Tweet
It's been a hell of a year for sneaky bastards. From Mark of the Ninja, which purists might even argue was the high point, to Far Cry 3, where I spent many a fabulous hour creeping up on STD-obsessed mercenaries - sometimes just to watch them being mauled by a passing tiger - everyone was at it. So much so, in fact, that we needn't mourn Assassin's Creed 3's relocation to the action-adventure genre, or the disappointment of Hitman: Absolution, which had its moments but ultimately satisfied neither fans of the series nor those who crouch worshipfully behind low walls. There was more than enough going on elsewhere to make up for them both.Frankly, there was more than enough to make up for them both in Dishonored alone. Arkane Studios' much-hyped first-person adventure may have had a suite of chaotic offensive actions to master, multiple endings and all the other trappings of the modern triple-A game, but I preferred to ignore all of those and concentrate on remaining undetected, even by those people whose unconscious bodies I would carefully stow in every hiding place going, while simultaneously dusting every room for the digital fingerprints of its designers - whether they intended me to find them or not.
A lot of games allow you to make your own way through them and are full of things to discover, but for me Dishonored was just as much about the things going on outside the multiple choices, the collectable bone charms and the halo effects around readable in-game fiction. It was about the bricked-up third floor of the Hound Pits pub, it was about the pneumatic braces locking plague victims into their homes, it was about the boat elevator fronting the Dunwall Tower, and it was about the playbills floating in the Rudshore water. More to the point, it was about wondering about where those things came from.
Read more…
More...