LO3 - Dishonoured review

Remember your first day of school: the fear of not having your parents there to tell you exactly what to do, but also the excitement of being able to make your own decisions and have some control for yourself. Dishonoured is like that first day of school, except with much more murdering and prostitution. The terms “ play your own way” or “choose your own path” get thrown around a lot in videogames nowadays, but most of these are just developers trying to big up their games in trailers and usually boil down to: choose option A or B, to receive weapon with colour scheme  A or B. Dishonoured is not one of those games.

In Dishonoured you play as Corvo Atono, a man seeking revenge after seeing the empress whom you were tasked with protecting, brutally murdered and her daughter kidnapped. Although this may seem cliché at first, after all revenge stories aren’t exactly few and far between, it soon evolves and whilst never becoming awe-inspiring, it becomes interesting enough to keep me invested. The writing also helps, with some funny dialogue and intriguing characters that feel right at home in the twisted world of Dunwall.

Whilst the main story isn’t something likely to stay in your mind for long after the endgame, the world and smaller side stories truly captivated me. It’s not often in games that I will stop to behold the environment, but dishonoured had me doing so many slow camera pans that I began to feel like I was filming for national geographic. That’s just the impact dishonoured’s world has on you: it’s a mesmerising mix of oil paintings and cartoons all melded together into one package that delights the eyes and begs to be explored. Each level is full to the brim of tiny details that make it seem like a real living world, and these details aren’t just designed to stand there and be gawped at, like your mum, many times players can also use these items to experiment with in darkly gleeful ways, also like your mum.

Speaking of exploration, I can now begin to talk about the core gameplay of dishonoured. Each level starts the same way, you arrive in a new environment are given an objective and then set loose. Wanna sneak across rooftops and disable alarms? wanna complete some side missions to earn a new path through the level? wanna burn guards to a lifeless crisp whilst summoning rats to chew through their bones whilst you stare and laugh at their helpless screams…

All of these options are available to the player, you’re never told which one would work best or whether or not it’s something Corvo would do. You just do it. That’s what makes dishonoured great, the game itself might not last you that long, and you could probably be done with it in about 8+ hours. But that’s not what dishonoured is about, it’s about exploring environments, finding all the different paths, choosing whichever one you want and then coming back to try the others. Dishonoured wants you to experiment with it, you can complete the game without killing a single character, does that mean you have to? No. Does it mean you should do? If you want to.

All in all I can thoroughly recommend Dishonoured. It’s a game that can be played over and over and still feel fresh each time. While it’s far from a perfect game, it still offers a great experience and the beautiful visuals and world design, make this a world worth living in.
9/10

For my background I found a image from creative commons and edited it myself, adding the clouds around the top and bottom of the image, I also added the titles and placed filters over the image