This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Normally when I setup my roulette wheel of choices I have a wheel space for a series if I feel it is something that needs to be played in order. For instance, you shouldn’t jump into Mass Effect 2 or 3 without playing the previous games. Can you play it that way? Certainly, but those stories are built on a continuation of what came before it and no matter how small you would be cheapening the experience just a little bit for yourself, if you didn’t play them in order. However, other games have so little connection the previous game that they can be played in any order. Final Fantasy games (assuming you aren’t talking about X-2 or a 13 spinoff) might have some general themes the same, or naming conventions, or even shared spells/items/weapons and all of those things might make you playing the game more enjoyable if you are playing them in order and seeing how they change, but you can get 99% of the way there without playing a previous game. Then there are the weird middle ground games that might not be a direct continuation of the story, but will help you appreciate future games. For those games I never really knew how to list them on the roulette wheel, do I list them as a series meaning I am always starting with the first game, or list them separately so that I might come to them out of order? Would it be more interesting for me to play a game like Hitman Blood money first and then randomly spin Hitman Silent Assassin and go back in time? Sure the story is kinda a continuation but I wouldn’t put it on the “must be played in order” grouping. This is all to say that I initially had Dishonored and its sequel listed as two separate items, and I spun Dishonored 2, but as you can tell from the title we aren’t talking about the 2^nd game, because I realized I am too much of a weirdo to play games out of order. Before I started Dishonored, I looked up if I could play the 2^nd one out of order, and was told YES, but that wasn’t apparently enough for me, so let’s instead talk about Dishonored 1 which took its place.

Dishonored is, technically, a first person shooter, but depending on how you play the game may not actually involve any shooting. You play as Corvo, a man who is framed for the death of the empress and the kidnapping of the empress daughter, who is secretly also your daughter. I know it doesn’t specifically say that, but the game drops so many hints that if you aren’t the biological father then you are, at worst, the person Emily sees as your father. Anyway, your job is to connect with the resistance, find Emily, and enact payback so that the people that framed you pay and Emily ends up back on the throne. Each level essentially plays out as you are set to deal with a target that played some role in the misery you find yourself in.

Believe it or not, this is the first time I have played Dishonored, it always existed as one of those games that I knew everyone liked so I bought it, but then never got around to playing it (see every game on my shelf). So I will say the first thing that really struck me was just how incredibly massive and open the levels were in this game. Even with what I knew about the game, I was expecting the levels to be more or less straight paths with the Deus Ex philosophy. If you are going sneaky, here is a vent on the roof, and if you are going loud take the front door, but outside of those choices you are going to be walking through the same areas. So, when I entered my first real level and not only was it multi staged (having to load into different maps to find your target), but that there were also side quests that took you in the complete opposite direction of the target kind of blew my mind. I don’t think anyone can certainly complain about the world building and level of detail that exists in just the environmental story-telling for this game. I would stumble upon rooms or areas that were completely optional, and be able to figure out the story they were trying to tell. In fact I remember early-on finding a room the chronicled the final days of a family who caught the plague, and it was genuinely heartbreaking to read, and yet easily missed as it was room not marked as a side quest or on the path to the main hit. It really set the scene for what I expected the game to be, as I was reading every journal, letter, and document I came across so I could learn as much about this world as possible.

However, it did approach the Skyrim level of documents that I found my interest waning as it seemed every other room had multiple books to read. I quickly went from devouring every piece of in game literature, to only reading the first or last line, to finally just clicking on the item to “check it off” some imaginary list as if there was achievement for reading every document. I don’t know whether I fall in the majority or minority, but I don’t need a book of poetry or a short story told via 5 volumes to feel immersed in the world. Tell the personal stories, what “regular people” are writing down in their journals, not the stories the Dishonored equivalent of Dean Koontz is writing. I’m sure my stance doesn’t make sense, but to me the stories that pop up in multiple houses throughout the game are fluff. If this book exists in 10 different areas in the game and tells the same story, then I doubt this book is actually adding to the environmental storytelling this game is going for. There might be 5 houses on my street that all own the book “The Da Vinci Code,” but if this was a video game, we wouldn’t need to make all 5 copies of that book readable, or even a single copy readable, it doesn’t really say anything about the world outside of “people bought this book,” or “This was a popular book at the time.” Alright, that was a long side-track, but it is something that bothers me in games (Skyrim, Witcher, etc. included) because I want to be fully immersed in the game. I want to read the text you included in the game, because it might be important or might get me to appreciate a story aspect more, but I don’t want to read someone’s first draft of a short story they are working on at home.

