I finally played Dishonored.

By Matt Taylor
It’s been awhile since I played a game that was just for me. Writing and making videos about video games means that a lot of what I play is for reviews and YouTube content, and I often spend a lot longer than I’d like replaying sections or recording and editing gameplay. I love what I do for Backwards Compatible and I get to play a lot of games, but sometimes It doesn’t feel like I’m doing it for my own enjoyment. Spending a few hours playing a game that was just for my own personal consumption was what I needed to recharge my batteries.

Generally considered one of the best stealth action-adventures, Dishonored garnered positive reviews all round and stood out amongst the fairly bland gaming lineup from the later part of 2012. I’d been meaning to pick up Dishonored since it was released and since then I had held it in my hands and walked around stores umming and ahhing multiple times, ultimately putting it down after deciding that something else deserved my attention and time. It wasn’t until recently that I finally purchased Dishonored, snapping it up in a Steam sale earlier this year, a decision made easier by the fact that I had built a PC last year and would be able to play Dishonored at settings that wouldn’t remind me that it was three years old. 
Set in the fictional city of Dunwall, Dishonored follows Corvo, a member of the royal guard framed for regicide by a conspiratorial group of the upperclass. Escaping his execution with the help of a group loyal to the rightful heir, Corvo is then tasked with bringing about the end of those who wronged him. 
Though the plot doesn’t scream originality, it supports that game well enough to let the mechanics shine on their pedestals. Corvo is armed with a combination of steampunk inspired weaponry and physical attacks as well as supernatural powers, enabling the player to approach each level as they see fit. As I played through Dishonored I was able to use these tools in a myriad of ways, approaching the same scenario from different angles and with varying results. While all the powers at your fingertips come in useful at one point or another, it’s the platforming that makes Dishonored really stand out. Using “Blink” (the ability found early on in the game that allows Corvo to transport to another location within a set distance) the player is able to choose what angle to take when entering a new location or room. Climbing across roof tops and hanging from chandeliers while enemies patrol below you never gets old, though does make me wonder how many of these guards are severely nearsighted. This mechanic serves the player well most of the time, allowing Corvo to complete entire levels without confrontation. The strength of the platforming in Dishonored is partially weakened by the slight issues I had controlling the game. On a few occasions I found myself overshooting or undershooting “blinks”, missing my mark and falling to my death or landing in a crowd of armed guards. I take credit for a small percent of these as early game user errors, but later in the game became frustrated by sections where the user interface told me “blinking” would be successful and ultimately wasn’t.
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Like many of the titles released in 2012, Dishonored leans on questions of morality throughout the game but manages to stand out as one of the only titles with this gameplay element to let the player feel that their actions have real consequences that affect the main storyline. Looking at games like Mass Effect or Fallout, the player could choose different moral avenues to travel which allowed the story to follow separate paths. The player would experience the game as they wished, but it often felt like a choose-your-own adventure story and less like a single story that can be influenced by the player. Dishonored allows the narrative to follow a single arch, using the player's actions to augment the experience as opposed to changing it entirely. Ultimately this lets the exceptional storyline stay completely prewritten, depending on the player's actions and less on dialogue choices. This game is perfect if like me you fall into the camp that enjoys a great story to follow with less divergence.

Throughout Dishonored I found myself really enjoying the world around me, from the lavish banquets to the plague riddled streets. The art direction lets all the places you travel through feel like one big piece of a larger world and I looked forward to seeing more of it as I went on. The only time I felt let down by some of the level design was towards the start of the last act, with the platforming losing some of the clarity that was present in earlier levels. Though this didn’t ruin the section entirely, I longed to return to levels that had previously been challenging and exciting as I began to feel the game might be overstaying its welcome.Luckily these sections quickly pass and game returned to it’s former glory, and as I wrapped up the storyline, I felt that I’d been missing out on Dishonored for too long.

I felt reinvigorated and was eager to dive into another title with a storyline that was smart, interesting and part of a game that was mostly well built. Dishonored had managed to help rekindle a hungry for gaming that I hadn’t had in a couple of months, and wet my appetite for some of the years biggest titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The game of the year edition of Dishonored is currently available through cdkeys.com for PC and on Amazon for all platforms. Check out the links below for some of the deals available.