Dishonored (2012)

This game is a stylish first-person action-stealth game developed by Arkane Studios. set in the plague-ridden, steampunk-inspired city of Dunwall, the MC is called Corvo Attano, a bodyguard framed for murder who gains supernatural powers to exact revenge or deliver justice. The game's standout features are its immersive world-building, flexible gameplay, and moral choice system, which at the time was nothing groundbreaking but the standout here is that it was amazingly implemented.

You can tackle missions with brutal force, stealth, or clever use of powers like teleportation and time-freezing. Each choice impacts the story and world, encouraging replayability, though out of all Dishonored titles, this is the least complex one when it comes to this mechanic. Though the combat can feel clunky at times and the story is straightforward, Dishonored shines with its freedom of approach, art design, and atmosphere. This is definitely a must-play for fans of immersive sims and stealth.

As for the visuals and sound design, it commits fully to its identity. Dunwall’s painterly art style, inspired by oil paintings and exaggerated architecture, gives the city a grim elegance that still holds up today. Paired with a moody OST that blends industrial sounds with somber melodies, the game constantly reinforces its themes of decay, corruption, and quiet desperation. Environmental storytelling does much of the heavy lifting, with abandoned apartments, propaganda posters, and overheard conversations fleshing out a world that feels lived in and deeply troubled.

What ultimately elevates this title is how well its systems interlock to support your expression. Levels are dense sandboxes designed to reward curiosity, observation, and experimentation, making even repeat playthroughs feel fresh. While later entries would refine and expand on these ideas, the original stands as a confident foundation, one that trusts you to define their own version of Corvo and live with the consequences. Even more than a decade later, the first Dishonored entry remains a strong example of how thoughtful design can turn player choice into the heart of the experience.

Dishonored is very underrated here, its easily one of the best immersive-sim games ever made, its technically a stealth game but you can play it also as an action game.

Dishonored boasts a number of qualities that stood the test of time. It has incredibly complex level design that takes into consideration the multiple mechanics the game throws at you. The levels always have multiple ways to enter to and exist from, each level has a lot of complexity in its architecture and the way enemy placement and targets are handled. The complexity of the level design makes the game highly replayable as you will always want to experience a different route to solve it.

Another quality is the gameplay, its first person stealth with a set of tools such as a gun, knife, bombs and traps, all these tools come together in harmony if you do a high chaos run, you can play beautifully and execute your targets in artistic ways that makes jaws drop.

Dishonored also has great art design, the art direction aged well and the game still looks fantastic to this day, Dunwall is a great steampunk setting filled with thick atmosphere and a lot of lore.

Dishonored has well implemented side quests each side quests offer you choice with dialogue and with gameplay, so not just pick a dialogue to see the consequences, you also can play your own way and the game will react to that later.

Story is interesting as its told through audio logs, notes, characters speaking in the background and environmental storytelling, you know the immersive-sim way reminder of games like Thief, Deus Ex and Shock series.

Not much else to say, but Dishonored is a masterpiece of a game, it has fun gameplay, smooth controls, unique and innovative power fantasy system, great level design, beautiful art direction, immersive atmosphere, interesting story and a lot of high replayability. Also the expansions are neat as they let you play from the antagonist point of view.

3.99 for this game is a joke of a rating, especially seeing the amount of slop above it. If you love immersive-sim games this is a must play!

So I bought this game on a sale maybe in 2013 a year after release. I was just coming off of playing Bioshock Infinite and I thought, why not try Dishonored. I played for 5 hours and for some reason put it down and never came back. Until December of 2021. I saw Dishonored 2 on sale and thought I should make my way through Dishonored 1. And boy am I glad I did. This game has a pretty engaging story, and each mission you complete makes you want to jump right into the next one. I'll be honest though, I had no idea about the chaos level stuff. I thought if I was sneaky enough I could stabby stab people in the neck and be good to go. Yea, apparently not. So after the second mission I was told that killing folks causes more zambies to spawn and more rats and just in general causes chaos. So I started being a bit more sneaky. So instead of killing people I would choke them out and throw them off ledges into the water...where I guess they died. :\ Because at the end of the mission it'd say I killed 11 people, when I thought I was just choking them out. Oh well, casualties of war I thought. I'll try harder next time not to cause chaos or kill anyone. Then I got to a mission that was going really well and then nearing the end everyone and their mom lost their crap and wanted to kill me. No matter how I played it from my last quicksave, people lost it and came after me hard. So what did I do? I sneak-stabbed them, I shot them, I parried their attacks and sliced off their heads. I was in a hurry and on a mission and nothing could stand in my way.

