Posted on: February 20, 2020
icarus-daedelus
Games: 209 Reviews: 2
Arkane keeping the immersive sim alive
Before Dishonored, Arkane Studios had been quietly making solid immersive sims like Arx Fatalis, their very decent Ultima Underworld homage, for around ten years. If Dishonored 1 was their first game which felt fully featured and distinctive, then Dishonored 2 is their masterpiece, a culmination of a decade of experience toiling away at one of the most difficult genres for any developer to realize well. (Arkane Austin's Prey, hopefully soon also available on GOG, is their very good version of a modern day System Shock.) The average level in this game is intricate and layered, with many secrets and nooks waiting to be discovered by a patient and methodical player; the exceptional levels here - one involving a mansion with moving walls made of clockwork, another allowing the player to see and shift back and forth in time - are among the best I've played in any game. Dishonored is a series that prizes player choice, flexibility, and power above all else, playing a bit more like a superpowered Deus Ex than the challenging stealth of Thief to which it is often (misleadingly, I think) compared, but this time through there is an explicit option to reject powers which the game is balanced around just as much as a "normal" playthrough with Emily's or Corvo's powers. I've now run through it three times with each of those playstyles and there's still more to see and do I haven't done - odd as it seems for a title with a stealth focus, for example, the game has a very robust combat system for people who like to play a little louder. As for weaknesses, the narrative here is an oddly unengaging rehash of the DLC for the first game - playing them back to back makes that unfortunately apparent. And while Karnaca is beautifully designed with a rich Mediterranean feel to the art direction, it lacks the weird quasi-Victorian charm of the whale-based society of the first game. (In-game, whale power is being phased out.) But what it does well it does without parallel.
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