2.5/5 ★ – Gibbs's review of Dishonored: Definitive Edition.

It’s hard to articulate exactly what I don’t like about Bethesda’s games, but they’ve always struck me as soulless. They feel less like passionate creative projects and more like products born from board meetings and market research. Dishonored continues this trend — though to be fair, it’s probably my favourite Bethesda-published game I’ve played. I’m a sucker for stealth, and Dishonored does have some great sequences. I can’t say I had a bad time here. But if I have to see that interaction prompt pop up on a character’s head, only for the camera to awkwardly zoom in on their stiff, dead-eyed face while a droning voice clip plays… I think I’ll lose my mind. That said, it’s not all artificial. I went for a simple playstyle: blink everywhere and choke everyone out. It was satisfying — sometimes very satisfying. It kept me engaged for a short playthrough, and provided some fun moments. I tried dabbling in the side content, but it all felt so synthetic and uninteresting that I quickly gave up and just blitzed through the main objectives. Thankfully, the game’s quick, fluid movement suits that approach perfectly. Now, the enemy AI is pretty basic and boring, but that made pathing clean and efficient. To be honest, even if I did love this game, I couldn’t see myself experimenting much with its wider toolbox. There are definitely some cool abilities in here, but half of them are explicitly designed for killing — which is odd, considering the game goes out of its way to repeatedly tell you you’re “rewarded” for not killing. This leads to two big problems. First, the mechanics and the messaging feel completely at odds. Why would I invest upgrades into pistols, rats, or whirlwind death magic when the game itself punishes murder with more difficult enemies, more rats, and a darker plot? Second, the game just tells you too much in general. Multiple times I’d enter an area and immediately get a pop-up like “You can traverse this zone via the rooftops or the sewers. Look around at these areas to sneak passed the guards!” What a way to undercut any sense of discovery or reward for paying attention. And the ever-present objective markers suck the life out of exploration; when you always know exactly where to go, there’s no mystery, no immersion. It’s so lame and unexciting. I don’t intend to write some massive essay about a game I found pretty middling. So to summarise: Dishonored gave me that same Bethesda “Market-Approved Product” feeling I get from a lot of their games — a creative concept at war with itself. But for a few hours, the stealth movement and mechanics were fun enough to keep me engaged until I rolled credits.