Reviews by Alex Ros

**Alex Ros** · 10-27-2012, 12:08 PM

Dishonored or Steal Your Honor Back

Art-Direction. There's no secret that a lot of quite famous designers-artists were involved into development of the visual style of the Dishonored imaginary city of Dunwall, where all of the events in the game take place. Viktor Antonov, mostly known for a memorable Half-Life 2 City 17 design. Ricardo Bare, the designer of all of the Deus Ex games. Sebastien Mitton, the designer of BioShock 2 fictional ruined underwater city of Rapture and lots of other projects. Simply by knowing such a strong team of designers collaborated on Dishonored, you might expect the visual side of Dishonored would be real unique, well-thought-out, accurately filled with details. And surely you would not be disappointed.

The city of Dunwall design is inspired by late 1700 - early 1900 real cities of London and Edinburgh. As a result we are surrounded by urban slums with extremely narrow and dark alleys, deadlocks in unexpected places, closely adjacent crooked buildings separated from each other at arm's length, windows at ground level, basements connected between ruins into complicated corridor complexes, littered rotten rustу sewers. In contrast with the decay and desolation themes, everything looks like a gracious painting in oils, saturated and even oversaturated by nearly infinite variety of warm colors and soft shades. And everything is truly painted, there no sign of photo realism and hundreds of textures without an exception are painted by hand. It gives you a surprising feeling you're inside of the old-fashioned hand-drawn animation, no comparison with the minimalism of Japanese anime or modern Hollywood 3D animation. NPCs around you from usual residents and funky criminals to uniformed city guards and lush nobles are dressed in fanciful 18th century stylized costumes, and surely that's increasing the effect of the presence at the of appropriate period of time of some fictional imaginary universe.

The world of Dishonored is resembling a futuristic cross between the Victorian Epoch with a lot more advanced modern technologies. The idea itself looks very similar to famous classical stealth Thief trilogy, where Late Middle Ages fantasy dark atmosphere was mixed with industrial themes. As long as both games are First-Person-View stealth oriented, that similarity doesn't look accidental, rather it looks like a conscious attempt to create a reminiscence, an allusion, a barely perceptible sense of recognition and familiarity within the genre. Anyway, industrial steampunkish injections into fantasy Victorian universe of Dishonored at most are designed by Viktor Antonov. His personal style is easily recognizable and there's no difficulty to detect similarities with famous Half-Life 2 City 17 designs in particular. For example, Dishonored Tallboys can be surely perceived as Half-Life Striders reimagination. Some would say there's nothing good to repeat yourself, but me personally accept this as the development of the personal style. And I think it's not that simple that Viktor Antonov is just repeating himself and grave-robbing old worked-out ideas. Kaldwins Bridge is objectively one of the most impressive levels of Dishonored and that is the priceless achievement of Viktor Antonov alone. Who else would be talented enough to deconstruct and than artistically reconstruct the famous Tower Bridge in a futuristic manner? I believe that all these vertically stretched and proportionally distorted mechanisms, machinery and metallic parts of architecture are exactly what make the game visual style something very eclectic, disturbing and memorable as a result. Dishonored would not ever become so spectacular without Viktor Antonov monochromatic metallic-cold industrialistic injections into colorful faerie Victorian Epoch atmosphere.

Dishonored art-direction is extremely complicated, truly well-thought-out and accurately detailed. Imaginary Dunwall city atmosphere is very immersive, everything looks alive and most of players would rapidly find themselves drawn into fictional game universe. 10/10.

Gameplay & Level Design. Innovative, unique and sandboxish gameplay backed by level design sharpened for a non-linear walkthrough are those features of Dishonored that were highly propagated during advertising pre-release campaign. In truth the game is introducing a really impressive toolset of melee and distant-shooting weapons, different types of ammunition, magical abilities and enchantments, dynamical perks so called Bone Charms. There's no restrictions of how to combine all these instruments. And that's exactly what objectively allows to call Dishonored gameplay sandboxish and non-linear. Practically as a player you're gifted by thousands of possibilities of how to walkthrough any single mission. Would you decide to play Dishonored like a non-stop-action game? Or would you prefer to ghost complicated levels? Would you love to try to combine stealth and terminator-alike gameplay styles? Would you decide to methodically explore all levels in order to find secrets and storyline hidden branches-possibilities? And that's only a tip of the iceberg. Would you Blink in order to walkthrough any specific part of a level? Or would you Possess a rat or a guard? Would you silently shoot enemies from a distance with a crossbow? Or would you come out to face enemies and shoot them all with a gun? Would you choose doors or windows to enter any specific building? Or would you decide to crawl through sewers or vent pipes? There're no restrictions and the list of those "Would you..." can easily become nearly infinite.

On the other hand behind all this diversity there's no real sense. There's no real matter, no real importance of how to play and walkthrough levels or missions. It's just a fun and no more. It's a freedom of choice in a desert. There's no open world and most of levels would not give you a feeling of a real non-linearity. In particular only two missions (High Overseer Campbell and House of Pleasure) that are truly non-linear without doubt. Anyway, there's no real sense in non-linearity even of those two levels as long as you would not receive any truly fulfilling behind-the-scenes storyline prize for your efforts to explore the city and learn its atmosphere and imaginary history. There're only two characters whom you're able to interact with and really change something (the old lady witch and the criminal leader). To make my thoughts clear I can compare Dishonored once again with outdated Thief series or Thief: Deadly Shadows of 2004 in particular, where the City was a lot more linear and simply smaller than any of Dishonored levels, but streets and deadlocks were flooded with tens of memorable scenes and characters; desire to poke your curious nose everywhere you could was truly rewarded with unforgettable memories. Back to Dishonored, no matter what you choose, no matter how to play, no matter how many notes you could read, everything leads you to a narrow and disappointing choice between an ugly bastard assasinator or an invisible spy warrior. To kill or not to kill. Dishonored is just a really big gorgeous Amusement Park, where're no restrictions and you're able to choose between hundreds of fascinating engaging attractions. Surely I got my innovative, unique and sandboxish entertainment, but there's nothing to remember.

