Dishonored

Release: 2012

Developer: Arkane Studios

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Genre: Stealth, FPS
Gameplay Stats: 15 hours, Low Chaos, 23/80 achievements 

I started this game a couple of months ago and got a bit distracted playing other things. One of the YouTube channels I follow published a video essay about the poignance of playing Dishonored during a pandemic, so I decided to pick it up again and finish it. The spaced out nature of my play may impact the accuracy of my views!

Visuals: I kind of like the visual style of this game, I'm not going to lie. It does however look really dated, the textures in particular. It's like a muted Borderlands. The characters all look pretty creepy just due to the exaggerated  proportions, and then add in some plague scarring on the majority and everyone is even creepier.

Audio: This isn't great. The music is okay, but nothing special. The sound effects are repetitive and fall flat. And the sound design is pretty lacking here. In a stealth game you expect to be able to use sounds to help you, but the balance on everything is just so strange. Sometimes you can hear people behind two walls crystal clear but you can't really hear the footsteps of an enemy right around a corner 3 feet away. It's just so weird. It feels like they grabbed the sound system from a Fallout game and just used it here instead of honing it for a game where sound is extremely important.

Plot: I started out not really caring about the plot, but it definitely seems relevant later in the game with what we are going through right now across the world. Minor spoilers, but the plague in this game was imported to kill the poor. The man directing response to the plague puts on airs of helping while making ineffective moves to allow the plague to continue. Definitely feels like what a recently former president was up to during our pandemic. There is a plot about a land struggling to find a new monarch, but it seemed a little ham-fisted. Not very well thought out, or maybe it just didn't resonate with me.

Gameplay: This is a pretty normal stealth game, including a lot of exposition given through journal entries that you pick up. There are way too many for my liking, it makes the game seem a little lazy. I began the game keeping up with them, but pretty quickly lost interest. The stealth mechanics here are pretty rudimentary, but I guess this game is almost a decade old. However, the game handles really well as a FPS game which is weird set of priorities for a game trying to be stealth. The maps are fairly well laid out, with more than one entrance and exit to just about every area in the game.

Overall I can see why this series was continued, but I don't think it really resonated with me. I might pick up and play Dishonored 2 when it is really on sale, but I wasn't impressed by this game. The only real unique thing here is that you have some super powers that you can use while sneaking around. The world is made for you to use these super powers though, so it's kind of a wash in my opinion. I think I would hesitate to recommend this game. I don't think it's aged well and I don't think it does enough to stand out from other stealth games. That being said, I don't think the game is bad. [5/10]