At one time or another, everyone has felt the way I did when playing Dishonored: a mixture of expectation, elation, remorse, and wistfulness at what could have been. It was like locking eyes with that beautiful someone and, heart pounding, listening to her describe why she hates The Wire.
That bad.
Dishonored’s ultimate disappointment would not have been such a sucker punch if the game hadn’t opened with such promise. Here’s the thing: One hour in, I expected to give Dishonored a 10. You start out in a Skyrim-style cart-ride. You’re on a boat, and you can peer into the inky haze of the distant city. That city, Dunwall, looks fabulous, and not just in its graphical fidelity. Wealthy estates soar upwards and cast their surroundings into gloom. Poorer locales recede into the shadows and seem to roil with sweat and sorrow. The whole of Dunwall seems to cry out “I am a breathing, embattled world; explore me and be rewarded.”
This exploration is where the game began to lose me. In truth, however, the first few missions simply set a pace that the rest of the game failed to match. If you’ve ever played Half-Life 2, you’ll find some familiarity in the “living world” of these early stages. Dunwall thrums with possibility, and the intrepid adventurer will always find some new trinket or bit of story. Arkane Studios, developer of Dishonored, loaded these first levels with a staggering bounty of sidequests, treasures, dialog and lore. It all seems too good to be true.
And it is. At last, the sad truth: Dishonored is terribly front-loaded. For all the intrigue in Dunwall, the biggest conspiracy might be the brain-drain ray pointed at your home base. Early on, characters gab and bicker with a robust array of dialog. As the game progresses, they’re gradually reduced to robots, repeatedly uttering the same one or two lines needed to advance the plot. Characters are not alone in this dumbing-down. At the start, in-game books hint at certain dark secrets — grim deities in conflict with the church, the city’s immoral power supply on the verge of failure — that never come to fruition. For all its early promises, Dunwall never quite makes good.
Of course, a game is more than its setting. Dishonored’s gameplay is a delight, and tarnishes only slightly by game’s end. You enter the world as an assassin very similar to the protagonist of the Thief series, able to move silently, slay enemies swiftly from behind, and fall back on an Assassin’s Creed inspired block-and-counter melee when engaged head-on. As you progress, you’ll pick up game-changing spells that set Dishonored apart from its stealth-game brothers. You might reach the second mission without falling for the game’s shadowy aesthetic or assassinations, but if you don’t love Blink, you simply aren’t human.
Blink is a medium-range teleport, and the feeling of learning Blink is equal to the green shell in Super Mario 64 or your first flying mount in World of Warcraft. It embodies the caterpillar-into-butterfly feeling of giving up the earth and suddenly becoming free. You’ll ask yourself, “How did I ever live without this?” In 2010, Avatar audiences saw the real world as suddenly drab and gray in contrast to Pandora. After Dishonored, moving in the real world suddenly seems so slow. And yet, simply by being so awesome, Blink creates a problem all its own. Blink makes the game easy.
Dishonored is a game about player empowerment. Everything, from your powers to your silence to your effect on NPCs, is designed to make you feel like a vengeful god unleashing hellfire on an unprepared world. Throughout, Dishonored shows how frightened it is of breaking the player empowerment cycle by being too timid to challenge the player. Every task feels constructed through the lens of “what if the player doesn’t have X spell,” and is put in easy reach of a player with only the default spell: Blink.
Dishonored stresses, through its tutorials and menus, that you can “play your way,” by selecting spells that suit your style. I can’t disagree: the hero you play may be very different from mine. This is true, but it simply doesn’t matter. Every part of the game, every objective, every treasure, and every side-quest can be achieved with only Blink. By a few hours in, I would not have been the charming protagonist the other characters love and admire. I would have been a tired and muttering Sisyphus, doomed to perform the same task – Blink behind guard, backstab, Blink to safety – again and again and again.
I came to Dishonored with enormous hope. I have loved everything Dishonored draws from: gameplay from Thief and Deus Ex and story from The Count of Monte Cristo and V for Vendetta. At first, my hopes seemed well founded, but, by about hour five, I felt like Dishonored and I were both just waiting for the end. Me due to boredom, and Dishonored because it had nothing left to give.
7 / 10
