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That's right, this last week I have mostly been playing Dishonored [sic]. So I figured that it was time for another review.
So. Roughly speaking, this is to Thief what Bioshock: Infinite is to Unreal. A first-person sneak-em-up with optional mass murder, with the now-popular two-fisted supernatural gameplay, set in a city gone to hell. And I couldn't help but see all the parallels to B:I, which I only just got out of playing, so there's a lot of room for comparison.
But first, the game itself. Dishonored is atmospheric as all hell (smell that sulfur) and the real protagonist of this game is the industrial whalepunk dystopia of Dunwall City. (Is 'whalepunk' a word? Is now.) They believe in showing rather than telling, and one of the supernatural powers that you get is nothing less than the ability to discover random nonessential secrets about either the local area or a specific target. The aesthetic, the look and the feel cannot be spoken too highly of.
The dialogue - while there is a lot of it - starts off uninspired and poorly delivered in places, but gets better as the game goes along; the game's initial kicker doesn't grab one the way that (for example) Bioshock: Infinite's does, but the subsequent plot continues to escalate and escalate really quite nicely. The secrets power in particular is nicely acted. I think it could have done with a voiced protagonist.
Two things to say about the mechanics. First - You are basically very strongly telegraphed that killing people and formenting chaos will have negative consequences. It is pointed out to you - not least by your Discover Random Secret power - that the guys you're potentially murdering are just people in a bad situation. And then they give you a knife. That knife is visible in the bottom right corner of your screen for 90% of the game. The position of the knife tells you whether you are stealthed or not. And every time you step up behind someone you get a tempting, tempting backstab prompt alongside the prompt to knock them out. But if you ever do? You get blood on your blade. Blood that sits there, not wiped off. Judging you. Reminding you that you killed someone today for no more reason that they were trying to kill you and you were too lazy to re-establish stealth. (And I'm totally replaying the game as a murderhobo.)
Second? The first superpower you get is the ability to teleport. It's on a short cooldown, but you can pay about 20% of your limited resource to ignore the cooldown. It's instant, easily and accurately targeted, and frankly why would you ever walk anywhere ever again? Or engage in a fair fight, or a fight you didn't want to be in? It's a stealth game. With a teleport button. With a massive range. And there's a lovely sneaky joy to be had in dropping down between two guards in the instant when their backs are turned and then away before they turn back. So that's great.
And yeah. There's a save / kill puppy moral choice thing going on, except that that puppy? It's the evilest damn puppy you ever met. That puppy is the frickin' Gollum of the dog world. It deserves death. It hates you. It'd kill you in an instant if it had the power. In fact, it's built its whole existence around doing harm to the ones that you love most. And it's a pain in the ass to save that damn puppy. Still want to save it? It won't thank you. But your knife, it has no blood on it yet. And maybe, just maybe, you can condemn it to exile, a broken hound.
And just like Infinite, there's a girl to rescue. Unlike Infinite, she's about twelve - and in a glaring first for such games, she looks and sounds and mostly acts twelve. And in general, the character art is great. There are no Hollywood figures or faces to be seen. Some of the men are ruggedly handsome in places, some of the women are tiredly pretty, but most of the characters are just, y'know, people. And they are mostly people-shaped. It's great.
And yes. It didn't grab me like Bioshock:Infinite. It wasn't quite as pretty, although it was equally as atmospheric. The plot made more sense. The supernatural was way better integrated. The worldbuilding was better delivered. The main characters looked less like supermodels. The protagonist was just as white and just as male, but they relied less on a male player. It was more the kind of game I like, although I think that the games are probably about equivalently good. I think I had about as much fun playing each, and Dishonored was shorter, so each minute of playing Dishonored was therefore more fun.
And as a parting note. One of the food items in Dishonored reads as probably the most disgusting thing I have ever forced a character of mine to eat. Tin of brined hagfish. Tin of brined hagfish. The correct response to eating tinned brined hagfish would be to run around, your eyes streaming, the occasional hideous gagging noises coming from your throat as you desperately attempted to assist your oesophagus in its instant revolt against whatever self-destructive impulse had possessed you to swallow the foul gelatinous ammoniac substance. But it gave me a few health points back, when somehow consumed through the mask the protagonist is conspicuously wearing. Perhaps he used a straw. OH GOD.
In conclusion: yeah. I liked that game. Its principal failing was that it was too short (12 hours).
