Human Revolution took place in a future where improbably vents were very much in fashion, while Dishonored approaches the problem of presenting alternate routes in a much more satisfactory way. In fact, it doesn’t present routes; at its strongest (which is most of what is at least twenty hours if savoured rather than scoffed), it presents places and leaves the player to make routes rather than finding them.
...
That the tour is ending at all feels mournful and I immediately, greedily wanted more. At first I almost stupidly determined that Arkane hadn’t provided enough but that’s unfair. Dishonored is so dense, with both possibility and meaning, that I’ve already played most of it twice. Same places, different experiences, and that’s not just because I changed my approach. The city reacts to the amount of corpses Corvo leaves in its tenements and slums, with the plague and the guards both strengthening in response to the chaos his actions cause.
Kill more people and more rat swarms and weepers will creep into each district as the infrastructure collapses. At the same time, the false regent, afraid and angry, will deploy more troops and more technology in a bid to win back the streets. The tallboys, so iconic in the promotional material, aren’t as significant as I expected, but they stalk later levels in squads if the chaos level is high and can be punishing.
....
That’s why Dishonored is important right now. It feels like a game from another timeline, one where Thief and System Shock set the bar for what first-person games could be, leading to designs that were built around intelligent use of space and world-building. I still wish Dishonored were longer but I also recognise that it takes a great deal of skill, hard work and time to create something of this quality; to ask for more in terms of content would be to ask for less in so many other ways. What we really should be asking is for other developers to learn the lessons that Arkane can teach them. Of course, it’s not as simple as that, because for all that there are flaws – there are always flaws – Dishonored is a work of rare imagination and skill, the sort of thing that can’t simply be copied and repeated. I hope I’m wrong, but we may not see its like again for a good while.