Surely, I do exaggerate and, just for example, if you would choose not to kill anyone and, as the saying goes, would choose to ghost over levels, you would be gifted with a lot more confusing and non-linear gameplay. Ghosting will force you to look really carefully for hidden passages and rewardly you will do find out there're a lot of them. Dunwall city is buided for carefull exploring. Sadly, but main complaint remains the same, there's no fullfilling backstories and characters. There're thousands of diaries and notes to read, but that's a game, not a book. And, once again, when you would complete the game there will nearly nothing to remember. 7/10.

Storyline. What do we remember? 3000 years passed, but Homer's Odyssey is not forgotten. What is not just entertaining, but fulfilling us emotionally? 2000 years passed, but Dante's Inferno still excites our imagination. I can take a lot less exotic examples and remind the names of Edgar Poe or Howard Lovecraft. What's the secret? Exceptionally beautiful style or unique atmosphere? Not without that for sure. But I believe the answer is a lot simpler. We remeber the stories and characters, scenes and situations, unreachable experience and unforgettable emotions as a result. What is a memorable story? Isn't it when the scenes and characters are meaningful and nothing is senseless? Isn't it a bunch of secrets and mysteries, that are revealing as the story goes on, unexpectedly leading to a newer secrets and mysteries? Isn't it a composition with the beginning, lots of turning points, culmination and final? If this is right, than you can't just entertain, there always must be a sense and meaning behind and between the lines. And games are no exception.

There's not much to say about Dishonored storyline. There's just no story in terms of professional and talented screenplay writing. Everything we got is the banal situation, that you have to revenge and destroy all your enemies. There's no intrigues, no unexpected turning points, no culmination and no impressive final.

Even the attempt to make a turning point, when friendly Loyalists are betraying you, is very unnatural and absolutely unmotivated, because we know too little about the Loyalists characters. What is a lot more confusing is that the authors of Dishonored did find a fine composition, when we begin the game at the tower of Dunwall, bright and beautiful fantasy palace, and later get back to the same point, but drastically changed and turned into an unwelcome and hostile place. This might be a classical nice circular composition. But this small victory turns into a silly defeat and instead of fine ending we receive a short extension with above mentioned Loyalists betrayal. There's nothing wrong with the turning point and Loyalists betrayal, but for good characters must change gradually, not in a moment, and these gradual changes of characters has to be part of story intrigue and mystery, waiting for revealing.

Sadly, but there is not a single scene or a dialogue, where you could sympathize someone, where you could be surprised and truly intrigued. There's no one to love or reasonably hate and no one to remember. We know nothing about our hero Corvo, we know nothing about the main antagonist Lord Regent. Most of characters are just static lifeless masks. Nothing to say about the Emily, the child character whom we expected to care of, but reversely the more we look at her behavior, the more she looks like an arrogant little bitch. The only one character whose personal story is touching and interesting is a story of Granny Rags, whom at first you perceive as a strange old lady with a sad love story behind, but later you realize she had turned to be an evil witch. There's nothing special and genius, nevertheless it's good enough for a game. Without doubt Dishonored could present us a whole lot more of memorable lively characters as long as there's a real lot of kinda skeletons of might-be-really-good characters. For example, the pair of ingenious Piero Joplin and Anton Sokolov might be a truly charismatic pair, but both characters and their stories are simply not developed and left as a draft shadows. Same thing with Callista, the niece of the Captain of City Watch. Slackjaw, the crime boss. Daud, the leader of assassins, who killed the Empress. There were hundreds of possibilities to introduce tens of charismatic persons and memorable scenes, but it just didn't happen for some reasons. As a result Dishonored is nearly a walking dead. 3/10

Conclusion. In general there's an interesting and quite promising idea-situation with plague and rats. Somehow it can be interpreted as a metaphor to a moment of time-of-change, when virgin Victorian glamorous fantasy turns into a mechanical industrial machine, cold and hostile. The world is destroying itself, cleaning itself up with plague and rats to make horrible changes possible. Anyway, the presence of plague and rats could be interpreted in a million ways, no matter what interpretation you choose, but surely it allows you to think about a lot of important things and happenings in our real momentary life. And I would love to praise that Dishonored artistic discovery, but I simply can't as long as plague and rats have turned into surprising move to force players to use stealthy style of playing. The more you assassinate your enemies the more you're surrounded by rats. Multifaceted metaphor turns into a banal morality.

This review is just a private and subjective opinion. Some can agree and some may disagree. But as for me personally I believe and stating on what might become an innovative, spectacular and memorable game, a piece of art, became just an entertaining, senseless and meaningless playground. Shining shell with no gem inside. 6/10

Seems like Arcane guys decided to patch up the black hole of the rushly developed story and characters. The story of the assassin Daud, presented in 6 chapters of DLC "The Knife of Dunwall" and DLC "The Brigmore Witches" is unexpectedly satisfying with almost a detective story with horrifying elements of mystics. The biggest black hole of the poor story of the original game is totally sealed with DLC full-packege with no doubts, but with the personal doubts of the Daud. 9/10