The Dishonored series was made for me. The people behind it might not have known it at the time but they still tried. So, every couple of years I replay those games.

This does include minor spoilers.

According to the tracker on Dishonored 2, I’m actually on playthrough 11, because when I start it, I tend to play it through twice. Once to get back to it and another time to kind of explore alternative routes. There’s still much to learn (and obviously I forget details).

The first game starts with Corvo, our hero, returning from a mission early. He happens to return at the worst possible moment as he gets there right as the empress is assassinated. This isn’t disclosed for a couple of missions, but Corvo is also the lover of the empress and father of her child, Emily, which seems to be kind of an open secret. As he happens to be there, he takes the fall for the murder. Thus dishonored, as Corvo is supposed to be the Royal Protector.

The first mission is to get out of prison, from where you meet the Loyalists, a faction who wants to take over from the coup. On your first night out, The Outsider, a god of sorts, visits you and gives you powers to help on your mission but there’s side effect: You are now kind of the main character of the world, as your decisions reflect upon the world. After that you try to figure out what happened to Emily (mission 2), then you save Emily from a brothel (mission 3), kidnap a scientist-artist who might have knowledge about the secret lover of the new regent (mission 5), you infiltrate a party where you need to identify the lover (mission 6), return to the palace where the game started to take down the regent (mission 6), which leads to you being betrayed by the Loyalists and left for dead for you to find the actual killer of the empress (mission 7) and return to the base to find that the conspirators have left but also left behind guards to kill their servants (mission 8), and finally you track down your former co-conspirators and save Emily again (mission 9). Each mission has at least one target and you need to make a choice between killing them or finding an alternate way to get rid of them.

Then there’s the DLCs, Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches. These star Daud, the assassin who killed the empress. Something broke inside of him at that very moment and now he is seeking reconciliation. These stories happen concurrently to the main game. At least partly. They also have a continuity. If you own both and have played the first one, you are asked whether you want to continue with that character to the next one (which I believe is advisable, unless you want a harder challenge).

Knife of Dunwall starts with a mini-mission that isn’t really one where the story is setup and the name Delilah is introduced. Then you go to a whale oil plant to figure out who this Delilah is, where you hear about a local official who is using the chaos to steal real estate and after you take him down, you learn that Delilah plans to possess Emily, after which you return to your base to find that Overseers, a militant religious organization with pretty much state religion status, has attacked your base and taken some of your gang as hostages. The DLC ends with your right hand Billie Lurk admitting that she had been working with Delilah and asks for forgiveness.

The Brigmore Witches again starts with a mini-mission where you just gather your stuff and hear your gang discuss how you might have lost your touch behind your back (and not even bothering to hide it very well). You also figure out that you need a boat to reach Delilah, so you need a captain, but the captain you believe could do the job is imprisoned, so you need to break her out. Worse yet, her gang has been taken over by a man who betrayed her, so now you need to take him down and he also managed to lose a key piece of the boat, so you need to take that back. This finally allows you to get to Brigmore, where you can finally confront Delilah, if you can get past his pretty large coven of witches. This ends with you trapping Delilah in the Void (a dimension inhabited by The Outsider).

Dishonored 2 starts with a tutorial where you play as Emily in her early 20s being trained by Corvo, so we’ve jumped about 15 years into the future. On the anniversary of her mother’s death, Delilah has somehow returned and uses the wealth provided to her by a duke from the southern island of the empire to stage a coup. After this yo get to choose between Corvo and Emily as your character. So, after you’ve chosen Emily, you need to escape the tower and reach a boat in the port to go to the southern island to figure this all out (mission 1), meet The Outsider again to get your powers (although, you can now say no to them), there the first mission is pretty much just getting used to the surroundings and to reach a train station (of sorts, the “train” seats two) (mission 2), to find what you can about The Crown Killer who everyone suspects is either Emily or Corvo (mission 3), after which you need to go to a clockwork mansion to rescue the same scientist-artist who you kidnapped in the first game (mission 4), from where you continue to the Royal Conservatory which has been taken over by Delilah’s witches (mission 5), from where you go to the Dust District, an area ravaged by reckless mining to figure out how to get to the mansion of the owner of the mines who hasn’t been seen in years (mission 6), which leads directly to the most interesting mission where you can move between now and three years ago at will (as long as there is nothing blocking you) where you can learn how Delilah returned (mission 7), after which you take on the duke who betrayed you (mission 8), and finally you can return home to confront Delilah and to banish him to The Void again (mission 9).

Dishonored 2 was supposed to get a DLC, but they decided to release it as a shorter game instead, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Billie Lurk, who betrayed Daud so long ago, becomes our main character. We actually learn in Dishonored 2 that the captain of the ship we were using was her. Now, it’s her turn to atone for what she had done and now she is looking for Daud who apparently is also in the same city. First, you find Daud, but you also learn about a cult (mission 1). Daud has a request: he is now old and can’t do it himself, so he wants you to go and kill The Outsider as he has inferred that The Outsider is the cause of all the chaos that he has seen through his life. To do this, you need a weapon, so you infiltrate the cult to find where the weapon is (mission 2), which leads you to break into a bank to steal it (mission 3), after which you go to the Royal Conservatory (now being investigated by the Overseer) where you need to figure out how to get to The Void (mission 4) and then you go to a remote mining colony turned into an HQ for the cult, where you can enter The Void to find and take care of The Outsider (mission 5).

for now, this is the end, although Deathloop does happen in the same world. The team behind the game have expressed that they don’t want to return to these characters but I bet we will still see Dishonored games at some point, because it is a franchise and even though it has never been a huge franchise, it is still a name and those carry a lot of weight these days.

So, the games and the DLCs are currently a continuous story. There is some overlap in the timelines, but not that much. The canon is that you take a very specific approach to these games and it seems that this approach is not the most popular one.

Dishonored is an immersive sim action franchise. Immersive sim meaning that your decisions matter. While there isn’t branching in the sense that playing a certain way would open different kinds of missions, your decisions do matter. If you kill people, the world reacts. There’s more guards, there’s more rats and there’s more weepers (who are people infected by what is known as the rat plague). You can see this in other ways as well. For example, there’s a point where Emily, the daughter of the empress, draws a picture of you. If you have tried to be non-lethal (as it’s called within the game), the picture is a happy face with red cheeks. If you have caused chaos, that picture will be very dark and ominous. There’s a point in Dishonored 2 where on low chaos you can hear a guard speaking to a someone working in a bar about how they should be saving money to get out of the city, whereas on high chaos, you can see the guard pushing the other woman off the roof. In the first game, later in the game, you come across an underground settlement of people who. If you play on low chaos, they are neutral, if you play on high chaos, they are Weepers and will try to attack you. There’s many, many of these smaller and larger changes to the world. Even the weather reflects your deeds.

And the game gives you tools to be non-lethal. Sure, early on it might be more difficult, but if you let the world descend into chaos, the game will become harder. Despite cool powers and non-lethal weapons, your most important tools in this regard are patience and spatial perception.

This is why the game was made for me. I like sitting there, looking at those guards, trying to figure out what the patterns they patrol in are, what’s the best opening to take one of them out so and what order should I do it in. You have to make sure the others don’t see you and that you have enough time to hide the body. The guards will notice that one of them is gone and react to it (although I think this is dependent on the difficulty level), but if they don’t see you take them, that will usually actually just open an opportunity to take them out as well.

Also, I just want to do this to make this world better. The world is a hellhole and largely because the aristocracy and the newly formed industrialist class are destroying it with their neglect but also just actively. In the first game there’s a rat plague going on because there was a conspiracy to get rid of the poor. Being someone with a lot of class consciousness, this makes me feel uncomfortable, but in a way that motivates me. Actually the biggest gripe I have with the game (probably not really, but it bothers me every time) is when you finally save Emily at the end of the last mission in the first, she immediately asks you whether she gets to be the empress now. Well, fuck. I tried. I guess were back to hoping our tyrant is benevolent.

We do learn in Dishonored 2 that Emily is indeed a benevolent ruler but not as involved as she should be. She is not that interested. She would rather run around in the night, honing the skills she has learned from her father. Only after seeing what her disregard for the state of the empire has done to her people in the south, when she needs to meet them and see how they live, does she realize that maybe she should be taking on more of a responsibility. And you have new allies to do it with based on your actions during the game.

My favorite is probably Lucia Pastor. You meet her after the mid-point of Dishonored 2, but at that point, if you have paid attention, you have already read about her quite a bit. She is a union organizer and when you talk to her after “fixing” the timeline in mission 7, she basically tells you, the empress, that she knows who you are and that if you are are not with her, you are against her, and she will do what she can for the poor miners she represents whether you like it or not. However, if you play nice, she will join your cabinet in the epilogue.

Of course, the lethal/non-lethal decision is just one thing you can think about. Each mission offers multiple approaches. You can infiltrate each place from multiple angles. To make this somewhat bearable for the designers, there might be some chokepoints, but even in those cases you can usually find an alternate route. Me being me, I usually just go everywhere.

The world is overall great. The two cities, Dunwall, your capital, and Karnaca, the city you visit in the south, are both very lived in and have great designs. They are also very distinct. While there’s similarities to the technology, there’s also differences. For example, they use a lot of wind power in Karnaca, where the winds are stronger.