This game felt like Assassin's Creed only way more fun and way better movement and controls. There are so many ways to achieve your objective, I never felt like I was locked into any kind of linear gameplay. It's almost like the Hitman series in which you're given an objective and left to carry it out on your own. Kill someone or dispose of them by some other means but leaving them alive - the choice is yours. And then there's a bunch of optional missions (which I completely did), so you get even more bang for your buck. I restarted my gameplay after the initial 5 hours, and Steam says my play time was about 18 hours, so I'd say going through all of the story took me about 13 hours. What a ride. Depending on how you play, you can run through a mission in 20-30 minutes, or take it slow like I did and average anywhere from 40 mins to an hour. It's nice that you can save and exit during a mission and come back right where you left off, too.

I've moved onto Dishonored 2 and the menus and mission environments look WAY cooler. The environments are way less dark & depressing, that's for sure.

Dishonored's gameplay is a combination of the weapons and power system from Bioshock with added stealth and traversal mechanics. I enjoyed finding alternate routes around the game's open levels, and alternative nonlethal methods to defeat the targets. However, the inclusion of a nonlethal melee would've been useful.

The art design, story and world are interesting. The characters are okay, could've had more development but the mission structure of the game and the inclusion of a silent protagonist meant that wasn't really needed. Also (and this may be a strange point) as I have a backlog of games to complete, I tend to like games that have concise, satisfying stories that don't drag on too long, and Dishonored is a good example of this.

The morality system was interesting. I liked how it was affected by gameplay more than right/wrong quicktime choices, although the morality of some of the nonlethal target approaches is questionable.

Overall, Dishonored is a good game, and I'd consider replaying it to try the high chaos (and probably more enjoyable) playstyle.

The degree of flexibility this game gives you is really kind of astounding. Like, there's one mission where, if you have the necessary power upgrade, you can fully skip about a third of the level by just jumping across rooftops. And it's not cheating, or even cheesing, because the important thing is that the game doesn't just give you options, but actually supports those options mechanically and with level design.

It's really quite fun, especially for someone like me who enjoys stealth but gets frustrated by games like Splinter Cell or the early Assassin's Creeds which brutally enforce stealth by making discovery either an automatic failure or just almost impossible to survive. And unlike the later ACs, Dishonored does actually incentivise stealth, both through resource scarcity and through incentivising non-lethal solutions (via how they affect the world and the epilogue) which tend to require stealth. Even that isn't done heavy-handedly, though, as you can get away with a few deaths per mission and still get the good ending. Playing non-lethal does feel restricting at times, as some of the mechanics, such as turning security systems against your enemies or even just basic drop takedowns, are off-limits, but the challenge is fun if you're into it.

The narrative is...prettttty boring, but the gameplay makes up for it, at least in the main game (The Knife of Dunwall DLC had a fun first level but was pretty subpar after that and kind of burnt me out, so I didn't bother playing The Witches of Brigmore).

I honestly forgot how much I loved this game. To the art style, the tone, the level design, the gameplay and progression system, every bit of it just makes me so happy. I knew I liked it when I played it 7 years ago, but playing it again now with a more critical eye makes me appreciate it even more.

I just finished a mostly low-chaos playthrough (except for the Flooded District and the last level. The difficulty SPIKES), and my only complaint for the story is that when you finish low chaos, the ending seems... anticlimactic to an extent. I remember enjoying the neutral/high-chaos ending I got years ago a lot more.

When playing as I did, stealthy and with as little killing as possible, it almost turns each level into a puzzle. How can I incapacitate this guard without the others noticing? How can I hide the guards unconscious body without outright killing him? I also love how most of the missions give you so many ways of tackling them. Do I want to kill these awful people? Or let them live, but make their lives as miserable as possible?

Revisiting the city of Dunwall gave me a new appreciation for it, and I'll most likely be revisiting again once I take a break from the game and pick up all the DLC for it. I've heard great things.

Dishonored: A Review

The 2012 instant classic lives up to its hype.

Dishonoured came out when I was taking a hiatus from video games and hence I never payed it much credence. That is until recently when the game was on sale for $6 on the Play Station Store. As of writing this review I have only completed the main story and haven’t touched the DLC supplied with the definitive edition. Keeping that in mind here are my opinions.

The story of Dishonored is simple but effective. Immediately as the story starts we become aware of the games title. You play as Corvo, the Royal Protector of Dunwall, who has been dishonoured by having the empresses murder blamed on him. The set up is rather simple but it is more than enough to understand our characters motivations and provide a driving reason for the games missions. Corvo joins the loyalists who pledge to rescue the empresses daughter and place her on the throne. We don’t understand much else about Corvo except that he cares greatly for Emily, the empresses daughter, and will do anything to protect her. This “blank character” of sorts is actually one of the games strength’s as it allows you to inject your personality into Corvo’s actions increasing your investment in the game. The Country of Dunwall is fascinating, a plague ravaged nation, desolate and without any glimmer of hope. In all the missions we are able to see implications of the plague and the effect it has on the common folk of the country. The mood created by the setting is extremely immersive, a mesh of steampunk architecture and desolate ruins. Not much is known about the world but there is a large amount of lore in the form of books that fill in the back story of Dunwall and the game in general. Overall the story is more than sufficient and remains interesting till the conclusion. The conclusion itself is rather underwhelming but it is a small problem when compared to the overall success of the game. Additionally the cutscenes leave a lot to be desired as they are usually simple conversations that lack any cinematic elements, coming across as rather bland and uninteresting. But again the game doesn’t utilise the cutscenes for anything except conveying backstory. The cinematic elements of the game exist in its gameplay.

Dishonoured’s gameplay is what I call revolutionary. Perhaps it is because I haven’t played many games in a similar genre, where you are able to play the entire game in a multitude of manners, and where the game doesn’t require you to at any point play in a specific manner. A game where the environments are so open and approaching a mission can be done in a plethora of different manners. Yes, dishonoured is what I call a non linear linear game. That is a poor sentence but it is precisely what this game is. Games like Far Cry contain stealth and action elements and one can say that the game is open to a multitude of approaches, but that cannot compare to dishonoured. You can go through the whole of dishonoured without killing an enemy or being seen by one at that. At the same time the whole game can be played in a pure non stealth manner, killing everyone you come across. How many games can brag of giving players the ability to hit both extremes. The answer is not many. This is why I am so impressed with the gameplay of dishonoured. I played the whole game in stealth attempting to not kill anyone and never be seen. This made the game a puzzle as you had to figure out the right routes and have a masters in using the blink power. Learning how to navigate the game without alerting or killing any enemies was a real challenge that required practice and execution but it is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I have had in a while. Because of the variety of gameplay options this game has an extremely high replay value. I can’t wait to play the game again as a vengeful spirit killing everyone in my way.

Overall, Dishonored is an absolute gem of a game which I would recommend strongly to both stealth and action fans. It is a breath of fresh air compared to the usual stealth action games the industry routinely churns out.

Ahhh, Dishonored. The reason I failed the majority of my classes the term it was released.

I picked up the limited edition. Check out this gorgeous tin, and the tarot cards that came with it.

I love the art of Dishonored, and getting the cards was just a bonus. Check out that map! I hope the (rumoured) sequels explore the world a little more. The game developers put so much work into creating the world of Dishonored, and whilst I loved Dunwall, I want to see more of Tyvia, or Morley - perhaps even the mysterious Pandyssian Continent.

The world building is obvious in all the books and notes that can be found throughout the game. I actively sort out works of literature in the game, because they were just so damn fascinating.

Okay, so. The game tries to encourage going about things in a stealthy manner, as evidenced by the list of stats at the end of each level, and awards for not being seen. The first three times I played through, I just went in guns blazing, because it was so much fun. They give you some really cool ways to kill people, and my favourite would have to rewiring the guard's watchtower so it turned on them and blew them all up. Arc Pylons were just as fun. (The Chaos meter was aptly named).

However, on my fourth (fifth? Sixth?) play through, I decided to go for stealthy, and was surprised at just how fun it was. I managed to complete the game with the low chaos ending, and it changed the entire feel of the game.

Dishonored is a game that changes with your mood. If you want to go bananas with the cool weapons and decapitate, blow up, stab, shoot, set rats upon or burn alive each person you come across, the game responds in kind with more rats and Weepers. If you go the stealthy option, Dunwall seems to heal itself somewhat. Along with tiny sidemissions and multiple ways to approach each objective, this game can be played numerous times, and still seem like a completely different game.

I hope the rumours for Dishonored 2 are true, because I desperately need more of the Dishonored world in my life.