U. U u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u.
That's right, this last week I have mostly been playing Dishonored [sic]. So I figured that it was time for another review.
So. Roughly speaking, this is to Thief what Bioshock: Infinite is to Unreal. A first-person sneak-em-up with optional mass murder, with the now-popular two-fisted supernatural gameplay, set in a city gone to hell. And I couldn't help but see all the parallels to B:I, which I only just got out of playing, so there's a lot of room for comparison.
But first, the game itself. Dishonored is atmospheric as all hell (smell that sulfur) and the real protagonist of this game is the industrial whalepunk dystopia of Dunwall City. (Is 'whalepunk' a word? Is now.) They believe in showing rather than telling, and one of the supernatural powers that you get is nothing less than the ability to discover random nonessential secrets about either the local area or a specific target. The aesthetic, the look and the feel cannot be spoken too highly of.
The dialogue - while there is a lot of it - starts off uninspired and poorly delivered in places, but gets better as the game goes along; the game's initial kicker doesn't grab one the way that (for example) Bioshock: Infinite's does, but the subsequent plot continues to escalate and escalate really quite nicely. The secrets power in particular is nicely acted. I think it could have done with a voiced protagonist.
Two things to say about the mechanics. First - You are basically very strongly telegraphed that killing people and formenting chaos will have negative consequences. It is pointed out to you - not least by your Discover Random Secret power - that the guys you're potentially murdering are just people in a bad situation. And then they give you a knife. That knife is visible in the bottom right corner of your screen for 90% of the game. The position of the knife tells you whether you are stealthed or not. And every time you step up behind someone you get a tempting, tempting backstab prompt alongside the prompt to knock them out. But if you ever do? You get blood on your blade. Blood that sits there, not wiped off. Judging you. Reminding you that you killed someone today for no more reason that they were trying to kill you and you were too lazy to re-establish stealth. (And I'm totally replaying the game as a murderhobo.)
Second? The first superpower you get is the ability to teleport. It's on a short cooldown, but you can pay about 20% of your limited resource to ignore the cooldown. It's instant, easily and accurately targeted, and frankly why would you ever walk anywhere ever again? Or engage in a fair fight, or a fight you didn't want to be in? It's a stealth game. With a teleport button. With a massive range. And there's a lovely sneaky joy to be had in dropping down between two guards in the instant when their backs are turned and then away before they turn back. So that's great.
And yeah. There's a save / kill puppy moral choice thing going on, except that that puppy? It's the evilest damn puppy you ever met. That puppy is the frickin' Gollum of the dog world. It deserves death. It hates you. It'd kill you in an instant if it had the power. In fact, it's built its whole existence around doing harm to the ones that you love most. And it's a pain in the ass to save that damn puppy. Still want to save it? It won't thank you. But your knife, it has no blood on it yet. And maybe, just maybe, you can condemn it to exile, a broken hound.
And just like Infinite, there's a girl to rescue. Unlike Infinite, she's about twelve - and in a glaring first for such games, she looks and sounds and mostly acts twelve. And in general, the character art is great. There are no Hollywood figures or faces to be seen. Some of the men are ruggedly handsome in places, some of the women are tiredly pretty, but most of the characters are just, y'know, people. And they are mostly people-shaped. It's great.
And yes. It didn't grab me like Bioshock:Infinite. It wasn't quite as pretty, although it was equally as atmospheric. The plot made more sense. The supernatural was way better integrated. The worldbuilding was better delivered. The main characters looked less like supermodels. The protagonist was just as white and just as male, but they relied less on a male player. It was more the kind of game I like, although I think that the games are probably about equivalently good. I think I had about as much fun playing each, and Dishonored was shorter, so each minute of playing Dishonored was therefore more fun.
And as a parting note. One of the food items in Dishonored reads as probably the most disgusting thing I have ever forced a character of mine to eat. Tin of brined hagfish. Tin of brined hagfish. The correct response to eating tinned brined hagfish would be to run around, your eyes streaming, the occasional hideous gagging noises coming from your throat as you desperately attempted to assist your oesophagus in its instant revolt against whatever self-destructive impulse had possessed you to swallow the foul gelatinous ammoniac substance. But it gave me a few health points back, when somehow consumed through the mask the protagonist is conspicuously wearing. Perhaps he used a straw. OH GOD.
In conclusion: yeah. I liked that game. Its principal failing was that it was too short (12 hours).