Retrospective Dishonored

How Arkane made an instant classic by balancing delicate stealth with wild swashbuckling.

- Chris Thursten

Dishonored is one of the great success stories of last gen, a blockbuster assassination adventure with an indie heart that happily moved against the ‘sequels and reboots’ trend of the time. Here was something genuinely new, a brilliantly conceived world of punk Victoriana that arrived fully formed, and from left field: Dishonored’s creators Arkane Studios had only a handful of credits to their name when they embarked on this journey.

Their first game was Arx Fatalis, a PC-only dungeon crawler with old school sensibilities that attracted a small cult following. Next they made Dark Messiah of Might and Magic for the PC and Xbox 360, which was a first-person action game set in the Might and Magic PC strategy universe. The story of Dishonored begins with Dark Messiah, a game that had no right to be as good as it turned out to be. One of the best first-person melee action games ever made, it turned a room full of orcs into a swashbuckling sandbox. You could chop off heads and arms, fling fireballs into pools of pitch and boot greenskins into wall mounted spikes. Its run-of-the-mill fantasy setting disguised the greatest Errol Flynn simulator ever made.

Until Dishonored came along. The game retained Dark Messiah’s kinetic melee system and relatively realistic physics, but shifted the emphasis onto murky stealth and murderous magic. As bodyguard-turned-fugitive assassin Corvo Attano, your pursuit of corrupt noblemen and shadowy conspirators can take many forms – including Dark Messiah-style derringdo – but the game encourages and rewards thoughtfulness, too.

Each Dishonored level is a sandbox built out of carefully conceived moving pieces. There’s the environment itself, which operates its own internal logic: