A love letter to Dishonored 2

This weekend, I read a fascinating tale of deception and redemption. I witnessed an uprising against power and greed. I visited a beautiful world that runs on wind power and whale oil. I solved complex and intricate puzzles requiring intense logic. I took down waves of downtrodden and corrupt officers. I combined gifts given to me in unique and surprising ways that I even shocked myself with my own creativity. And I did all this in a video game.

For those out of the loop, Dishonored 2 is a stealth-action game with some RPG and open-world elements infused into it. The plot revolves around something taken from you which you were falsely accused for (hence the name), and your journey to get it back. The gameplay involves combining supernatural powers gifted to you in extremely creative and strange ways to reach new places, eliminate your opposition, and accomplish objectives.

It’s a follow-up to 2012’s immensely successful Dishonored, which took everyone by surprise with its unique world, beautifully haunting art direction, and its gameplay centered around powers. It was a very successful game in a small crowd of players who love stealth-sandbox games. Essentially, the game gives you a bunch of tools and leaves it up to you how you want to use them. This, combined with incredible level design that allows for verticality unlike any other game, made for a truly unforgettable experience that players fell in love with.

Arkane Studios had a lot of pressure to deliver once again with Dishonored 2, and players had very high expectations from the game. I’m pleased to say that the game exceeds all expectations. It offers you the choice between two playable protagonists, and along with having different motivations lore-wise, they both offer completely different playstyles. As with the previous game, you can also choose to approach the game lethally or non-lethally, dynamically changing the level of chaos you cause and see in the world around you — eventually leading to different endings based on your actions.

The standout star of the game, however, has to be its stellar level design. The environments are massive. Entire districts of a massive city take center stage as your own personal playground during missions. The game doesn’t force you to explore any of it. In fact, you can skip all of it and go right to your objective marker if you so desire. But this is for the players who enjoy taking their time and exploring the world around them. I’ve spent four to six hours in one level whereas the main objective could’ve been accomplished in thirty minutes. That’s how much lore and detail is packed into this world.

One example: I teleported onto a random balcony and started eavesdropping on two unassuming civilians talking about a heist being planned to rob a black market down the street. I followed their clues to where the thieves were planning the heist and silently observed as the thieves laid out their plans to blow a hole in the back wall of the market using explosive whale oil canisters. Immediately after, I knocked them both out unconscious and took it upon myself to put their plan into action. They were lacking sufficient explosives, so I went to a different building, grabbed a whale oil canister, filled it up, carried it back to the site of the heist, and placed it next to the other canisters of whale oil. I blew up the wall by setting the canisters on fire, went in, and robbed the entire market. And of course, some hidden letters and notes I found in the thieves’ pockets explained their motivations and incentives to do such a thing. Turns out they were two sisters whose parents had mysteriously perished in the Rat Plague (from the previous game) and they were thus were left to rot in the streets of their hometown. They made do with what skills they had and eventually became skilled pickpockets and con artists, which led them to the path they are now on.

All of this was entirely optional and has absolutely nothing to do with the main story. It was entirely a side diversion. The game doesn’t even give you HUD indicators or objective markers for this kind of stuff. It evolves entirely by your own exploration of the game world and its residents. This is what makes the world feel so alive and rewarding when you take the time to hang around and see what happens. And this was only one example of seven or so times that this has already happened in my twenty or so hours of gameplay. This is also why I’m only halfway through the game after twenty hours of gameplay. The Witcher 3 was highly-praised for its side-quests, which were equally engrossing as the main plot itself. Dishonored 2 definitely treats its world the same way, and does so with such finesse and elegance that you forget what’s part of the main plot and what’s not.

Let’s talk about powers. The game allows you to purchase powers with “runes”, in-game items that can be found scattered across the levels. You then use these runes to unlock and upgrade powers. Each power has its own skill tree consisting of two to three branches and a total of four to five upgrades. You can do this however you like. You can get the base level of all the powers or just choose two and upgrade them all the way (the upgrades cost a varying amount of runes too). They are all very interesting and they all harmonize with each other incredibly well. Nothing feels overpowered and they all feel good to use.

Example: A power called Doppelganger allows you to make a copy of yourself to distract enemies. Another power called Domino allows you to link enemies together so that they share the same fate. A third power called Far Reach allows you to grab enemies and fling them towards you violently (in its fully upgraded form). An in-game gameplay mechanic allows you to re-wire circuitry in Walls of Light, where you can reverse polarity so that the wall affects enemies instead of you. Now we combine all these. I snuck around the guards over the rooftop to access the security panel for the Wall of Light. I re-wired it and reversed its polarity. Standing right across from the wall of light, I summoned a doppelganger on the other side. I linked the enemies together with Domino and then linked them to my own doppelganger, so that the enemies share the same fate as my doppelganger. Using Far Reach, I grabbed my own doppelganger and hurled her towards myself. She was electrocuted in an excruciatingly gruesome fashion as she passed through the Wall of Light. The enemies shared her fate as a result of being linked to my doppelganer through the Domino power.

That was just one of the thousands of ways in which you can creatively combine your powers with gameplay mechanics to come up with really surprising ways of playing the game. The two playable characters have completely different powers that are reflective of their personalities too. For instance, Emily is an empress and has very majestic and royal powers such as Mesmerize, which allows her to summon an enchanting void that hypnotizes enemies. Corvo is a more manipulative person, possessing the bodies of people to take control and swapping people through time.

As Sid Meier once famously said, a great strategy game is one where you have really simple systems interacting in very complex ways. It opens up a world of possibilities for the player and allows them to do whatever it is they wish to do. In Dishonored 2, this is very much the case. If you ever stop and think “I wonder if I can…”, the answer is very likely yes. The gameplay designers and level designers have created such stupendously good game worlds that literally anything is possible.

It’s almost a shame to categorize Dishonored 2 in any existing genre of games. It’s a stealth game, it’s an action game, it’s an exploration game, it’s a role-playing game, but most of all, it’s a creativity game. Not many games out there take this approach of treating the player as a smart person who’s capable of making their own choices and decisions. Not many games let the player experiment with various approaches where none of them are necessarily wrong, they’re just different depending on your style of play. It opens up a world of possibilities where each player has a unique experience based on how they choose to approach the world with their actions.

If you can’t tell by now, I absolutely adore this game. The art direction and overall art style deserves a separate blog post for itself. The environment artists have outdone themselves beyond anything I ever expected. But what stands out to me is definitely the level design and the gameplay built around it. The game does not hold your hand through anything and expects you to figure it out for yourself. It can be unforgiving at times, but this isn’t meant for your average gamer. This is a love letter to the thinking gamer. The more cerebral, the more strategic, and most of all — the most creative gamers. In a time where most games are taking inspiration from Hollywood to create bombastic setpieces centered around explosions and fast-paced moments of action, Arkane Studios confidently takes the path less traveled by allowing players to create their own emergent narratives by playing the game the way they want. And it’s bloody well done. I hope we see more games take this path because it truly makes for smarter gamers and encourages more creativity from the game developers.