One of the best things about Dishonored is that everyone comes away from it with their own unique stories about how things went down. Feel free to share your own stories in the comments below; these were my own personal favourite moments.
While I’ll avoid straight-up plot spoilers, these are anecdotal descriptions of events and targets, and as such will reveal things that can (and do) happen during the course of gameplay, so if you haven’t finished it yet, maybe go and do that first.
I Just Barely Win A Duel
The duel in the Lady Boyle mission is a fine set-piece, and one that I very nearly died in. My plans, as I stood waiting for the countdown to end, was to slow time just as the countdown ended and line my shot up carefully before he could pull his trigger. It would be just like Red Dead Redemption! But the guy managed to get a shot off a split second before I slowed time, hitting me square in the face. That should have been it, but I was holding a bone charm that gave me a tiny bit of extra health – just enough, it turned out, to keep me alive. I looked him in the eyes and took a few seconds – a few tenths of a second, as far as he was concerned – to line up my shot and blow him down. He got the better of me, but no one would ever know. I robbed his corpse and moved on.
A Wealthy Man Startles Me
On my way to retrieve Sokolov’s beard, and the man behind it, I found myself scaling the balcony of a rich man I’d heard speaking to a guard earlier. There was a rune in his home, and although I knew that he had just walked through the front door himself, I thought I could grab the rune and zip out before he noticed me. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out – while trying to figure out if there was an easy way of opening the safe containing the rune (which, as it turned out, required solving a decent little puzzle), the man I’d been spying on earlier walked in on me. He came at me with a sword; I panicked and shot him. It was a small moment, but one that resonated – I was a home invader, and this man had done nothing to deserve his fate. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in real life, but Corvo, of course, got away with it. I stole everything the man had.
I Pin A Man’s Head To The Wall
This is a simple one. I was showing a friend the game, trying to convince him that he needed to play it. I think I may have sold him when an arrow I shot ripped a man’s head off and pinned it to the wall behind him, the shock still showing on his face, making for a rather grisly mount.
I Develop Bloodlust
My attempt to storm the castle and kill the Lord Regent didn’t go quite as planned. One of the weird, great things about Dishonored is that sometimes you’ll experience moments of disappointment that make you appreciate the game all the more – so it was when the Lord Regent fell to my sword without me even realising it was him in the middle of a huge skirmish. Something important had become an afterthought, which just goes to show how many options the game gives you. The fight moved from room to room – a guard burst through the locked door I’d been trying to find a key for earlier, which certainly made the exploration that followed easier – and got pretty hectic, as I threw around explosive canisters of whale oil, used up all my ammo, and worked myself up into a state of bloodlust. When the ground was littered with bodies, I went down into the torture chambers and made enough noise to get the chief torturer to fight me one on one – after playing the game so quietly, it was suddenly very important to me that the next guy knew who had killed him.
I Get The Experience I Wanted From Mirror’s Edge
The best stealth games are the ones where getting caught means coming up with, and executing, a new plan rather than resetting. So it was on the second to last mission when a tall man spotted me and opened fire after I’d spent so long skulking in the bushes, waiting to move on the building ahead of me. I ended up executing a series of blinks that took me through a nearby door, right up to the crucial evidence I was seeking, out the next door, over a building and into the nearby ocean, where I dove down and swan around to (relative, brief) safety, the whole level actively seeking me. This is the best part of games like Dishonored – not the hiding, not sinking a knife into someone’s throat, but the sweet thrill of the escape.
By James O'Connor
What's the most awesome thing to happen to you in Dishonored?