The best level by far is one that takes place at a house party. It is the only real level that lets you solve a mystery. Sure you have to knock out guards before getting to the party or even once inside, but then you get to explore a somewhat more contained map. Trying to figure out who your target is, before making your strike. It stands out to me, for both a positive and negative way. Obviously I think its a great level that lets you kinda breathe and not feel like you have to slink from dark corner to dark corner, but on the negative side, its the only one of its kind. I found that I wanted more levels like this, and after you finish it, its back to big open world kill floors (or sneak floors), and that was a letdown. I think there is a game that exists that mixes the mystery of that level with the big open world levels better then a 9-1 split.

Anyway, I mentioned earlier, that you can play Dishonored in a multitude of different styles given the tools and spells at your potential disposal. If you want to enact revenge on every one and everything, you can go on a killing spree using guns and crossbows. You can sneak in the shadows and use your special powers to call swarms of rats to dispose of your enemies, or you can try and take the pacifist route and sneak your way through levels and only put guards to sleep when they stand in your way. The game does react to how you are going to play as well, with the world changing around you depending on how high your overall chaos level might be. The more ruthless you are and the more people you kill, the higher your chaos rating will be at the end of every level. As your accumulation of chaos grows, the world will begin changing with you. There might be more guards, rats, or infected civilians in areas, which will obviously make your route that much harder. If you approach the missions in a different light, then you might find targets more accessible, more freedom on the ground, and other benefits for being sneaky. It is a really unique style of play that I feel is signposted in the absolute worst way.

I will admit, that I played the game wrong. I know that you can’t technically play the game wrong, but I did because of an early loading screen. On one of the many loading screens there was a tidbit that said something similar to: “Less kills = Less chaos = Good ending.” Now, I don’t care what game I am playing, if the game is going to tell me straight up that I will get a good ending by playing a certain way, then you better believe I want to get the good ending. At this point, I don’t really know the full story of the game, and what twists and turns are coming, but I am going to associate a good ending with closure and presumably happiness, so yeah I am going to strive towards that. Therefore this colored my entire approach to the game, I didn’t know how many kills would tell the game to move the needle from low to medium or high chaos, so guess what I did? That’s right, refused to kill anyone, unless it was an accident (more on that later). Not only did I take the non-lethal approach on every target, but I also would only knock out guards. I didn’t know what the threshold was, so I wasn’t going to take any chances. I would have completed the whole game with no kills, except for a few knocked out enemies falling from great heights, that I didn’t know died until the stat screen at the end of the level. I was so set in my way, that I spent the game saving and loading frequently if a section went wrong and I was forced to kill a guard. I even ignored purchasing a lot of the more interesting powers, because they usually all harmed enemies. I handicapped the fun for this game because the game told me that I was going to get a bad ending and seeing as I was only going to play this game once (at this moment) it wouldn’t have set well with me if my first run through was the equivalent to an evil path.

Now don’t get me wrong, I want games to have consequences for the actions I take. I even want games to have multiple endings that take into consideration what you have done, but my issue is really how blatant I thought the game was by calling it out. In Mass Effect you know going in that you can take the good guy approach or the bad guy approach to most situations, but you don’t always know what the consequence is going to be and you certainly don’t know if it is going to handicap your ending. I can be a pretty ruthless guy, but still lead my team through the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2, my character can have nuances. When I started Witcher 3, one of the first side quests I remember was catching a drunk thief and then thinking I was going the “good” path with it, and the consequence were the guards just straight up murdering the thief. It quickly made me realize that I had to really think through my choices as to how I want to present myself. Dishonored just straight up told me, don’t kill anyone, if you want the good ending. I looked it up after I beat the game, and I still don’t fully understand if the game really only measures Chaos based on the actual targets of the levels, or if it takes guards into consideration at all.

