Monthly Archives: December 2012

Dishonored

After getting it in the Steam Sale I just finished this after ~19 hours spent on it. Some thoughts after my stealth / nearly no killing run-though:

  • Excellent world and visual design
  • Nice gameplay (closest relative I can think of is Deus Ex, with the multiple approaches depending on the powers you’ve invested in) and good missions
  • Powers are almost too powerful (e.g. Dark Vision, Stop Time, Possess, …). It’s supposed to be balanced by their rune cost, but the normal exploratory collecting got me to have ~5 runes left over at the end after purchasing anything stealth relevant.
  • The “celebrity acquisition” (that’s a line from the credits) didn’t really improve the voices IMO, I rather got pulled out of the world. “Why is Cersei a maid / tutor?”
  • The ending was lacklustre (1 line from Emily + some static 3D environments according to some outcomes / side-missions). Not much in the way of explanations for the plague or resolution thereof.
  • Why on earth would you use a 20 year old video codec (Bink) and then use that to encode your scrolling credits? It seems no-one can code a scroller anymore… ;_;

So, definitely enjoyable (especially at half price), but not close to GOTY for me.