Today, I spent a little bit of time with Dishonored, a first-person-action-stealth-steampunk-assassination-adventure. You’ll notice there was no concise way to describe the game, and that’s because it is a strange combination of genres. Designed with a little bit of Thief and Deus Ex’s DNA, Dishonored puts you in the shoes of an assassin out to clear their name in a rotting steampunk city:
The game allows players to approach situations many different ways. To highlight this, the developers guided us through two ways to play the same level: one focusing on stealth, the other focusing on butchering everyone. Using the assassin’s many unique skills, such as teleporting, possession, summoning rat swarms, and time manipulation, along with a decent arsenal of crossbows and pistols, players can really tailor the game to their play styles. We saw a teleporting, head chopping assault, and we saw how you can sneak into a building by possessing a friggin’ fish! Yes, the player can possess animals (and later people), use them to get past the guards / break into the building, and then separate their souls, leaving them in the new location. Very cool.
Adding to the replayability, and this game does look incredibly replayable, are minor randomizations found in the missions. An example shown involved the location of two targets for assassination. Characters are not locked to a specific location, meaning where you find a target in one playthrough may be entirely different in the next.
Though the controls felt a little lose, overall the game just blew me away.
2 Comments
You had me at “possessing fish.” See you at launch.