Anniversary Advent 2022 | Dishonored - The Streets Dunwall Ten Years Later

I don’t think I’ll get my own squad after what happened last night.

It’s been a decade since Dishonored scurried out of Arkane Studios and into our hearts, and it still tops many people’s personal favourite game list to this day. It offered a dose of gothic steampunk that just hadn’t been seen in many mainstream games at the time - or since. When you think about it the game really does have everything anyone could ask for; corruption, darkness, disease, swords, messed up magic, and enough rats to turn a person into a puddle of viscera in seconds.

Images proceeding unfortunate events.

Within this beautiful and dangerous world, you play as Corvo Attano, Royal Protector (and lover) to Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, living in comfort at the Royal Palace in the capital city of Dunwall. Well, for the first ten minutes at least, then you become Corvo Attano, fall guy for the assassination of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin as well as a pawn of the uncaring celestial god and bit of a dick, The Outsider. It’s from that pouty floating bastard that you get your cool powers that act as the backbone to Dishonored’s intricate, systemic and yet somehow well-paced gameplay.

You telling me Arkane worked on a cancelled Half-Life project? I don’t believe you…

One of the game’s biggest strengths is how much of Dishonored’s world you get to see during the course of the story. Starting in the gutter (literally) you will travel to royal palaces; snooty aristocratic parties; flooded ruins; working-class pubs and everything in between. Even the most upper-class environments all creak and shudder, hiding disgusting things in the many dark corners of this grim world. Bloodstained sheets covering the bodies of the dead line the streets as the guarded and privileged nobility scoot on by in their full metal electric tram carriages. The moans of the great whales whose oil powers this fragile, uncaring Empire carry across the water. 

The name of the game is choice. The amount of dead bodies you create directly affects the amount of chaos in the world, and this in turn decides how dark the story gets. It’s not the most complex of moral choice systems, but it does affect more than just the ending. The plague ravaging the Isles is only one of the threats to this delicate balance of power. You’ve got the religious zealots over at the Abbey of the Everyman; the victims of the aforementioned plague, known as ‘weepers’; criminal gangs; and the man who framed you in the first place, Lord Regent Hiram Burrows, who looks like your local Tory MP if they murdered the incumbent and then blamed it on the doorman. It’s a testament to the game’s design that it’s perfectly possible to kill every living thing you come across or finish the whole game causing little more than lots of headaches from the shadows. Even the main targets can be dealt with non-lethally (which, in my opinion, can often be fates worse than death).

You can complete the not only without killing anyone but without being seen.

Or you could be cool.

Dishonored set itself apart by being a linear game released during a time when much of the industry ramping up of the open-world sandbox bubble that most AAA games still find themselves within. We had GTA IV four years prior, people were still crying at Red Dead Redemption, and the current omnipresent spectre of GTA Online was still a year away. Everything about Dishonored, from its art style to its level design, harkened back to the days of PC imersive sims like Deus Ex and Thief, which is also where Arkane got the basis for Dishonored’s stealth mechanics. Mostly playing on light and shadow, and lots of guards investigating noises that surely must just be rats?

The story itself is sometimes seen as a sticking point, even among fans; you deal with what’s been established as the main villain just over halfway through, and the steam goes out of it over the next few chapters. But when Dishonored hits the mark, it’s one of the most absorbing examples of modern gaming out there. I still, to this day, remember watching the E3 reveal (remember E3?) and how…different it looked (bear in mind I was about 11 at the time). And while the differences between ‘low’ and ‘high’ chaos are pretty much completely binary, the effect on the world is just nuanced enough to be more than an inFamous-style “press this button to be a bastard” system. 

Dishonored’s world is so goddamn brilliant to me that replaying is never a chore. The pace of superpower acquisition is near perfect, especially if you’re aiming for a pacifist run. You’re never screwed if you don’t have the upgraded version of power X, things are just marginally easier if you do have it. There are so many books and letters to read, to flesh out this crumbling empire world and people slowly dying in it, sometimes these bits of side story take the form of complete tales, and sometimes just scratching the surface of a place that feels endlessly deep. 

Don’t worry honey, those guards are just dancing with those cute rodents… Dancing in pools of their own blood.

So go, gather with whisky and cigars (I know, I’m a chronic asthmatic who doesn’t like whisky, shut up), and relive Dishonored on its tenth birthday. Be immersed in a world where it’s really hard to resist becoming a serial killer and see what rewards the game will offer you if you can fight temptation. In this case, ‘temptation’ means ‘summoning rats from hell’ to nibble guards to death. Words to live by.