Just beat Dishonored on PS4. This one's gonna make me seem like a total snob again as it's about another super popular and highly acclaimed game that I did not enjoy. I actually tried Dishonored when it was still fairly new but stopped playing it pretty soon as it was instantly off-putting to me for some reason. I figured that maybe I just wasn't in the right mood and would enjoy it a lot on my second attempt - I had the same kind of experience with BioShock, after all. Alas, I've beaten the whole thing now and can say with some certainty that I don't like this game. It's actually becoming a pattern with Arkane's games as I've had similar sentiments about Prey.

Briefly put: in my eyes the game is half-assed in almost every possible way. It starts with the story, which had immense potential, but is in the end very basic and cliched - the big twists were as predictable as it gets. The game has pretty interesting lore but the environments fail to sell it and turned out quite mundane by video game standards (I've been told that the DLC does a much better job in this regard). It has an original art style that has received a lot of praise and while I think the characters look great I can't say the same for the environments. The world is supposed to look a bit like a painting, so you have these seemingly hand-painted textures on often fairly basic geometry - IMO this was done too inconsistently and to my eyes it just looks like blurry textures on low poly environments, like in late 90s or very early 2000s 3D games. I could live with all of that but sadly I have the same kinds of problems with the gameplay.

The game is clearly inspired by "immersive sims" like System Shock 2, Deus Ex or - most notably - Thief. As a matter of fact the game feels a lot like Thief on steroids and you can find the traditional immersive sim philosophy in tons of details. All in all the game is rather linear but you can solve almost all problems in numerous ways, sometimes quite emergent ones. Traditionally many areas can be reached in a number of ways: disable a security device, turn into a rat to enter through a vent or "blink" (teleport) over a bunch of obstacles etc.. By the time Dishonored came out this wasn't impressive to me AT ALL and Dishonored doesn't even execute it very well. It feels more like level designers making sure that you won't get stuck depending on the skills you chose than a tool to genuinely allow different playstyles and strategies. It doesn't feel even remotely as satisfying to me as in Deus Ex or Bloodlines where this felt like a strong tool to convey my avatar's personality or genuinely different playstyles nor do the levels have the kind of scale like in Deus Ex where it felt like you were playing an entirely different level depending on which path you chose (incidentally Invisible War was accused of something similar - multiple ways to get into a room but you just get into that room either way).

Then there's the thing that I think that Dishonored's stealth gameplay generally sucks. Enemy behaviour is neither natural nor reliable - enemies often take weird paths and demonstrate unpredictable behaviour that makes hunting them unnecessarily stressful and literally made me savescum more than in any other console game (well, besides Splinter Cell 1 and 2 on the PS3). And I guess it's not just me since the loading screen repeatedly told me to save often. And frankly the level design is pretty bad in my eyes. Dishonored came out after a ton of Asscreed, Metal Gear and some Arkham games all of which had expertly designed stealth arenas that were like puzzles (well, Asscreed the least). Those games had tons of paths and vantage points that allowed you to plan ahead and strike with surgical precision - by comparison Dishonored is just noise. Here it's usually just chaos where you must identify that one moment when things just happen to line up nicely and then you have that tiny window of opportunity, go full YOLO and pray that another enemy didn't pull one of those unpredictable moves like leaning with his back against a railing instead of putting his hands on it. And the level design is consistently lacking - too few passages and obstacles all around. It has happened too many times that I ended up in a corner with an enemy approaching and no way out even though he was still quite far away. Nothing to crawl under, no vent next to me, no chandelier above me. Even once I had mastered blinking (again: teleportation) and had learned to quickly relocate past an oncoming enemy I felt that the level design did not offer even remotely enough options.

Surely I could have gotten a bit more out of the game by relying on some of the tools and abilities a bit more, many players would probably tell me that I could have e.g. stopped time or possessed an enemy in those situations but here's where some other issues come into play. The game triggers intense hoarders syndrome in me. Mana is a finite resource in this game and only two of your skills, blinking and some "detective mode" thing that allows you to see enemies through walls, won't permanently reduce your mana supply (unless you use them in quick succession) so I was very much inclined to primarily rely on those and failed to resort to the other abilities when I had to make a quick decision. Sure, one might say "git gud" and "it's hardcore game" and so on but well, Arkham's economy actively encouraged diverse ability use by using cooldowns instead of shared "mana" and in my eyes Dishonored would have just been a much better game by doing the same.

The other thing that annoys me about the game is what I have with many games with moral choices. Dishonored is the most fun when you slaughter enemies - there's actually quite a fun set of devastating and brutal abilities like summoning a rat swarm that eats enemies alive and even devours their bodies, there are also traps and you can hack security stuff to kill enemies instead of you. Yet, in this game that is fundamentally about an assassin with a skull mask who literally moves out to murder a series of VIPs and where there's almost always a badass dagger on the screen, you're encouraged to act peacefully. It is heavily implied that you get a better ending by keeping bloodshed to a minimum, all targets can be eliminated peacefully by doing optional objectives (and what sick mind would skip optional objectives?) and there's a checkbox for performing zero kills on the summary screen after each level. And soon I noticed that yeah, it's actually quite easy to get through the game just by knocking enemies out and using sleep darts on them so that's what I did. The result is that I got a game that is neither particularly fun nor fits the player fantasy implied by the friggin' box art. As a reward I got a good ending. In retrospect I totally should have played the game as a bloodthirsty killer, alas, the game did nothing to motivate me to do that - neither the objectives, the economy nor the rating system encourages to play the game in the way that is more fun and in my opinion that's just crappy design.

Yes, in hindsight I would have just not given a damn about ratings or the ending and just played the game in the way that is most fun but honestly: I just didn't know any better. At least I know what to do when I approach the sequels.

So yeah, I didn't really enjoy the game. And it sucks because I really wanted to like the game. It has a cool lore, some great characters, a nice style and atmosphere and so on but to me its execution is just pretty meh all around.