Dishonorable Mention

I’m in a gilded banqueting hall. It’s a balmy evening, and masked guests are milling; drinking deeply from their cups, admiring the décor, complimenting each other’s costumes and exchanging juicy gossip about the party's hosts. Servants weave in and out of the crowd, eyes diverted and brows furrowed. Mahogany tables groan under the weight of roasted hogs, a shimmering cider fountain, and a sumptuous display of fruit, cheeses and other delectable offerings that make it very clear you’re in the presence of wealth and privilege. In the next room, someone laughs loudly. I look up, and I can see fireworks bursting and crackling through the glass-domed roof.  As I wander through the reception rooms festooned with party favours, stopping to inspect the artwork adorning the walls, my gaze flits innocuously between three almost identically dressed women. These are the Lady Boyles, gracious hostesses of this fine feast.

One of them will die by my hand tonight.

The ill-fated Lady Boyle. Or one of them...

This is Dishonored, and the hands-on demo I had at Gamescom last week. It’s a game that has been turning heads since its announcement in 2011, thanks in no small part to its pedigree; the development team include alumni of both Deus Ex and Half Life 2. 

I met with Dishonored’s co-creators Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio at last year’s Gamescom, before anything more than a few stills from the game had really been shown. Spending just a few minutes hearing them talk, however, was enough to convince me that Dishonored was going to be something special. When you have developers that are so passionate and inspired about what they do and where their influences come from, it’s hard to not be drawn into their world.

And the world of Dishonored is certainly compelling. The intricacies of its gameplay and combat ideally need a gradual introduction, rather than the everything-unlocked-at-once approach I experienced, but the picture the game managed to paint in that time, of a dystopian world struck by both shameless decadence and crippling poverty, is as vivid as any I’ve seen for quite some time.

The creepiest masked banquet you will ever attend.

Set in the industrial city of Dunwall, Dishonored sees you play as Corvo Atano; a once-legendary bodyguard who is framed for the murder of the Empress in his charge, and is thus forced to become a ruthless assassin in order to exact revenge on those who wronged him. Like my quarry tonight – the Lady Boyle; a supporter of the oppressive Lord Regent who assumed power following the Empresses’ death. 

And so my hunt continues. This affluent party where I now find myself is in stark contrast with the decaying alleys just beyond the mansion walls. In just the next street over, I ran into violent ‘weepers,’ victims of the virulent plague afflicting the populace. Their eyes ooze blood, and their desperate, angry cries echo after me as I flee. I also had a close encounter with a ‘Tall Boy’ – a stilted trooper who patrols the city high above the putrid miasmas that fill the cobblestoned streets. Swarms of rats, symbols of the fetid state of affairs in all ranks and classes of Dunwall, pour out of every nook and crevice.

 Similarities between the festering Dunwall and City 17, Half Life 2’s ominous metropolis, are inescapable. Unsurprising, as both are the work of art director/conceptual artist Viktor Antonov. With Dishonored, he blends Victorian Steam Punk aesthetics with the rotted architecture of seventeenth century London slums, where the Black Plague and the Great Fire had taken its toll on the trampled underclasses, and the gap between the rich and poor had never been so wide. But where mind forg’d manacles held the unfortunate majority in place historically, in Dishonored the downtrodden have teeth.

Great party - shame about the hospitality.

I identified the correct sister quite quickly, thanks to a loose-lipped guest in a moth mask who I’d plied with cider. A gentleman who claimed to be Lady Boyle’s lover had also approached me. If I left her alive but unconscious in the basement, he pleaded, he’d whisk her away and she would never be seen in Dunwall again. This is something developers Arkane Studios have promised; that all assassinations will have the option of a non-lethal resolution. They’ve also promised moral choices with non-linear consequences, and plenty of different avenues of exploration for each level.  In other words, there won’t just be an ‘action’ path and a ‘sneaking’ path, as tends to be the case with a lot of games that claim an emphasis on player choice.

My short time with Dishonored was cut even shorter due to an overlapping appointment on the other side of Koelnmesse, so my Lady Boyle, though unmasked, was left to enjoy the remainder of her banquet unscathed. It was disappointing to say the least, but if anything, this unresolved mission left me hungrier for more. Reading up on the paths other players took is staggering; there is an unbelievable amount of freedom if your imagination is up to task, and each available solution is more inventive than the last.

I’m even more excited by Dishonored now than I was a year ago. Players are gifted a beautiful, bustling world and a variety of tools with which to influence and shape it; where what you do or don’t do will have a knock-on effect to the events that follow. It’s a dense, rich, characterful world where you rightfully feel very, very small indeed – as small and insignificant as one of the rats you can possess.

A rat that’s about to bring a plague down on the heads of your enemies.