walk through it safely. You can remove the power supply altogether, or you can hack it with a rewiring tool. Uh oh... here we go hacking minigame.

Or not. There's no minigame. You just place the tool on the device and it's done. FINALLY! The same happens with the safes with combination locks too: to open the lock you manually change the numbers on the lock, there's no pipemania or 'find the sweet spot' minigame. This game doesn't have a single minigame in it at all and it's about damn time a modern game did this. There isn't a QTE in sight anywhere either.

Oh and I'm sure you're wondering what is this wall of light I keep talking about. It goes a little like this:

It does this to you when you walk through it. Guards can safely walk through them but when you hack them it reverses it; you can safely walk through but guards cannot. If a guard sees another guard get killed by it they fall back and won't go through it. They will then pick up rocks and throw them at the wall until it runs out of power, which I thought was really cool. Not as cool as this disintegration though.

More people got stabbed yadda yadda. The design of these guys is incredibly similar to the enemies from Thief 2, which I think is not a coincidence. It feels more like a love letter than something derivative though, unlike most of the rest of the game.

Much wall climbing and guard stabbing later I arrive in the Snooty McHighbrow's quarters. He's meeting with a guard captain and plans to poison him, and this is an early example of how good the game can (sometimes) be when it comes to choices. You can swap the poison so he gets poisoned instead, if you're a total dick you can poison them both, you can remove the poison altogether and force the guy to rethink his plans, or you can practice apathy and just let the guy do his dirty work. If you spill the poison he lures the captain to a secret area and kills him, but at any point you can try and stop him and the captain reacts differently if he realises he has been betrayed or not.

It's great to try all the different options here and see how it plays out. If you poison the Overseer some guards come in and accuse the captain, who then has to fight his way out to safety. Unfortunately on every single mission after the first they strip away all these choices and leave you with almost no lethal options at all except outright stabby stab. And the non-lethal options all devolve into: do X sidequest for NPC Y, and they will 'deal with' target Z off camera for you.

Speaking of outright stabby stab. This was an option too, the poison was just an alternative to do it without getting your own hands dirty. You could completely ignore the poison route and just go it the good ol' fashioned way. I fought him in direct combat (I have honour you know! Honour with an o!), and it was one of the most brutal kills I've ever seen in the game. Corvo sliced the guy's arm off, then grabbed him in a chokehold and stabbed down through his neck. Then he wiggled the blade around and caused the blood to flow. There was also the banishment method I mentioned earlier, but I'll leave that for people to 'work out'.


I think I'll leave this here for now. I skipped over a LOT of things that happened here (mostly stabbings, but also all the sidequests) and it's already running a good length. The game is also new and I don't want to spoil the entire game. Plus I think you get the idea now, you run around on pipes and then stab people. Or don't stab them if you don't want to, though the heart likes to tell you how each and every person in this game is a depraved sociopath that is going to die in a couple of days anyway even if you don't kill them.

This is easily one of the best games I have played in years. You can play it completely stealthily without anyone even knowing you were there, with zero kills the entire game. If you do decide to kill people then panic in the city rises between missions and people react to you differently. People will start talking about you like you're a mass murderer (because you are) and there's tons more rats in the city and more people infected with the plague. It's really cool seeing how much differently the game is based on if you were Stabby Stabby or keeping your hands clean. The only letdown is how much the game treats you like an idiot, but if you can get over that it's a very worth successor to the Thief games, and does the assassinating thing far more interestingly than Assassin's Creed or Hitman. Plus it has no cover system: if you don't want to be seen you have to hide, avoid patrols and use the environment, you can't just press a button to snap to cover and then run full sprint behind the cover (hello Deus Ex 3).

And maaan did you see that beard?