Had the game not explicitly said what made a good ending, I probably would have still non-lethal dealt with the targets, but I would have certainly killed guards, especially if I got caught sneaking or hiding a body. I might have even ended up with the same ending, but I can tell you I would have re-loaded a lot less saves, and probably enjoyed the game more. Thinking back on how I would methodically knock out guards and hide their bodies and save after each one, just because I knew if I was caught on the following guard I could re-load and not have to start the whole section over. Can I blame the game for my mannerism and how I played the game? Yes, I can. Maybe its not 100% to fault, but for a tip to specifically speak to the type of ending you are going to get, will make some people play differently. Not that I think a lot of people are going to read this write-up about Dishonored if they have never played Dishonored, but I would certainly argue that your first playthrough should not be the sneaky playthrough. Enjoy the powers, enjoy taking out guards either by trickery or by straight up combat, but the slow methodical way certainly took me out of it.

Going back to that freedom, I was pretty entertained once I had the level 2 teleport skill (blink) and the level 2 stop time skill (Bend), about the stuff you could get up to in the game. Obviously this is a big hats off to the development team, but it was fun finding creative ways to stay on rooftops out of the line of sight of enemies, or how you could freeze time and do a whole mess of things before time re-started. It was late in the game, and there was a patrol of 3 enemies that I just couldn’t split up that I wanted to get past, knowing if I knocked out one I would be facing the wrath of the others meant I had to get creative. So, I was able to freeze time, fire three sleep darts at roughly the same time, get back into hiding, and when time resumed they all basically fell asleep at the same time. Of course, I am sure there were other routes that would have not even put these people in my path, but I picked my poison and was still able to use the tools to make things work out towards my play style.

I did have a couple glitches and gaffs that would momentarily take me out of the game, but nothing truly game breaking. In one instance I had a guard who was on a slanted rooftop start to slide so that his feet were no longer touching solid ground, the character didn’t plummet to their death as they should, they were just hovering about 2 feet away from the edge of the building, and still operating as normal. This really messed me up because if I used a sleeping dart to knock them asleep, then they would fall to the ground and die, which as you know was something I was trying to avoid. I did have to load that part of the game several times, in order to either get past the floating guard, or shoot him before he got off the building. In another instance, when I entered a new area, the camera got stuck zoomed in and I was playing the level with a different perspective. That was easily fixed by re-loading a save before I entered that area. The weirdest thing that happened to me by far, is that I was forced to turn my 360 on its side to play the game. I have no idea why, but the game would not load if my 360 was vertical, and despite cleaning the disc it just wouldn't work. I still have no idea why, other games work when the system is vertical, it was just dishonored that refused, and yes, I checked the disc for scratches and it looked perfect to the naked eye.

With all that being said, this is certainly a game that warrants a 2^nd playthrough if only to see the other side of things. After completing the game I watched a quick video that outlines some of the differences that occur based on the choices you make in the game and it was fascinating. Conversations, or scenes that I missed completely because I played the whole game through with low chaos. No spoilers, but Emily was never at risk for me in the final moments of the game, I was able to just unlock a door to retrieve her when I got to that point. Had I not watched a difference youtube video, it would have been cool to see that swap should I ever play the game again. I can confidently say that it will be awhile before I make that choice (seeing as how many games I have and how little time I have to play them), but for people who aren’t constantly playing through new games, it’s one worth revisiting. If anything it makes me more interested in playing Dishonored 2, the real game I should have been playing. Sure, I might not have fallen in love with Dishonored 1 like a lot of people did when it came out, but I am able to see a lot of the good stuff that makes the game stand out. It could very well be awhile before I get to D2, but I can finally check off this 360 game of the year vote getter from my huge backlog.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: I dont think so.

Where does it rank: I liked Dishonored, I really did, but I also know that I could have liked it more if I wasn't hamstrung by the choice to play for the good ending. You can argue that I shouldn't take that into consideration when I "rate" this game, but I would say that, the game specifically said this, not some message board i looked up ahead of time. Look, this isn't a game that was number 1 that now drops to number 20, even had I played this game with all the powers I still wouldn't have put this as a top 10 game. I currently have Dishonored ranked as the 26th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between "Griftlands" (25th) and "Gabriel Knight: SOTF Remake" (27th). There was a lot to really like about the game, but I did tire of it towards the end, because I was just so sick of sneaking around everywhere.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening