recommended!
our favourite lines:

Guard A: "should we gather for whiskey and cigars tonight?"
Guard B: "indeed, i believe so."
Guard C: "along stupid godd4amn, ....... (keeps mumbling)"
Guard D: "seing rats (Ha, i sh1t bigger than you!)"
Guard E: "could the city getting worse after what happen last night?"
Guard F: "never doubted it."

dont even have this on my account but its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ peak

Dishonored is a game I've played too many times considering I don't like it. I sat in glued to the screen watching the trailers, I scrounged enough cash to buy it within a year of release (a big deal at the time), and in the years since I've beat this game at least half a dozen times, once without alerts, kills, knockouts outside of targets, or powers (may have used blink once for a platforming thing, but that's it.) I want to love this game, I want it to be the Thief games Looking Glass never gave us, I want it to be this colossus of game design that stands to spite an industry that restricts it further every year, but I don't.

A lot of this game is close to being great, but falls far enough to not be good. The art design is a emblematic of this as the idea of oil-painting turned real not-Victorian-London is great. There's a masterful mix of the decay that poverty and plague has brought to the average person, while often in the same level the rich are opulently detached. The shine of whale oil is one of the few visuals that manages to be iconic, but often the result is just ugly or worse, uninspired. Everyone in this game is atrocious looking, the faces look dysgenic, and a lot of the views are monotone in colour, it all fazes into an indistinct malaise that neither captivates, nor, more crucially, well defines the area.

In my attempts to love Dishonored, I've come across advice again and again to turn off a lot of the pittances made for the player, for example the objective markers. Once removed, the game doesn't give you enough information to find some things, especially optional objectives, without a gross comb of the area. This most recent playthrough I got lost for 20 minutes trying to take out the search light when kidnapping Sokolov. I hate a lot of these allowances, I hate blink, I hate darkeye, I don't like sleep darts, but when stripped away the game doesn't have a compelling alternative. The most fun I had was with my predescribed challenge run, but it was also the most frustration. The game simply isn't designed to be played without these insidious elements.

Why do I hate blink? It fosters an assymetrical playstyle, which isn't bad by itself, but this assymetry comes by a physical distinction between safe and not safe areas. The ever present chandeliers are safe because you can't be seen there unless you're in alert and enemies can't reach you. You can walk away from your computer if you're up there. These aren't safe areas like a saving room in Resident Evil either, a place to prepare for a challenging run into danger, they're so prevalent that "smart" play is blinking to one, waiting for your mana to regen, blinking to the next, ad infinitem. These aren't present in every level and they aren't in every room, but one of their equivalents always is. The issue isn't in difficulty, but tension is. I don't want to feel safe and invincible during a stealth game, I want to feel tense and immersed. The power fantasy of stealth is totally inverted here, instead of being wily and succeeding because of your own wits, you succeeded because you have special ghost powers.

Furthermore, I'm going to try not to talk about Thief too much, but seeing as Dishonored is widely compared to it I'll do so here. In Thief, let's say you turn a corner only to find a guard way too close. There's real tension, moving quickly to remove yourself from danger is safe, but loud and makes you more visible, that could be what makes the guard detect you. Hiding in shadows might be smart, but the guard can access your position and nearly trip over you, then you're screwed. It's genius. In Dishonored? Blink away. So much tension and decision making is destroyed because Blink is so powerful, you NEVER have to commit to anything outside of a choking guards. Everyone uses blink, it's iconic to the series because you'll constantly be using it. Even something as simple and ubiquitous across gaming as sneaking up to someone to do a stealth kill is made trivial, you don't need to worry about sound or timing, it's silent and instant and makes so many encounters feel meaningless. This is also my issue with the sleep arrows, they're just a bit more niche.

I hate darkeye because it's the intended method for awareness. The sound engine in this game sucks, so the solution is just get wallhacks. Turning on darkeye removes all ambiguity about a situation except the possibility of a wall starting or stopping where you don't expect, so you flicker in and out of it as fast as your mana can regen. It's all so slow and disruptive and uninteresting. My previous Thief example works here as well, tension comes from uncertainty and Dishonored's stealth is as black and white and you could manage. This binary state of stealth leaves so little unknown to the player that I have nothing to fear. I know everything that's about to happen and if I don't then it's just a button press away and seconds until I can keep playing a video game instead of cheating out where the enemies are. It feels awful to use, but without it you're helpless and open to many unfair game overs. In Thief you move slowly but there's always some risk, so you're listening out for guards. You're playing and observing at the same time. In Dishonored, you fly and zip around so there's no time for listening, if that even worked, so instead they had to include a mechanic as sledgehammerly game breaking as blink to match it. You're also physically detached from what you're observing, i.e. on the chandelier seeing if a doorway is safe, so you can't push your ear up to listen to it or peak through, this is then the alternative.

Any stealth run in Dishonored is also hampered by the action combat aspect to the game, anytime you're spotted you could just go and kill. The combat's pretty basic despite the plethora of abilities. I've seen crazy combos online, but that's all unnecessary. The levels are broken up to allow you to make fast swoops between cover and break line of sight, but when most enemies' major threat is that they stop and slowly aim their pistol, it allows you to really easily avoid their line of fire and break up larger groups into individuals. Both aspects suffer by the other's existence.

The world is almost interesting, just doesn't feel fleshed out enough considering the crazy sights we see, the levels all feel very artificial despite a lot of detail being added in. The story is dismissal, there's one twist that is obvious and toothless and there's a few characters you can get attached to. Emily is fine, but suffers from being too heavy handed in her role as the moral center of the game, Sam is cool but not interesting. Daud gets a lot more attention in the DLC obviously and I think works as a solid character, it helps that I like his levels a bit more as well, but I never felt compelled by him. Slackjaw and Granny Rags are interesting, but once you get what they are there's not much else. There's so much voice talent in this game that's wasted, why is Piero Brad Dourif? An amazing actor who's relegated to being "odd" and a pervert.

I intended to write 2 paragraphs or so, I guess this is why I keep coming back to the game. I wish I liked it and it does bring my mind back to it after a while, but I think it's due to it being an interesting failure and receiving near unanimous praise. This most recent run I didn't quicksave at all, I can abuse that in some stealth games and wanted to more freely go with Dishonored's flow and meet it at whatever terms it may give. I tried my best to embrace it's world and gameplay, and I came out the otherside even more sure that this simply isn't a good game.