There’s various factions: multiple gangs, The Overseers, the guards, the witches and so forth. I think my favorite is the witches. As enemies, they are truly my nemesis, because their erratic movement (they can teleport) often spoils my plans, but we learn a lot about them as we read their letters and diaries and so forth. For many of them, becoming a witch was basically the only way out from a miserable life. Some left behind rich families because those families were forcing them into unwanted marriages and so forth. While they are outwardly loyal to Delilah, they are not a monolith. For example, one of them sells Daud information on how to take Delilah down because she believes Delilah is a risk to her sisters.

Class is a constant theme. The upper classes are largely fully adversarial to the lower classes. Basically, they seem to believe that they don’t even deserve to live unless they are useful. Well, except the guards they so readily employ. The rich use the poor as test subjects for their experiments, sometimes targets to practice on, or just disposable. The rich are also quite willing to just destroy anything for short-term benefit.

I like Emily as a character quite a bit. She is kind of naive, especially relative to where she should be to rule an empire, but she is also kind of a person you might like to know. In the first mission, there’s a letter from the man she is marrying (and they really seem to love each other, although we never meet this man). The letter mentions that he is bringing some kind of a tobacco which is forbidden in some parts of the empire, meaning that Emily likes to smoke some kind of a drug with her fiancee. She kind of hates the pomp and circumstance of the court where she is basically trapped.

Corvo is a bit different. He is silent in the first game which gives you the freedom to think what you want about what’s going on, which I find to be good. Otherwise he is just pretty basic tough guy.

Daud, on the other hand, is voiced by the late Michael Madsen, so they were ready to put some money into that DLC. He has a lot of history and you feel the weight of it. The missions have been designed in such a way that even though Corvo has very similar powers, Daud can approach things differently, because he knows the people of the city. He can buy favors and use his contacts.

Billie Lurk is another character they put money into as she is voiced by Rosario Dawson. Like Daud, she carries a lot of baggage. She seems to be the most reluctant of these characters, basically being motivated by obligation rather then anything internal. Yet, in the end, whereas the others have been responsible for the fate of the empire, Billie has to take responsibility for fate of the whole reality. And actually, there’s a weirdly happy ending to her game, although her personal trauma probably never really let’s her be happy.

One thing I enjoy about these characters is that at no point do they feel stupid. Many games have scripted events that you can see coming a mile away. Yet, our main character just walks into them. How many times does Batman do exactly this in the Arkham series? He just stands there when realistically he should be able to escape or fight back or stop something from happening. While both Corvo and Daud were betrayed by their close allies, you could see why this happened and the traitors were smart enough to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like our heroes were naive, which is important as these two have been living in this world for a long while.

There are some misses in the games. For example, of the non-lethal options, many are great, but a few are kind of problematic, shall we say. For example, in one instance you deliver a woman to a man. There is a strong implication that she has just then become his sex slave. That’s not good. They did learn and I don’t remember any really messed up ones from the later games. Well, I guess you do lobotomize someone in Dishonored 2 and Daud does torture someone. Yeah. Well, you do what you have to do, but maybe they should have put a little more thought into some of these.

There’s also a side mission early on in the first game, where a low chaos version doesn’t exist, which I find to be pretty bad design. Especially for someone like me who just enjoys doing everything. I think there’s another similar situation in the first DLC but I’ve never looked into it.

They also left out the chaos mechanic from Death of the Outsider. You could argue that there is an in-world reason for this, since Billie Lurk’s relationship to The Outsider is different from Corvo, Daud and Emily. To me the chaos system is very integral to the game, so I do find this to be a pretty bad decision. Sure, certain players were complaining about it because they just wanted to cause mayhem and felt punished when their mayhem hit them back, even though I feel they should have taken that as an achievement if that was their goal.

Then there’s the gripe I already mentioned: The weird assumption that Emily is the true monarch and she should be the empress. Why? She isn’t very motivated for the job and while she is getting good advice (at least we can assume so), those advisors will be out eventually, so what then? Does she need to go out on a new adventure to find new ones?

Communities do work better when structured bottom-up rather than top-down. More democracy is better, even in the workplace. This is the way to reach better outcomes for everyone, not just the rich. And actually, even the rich are better off in a more equitable society. I mean, we can see on social media that certain rich and powerful people would definitely benefit from actual human connection they can’t have now, because they have substituted that with money.

So, as the games do a lot of work to show how disgusting our hierarchical society is, instead of offering anything else, we are just served the solution of hoping for the best with someone who is essentially a good person. Is that going to work in the long run? No. We’ll just have to wait for another game to fix the problems caused by Emily’s eventual failures.

But hey, I still love the games. You can’t get to perfection on such complicated topics on first or second try. Maybe in the future. On the other hand, part of me is happy with this series as it is. Just leave me wanting for more. That is better than making something that can’t live up to my expectations.