Ten years ago, Ion Storm incorporated created a game published by Eidos entitled Thief: Deadly Shadows. It was a stealth based games that was set in a first person perspective. I was only eleven at the time myself, but I was able to get my hands on a copy of this game through a simple garage sale up the street from my home. At the time, I was overwhelmed by the mechanics and found the game far too complicated for me to enjoy. Soon after, it was packed away in a moving box as my family found a new place to call home. Over the summer my need to clean everything up grew overwhelming enough that I thought I'd try to tackle some of the moving boxes that never really got opened. That's when I pulled out this game, replayed it, and found the potential it was actually holding. It was able to get me to jump a few times, and I was able to grasp the mechanics that seemed to fly over my head when I was younger.
Some readers are totally confused by the title at this point, and are perplexed as to why I'm sitting here talking about a game that's almost a decade old. Well, Dishonored and Thief: Deadly Shadows share a lot of similarities. Not only do they have an eerie, first person steam punk style, but a lot of the weapons are the same. I even feel like stealth in Thief is just a little easier because of things like water arrows. The intelligence of the enemies seems to help me out a bit as well.
The coolest thing about Dishonored system centered around the magical powers that a story character grants you. Upgrading them throughout the game, it almost feels like cheating if you couldn't tell the game was designed for it. Early on, you enter an area within a mission and it stops you with a prompt, actually letting you know that there are a multitude of different paths that you could take to reach any of your objectives. That same area held at least five points of interest for the same mission too, which made it a stealthy playground in a way. It is still rather linear, like Thief. You still much stealth from point A to Point B and do something bad ass to continue the story line, but what you actually do depends on what sort of player you are. I actually felt bad for one of my targets. Instead of killing them, I had their tongues removed and they were sent away as slaves in one of the coal mines they owned. It made me wonder if death was the nicer option.
Advertised that you could go through the entire game without killing a soul seems to hold up. I've played the first three missions myself. Getting the 100 gamerscore achievement is a great incentive for players, if the added challenge to mess around with the game mechanics and try something unorthodox and new isn't enough to get your gamer going. The whole game just has this added charm of, "I'm a bad ass in a port town with a vendetta and it's dark out. Okay, let's go do something cool." Though the whole political story line doesn't seem to really pop out very well, the world will reel you into playing more and more of the title, just the hear more about the enigma that is The Outsider and see more of the crazy mechanical aspect of the world. Wishing there was more of both, I wouldn't say Dishonored is for everyone, but if you're a fan of Thief from back in the day, or want a stealth game that you can just mess around in, this one is definitely worthwhile. The stealth itself is what has me ready to see this one through to the end myself.
*Soon I'll have something else up. If it's not tonight or tomorrow morning, I may wait one more week. I've gone down the Pathfinder Dungeons and Dragons style of games' rabbit hole recently, and I've been wanting to write something comparing it with RPG gaming, if not video gaming in general. I might wait a week just to get one more session in for when I write. We'll see.*
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