A Dishonorable Mention

Put simply, Dishonored is what you get if you ask the company who created Skyrim to go away and make Bioshock. It’s got the immersive atmosphere of the former but with the vibrant, larger-than-life visual style of the latter – and it’s a great combination. The art director (who was a big player in creating the visuals for Half-Life 2) was going for “a living painting”, and has created something very reminiscent of steampunk but with all the colour left in. It’s consistently atmospheric and has got bucket-loads of attention to detail that despite the quirky theme gives the game a real, lived-in world.

In addition to the vivid graphics, Dishonored also takes a stab at one of my pet peeves – games that are too easy. Combat is definitely not weighted in the player’s favour with considerable skill required to take on a room of bad guys and make it out alive, so stealth gameplay is very much encouraged. This has its own set of difficulties as enemies are quick to notice when one of their number drop to the floor, and thankfully they haven’t inherited the incredibly limited vision skills of their Elder Scrolls cousins, so staying hidden is not easy. All this adds up to challenging gameplay that will probably surprise. It’s easy to think you’ve seen all these elements before and not really take them as seriously as they deserve – you’ll be made to pay for that mistake. Of course, getting beaten to a pulp over and over is just frustrating but it’s refreshing to find that Dishonored is not a game that’s scared of sending you back to the start. The level I played was reasonably linear in it’s design but there was still a lot of choice: you could storm in crossbows blazing, hide in the shadows and take out the enemy one by one or even possess an innocent maid to get past the security alarms – there’s a lot of scope for different approaches. Apparently there’s also some open-world element (well, this is Bethesda) but details as yet are unclear.

In essence, Dishonored is definitely a game to be getting excited about; I’ve not been this excited for a new game in far too long. You could argue that we’re just playing Bioshock with a different skin but with the latest in that franchise still beyond the horizon, Dishonored may have beaten it to the post with it’s fresh slice of dark, stealthy action.