Dishonored Review

Arkane's immersive sim gives you a lethal toolkit and then quietly grades you for not using it, which is a better moral system than most games manage with dialogue wheels. Blink is the whole design: a short instant teleport that turns every rooftop, ledge and open window into an entrance, so Dunwall's levels stop being corridors and become three-dimensional problems with a dozen answers. The chaos system means bodies pile into rat swarms, guard counts and a bleaker ending, so restraint is enforced by the world state rather than by a score screen.

Powers stack in ways the designers clearly anticipated and occasionally did not, and Possession into a fish is the sort of solution that makes a game feel alive. Viktor Antonov's whale-oil industrial art direction, all painted textures and exaggerated proportions, ages far better than photorealism would have. The plot is thin and the betrayal is telegraphed inside the first hour, and Corvo's silence hollows him out. The level design carries everything.