Imagine that in some alternate reality, the Industrial Revolution was powered not by coal, but an entirely different fuel source…whale oil. And the supernatural. That gives you an idea of where first-person stealthy adventure game Dishonored and its surreal spin on an assassin’s life is headed.
The developers at Arkane Studios are quick to point out that the steampunk-styled Dunwall isn’t a location you’d find on Earth. That much is apparent as we’re introduced to our character, Corvo, a former royal guard who’s been recently framed for the murder of the city’s Empress. Eager to clear your name and find the real culprits, you’ll roam the city to solve the mystery and reclaim your honor. But that central whodunit is only a carrot on a stick — it’s how you’ll tackle the task with your various powers and which of the game’s multitude of paths to any given objective that hints at the intriguing journey Dishonored will provide.
As Corvo, you can seemingly teleport from location to location just by pinpointing it through a handy spyglass. And that’s just one of the strange supernatural abilities — which populate a “power wheel” you can pull up on the fly — that came in handy during the mission we saw. Your job is to infiltrate the Golden Cat, a bustling brothel teeming with painted ladies and their clientele, in order to track down a pair of good-for-nothing nobles: the Pendleton Twins.
How you find your targets is entirely up to you. For us, Arkane reps showed off two opposite approaches to the same objective: stealthy and aggressive. Surprisingly, the sneakier route seemed slightly less nerve-wracking. Staying out of sight and using your power of possession to inhabit everything from a fish in the city canal — so you can swim up and into the brothel’s underbelly — to one of the establishment’s employees so you can learn important info and gain access to normally off-limit areas is key to slipping through undetected. And once you lift a Master Key off a Madam you’ve eavesdropped on, you find one of the twins chatting up a prostitute in a room situated, conveniently enough, next to a steam-pipe control machine. Use a valve to redirect and release a powerful burst of steam into the adjacent room and voila! A suffocated Pendleton without blood or alarms.
The second Pendleton is found in a more compromising position with a brothel staffer in a room overlooking the harbor. This location was a bit trickier to sneak into, but using Possession, we only needed to inhabit this fellow’s body, then walk him out to the balcony for a quick neck-snap and toss over the railing. The panicked prostitute inside who sees it all unfold gets a few quick tranquilizer darts to the neck, and your objective is done! In fact, the team assures us that you can even play through the game non-lethally. Of course, all of this sneakery is more difficult to pull off than it seems in the demo, we’re sure. But none of it is nearly as harrowing as taking the more run-’n’-gun approach sampled in the second, more aggro run-through of the same mission.
You’ll still have to find one of the several different ways to break into the brothel, be it swimming into the bath house as a possessed fish or slipping into an upper-level window. But once you’re inside, you’ll be able to brutally assassinate enemies and innocents alike with your knife or crossbow to get to your goal. In a few instances, Corvo’s impressive Windblast power was used to simply blow targets off ledges. Decapitations and throat-slitting ensued as well, with Arkane hinting that you’ll also have access to a time-halting power — allowing you to freeze enemy bullets, then possess the people who fired them in the first place, position them in front of the suspended projectile, and watch them get hit with their own gunfire when time resumes. Compared to the stealthy route, this more aggressive approach felt like a hyperactive crimson geyser, thanks to slashed throats and crossbow bolts.
But no matter how you play it, Dishonored’s strange world and open-endedness offer up an adventure that’s as deadly as you want it to be. With different endings based solely on how you play throughout the entire game, perhaps we’ll have ample motivation for multiple playthroughs.
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PUBLISHER: Bethesda • DEVELOPER: Arkane Studios • MULTIPLAYER: No • RELEASE DATE: TBD 2012 • FOR FANS OF: BioShock, Thief, possessing unwitting citizens
