I’ve been intending to roll through Dishonored again for a while, but at this point I’m waiting for the Definitive Edition on PS4/Xbox One. There are two things you should take note of in that sentence: Firstly, I said ‘again,’ in fact this would be somewhere in the region of my 20th playthrough of the game since it launched in 2012. Secondly, I’m buying a new version of it despite already owning it. You might think this is because my existing copy is on a console I no longer use, but you’d be wrong. I own Dishonored and its three DLC offerings on PC, and I adore that version. Even when these new ports come out, the PC version will likely remain my preferred platform given the accuracy of the mouse control. So why buy it again? Two reasons: I want to attempt a Platinum/1000pts, and frankly I just want to throw money at the people that brought this game into my life.
In 2012 I placed Dishonored as my sixth favourite Game of the Year. At the time I’d played it once and that placing felt right. The five games that topped it did not do so idly, those top six spots were a nightmare for me to arrange, but ultimately I could not justify placing it above the others based on that initial playthrough. In retrospect, I was wrong. Having now played through the game a silly number of times in myriad ways, I would not only retroactively place it at the top of that list, but I’d also throw it into my top ten games of all time.
Listening to a recent episode of BRBUK, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when Tim and Coleman both stated they’d never given Dishonored much of shot. Then I thought about it for a moment and realised they weren’t alone. Dishonored came out in the midst of a very release-heavy holiday in 2012, and most people either played it a bit and moved on or completely glossed over it, never allowing themselves the opportunity for the game to click as it has with so many devoted fans.
There’s so much to speak positively about with the game, from its incredibly deep fiction and world-building to the characters and method of narrative, but more than anything the one thing that drives home what this game is capable of is the gameplay mechanics. On the surface Dishonored is a first-person stealth game in which you use a combination of weapons, gadgets and powers to eliminate specific targets. And that totally is the game, it’s supernatural Hitman (and I’d argue the best Hitman game ever made). And just like with Hitman, your target and the level in which they reside are almost ancillary to the joy of experimentation. The number of ways to complete an objective are innumerable, you could spend hours planning out the most intricate domino effect assassination, chaining the game’s different systems together, to get that one moment of unadulterated satisfaction when everything falls into place.
I’ve always found that the best way to describe something to someone is not to describe it at all, but to show them. And so I highly recommend you watch the following videos.
In this first video (length: 1m 18s), the player is expertly chaining kills together in a very high chaos manner (chaos is a system in the game that increases as you do more obvious things and kill people, which then go on to affect other areas as well as the story). The precision of the execution is staggering.
Next up we have one of the more famous Dishonored videos to have been made, The Many Deaths of Lady Boyle (length: 3m 46s). This player has experimented to a ridiculous degree as they find a bunch of different and inventive ways to assassinate one of the game’s antagonists, Lady Boyle.
This final link is actually to a playlist of six videos, in which the player demonstrates just how much additional fun you can invent for yourself within Dishonored‘s systems. He has challenged himself to complete the first half of the game, leaving no trace that he was ever there, but this doesn’t simply mean assassinating the targets without ever being detected. The challenge is to — where possible — assassinate all targets without ever being detected and making the death look like a completely believable accident or natural causes. It’s the most fascinating playthrough I’ve ever seen, and well worth the time to watch it. It also doubles as a hilarious lesson in ludonarrative dissonance!
Hopefully my obvious adoration plus the above videos have convinced those of you that never tried, or played much of Dishonored to give it the shot I feel it deserves. And when you do, and if you click with it like I and many others have, you will quickly understand why a sequel that features two playable protagonists with differing power sets is making us all very, very excited.
Tags: Dishonored, Dishonored 2
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