Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Since I never pay any attention to game marketing materials, I didn’t know about this game at all until it started getting praised on Broken Forum. Even then, all I knew about it was that it was a stealth oriented action with some pretty funky powers. I didn’t even know that it was a first-person game or anything about its setting or art style.

• Because of this, I was very surprised and nonplussed about the first-person view. I had never played the original Thief games, so to me stealth games were always played in the third-person view which gives you superior situational awareness of whether or not your character is wholly hidden from view. I had also decided to play this with an Xbox 360 controller instead of mouse + keyboard, and the melee combat was giving me fits. I’d imagine mouse users can much more easily deal with the elegant way enemies tend to sidestep out of the way of a sword swing and slash at your side but I never could get the hang of dealing with this correctly with a controller.

• This made the first couple of hours or so of the game pretty rough for me. I had a hard time deciding if this was supposed to play as a stealth game or as an action game. I was also disappointed that the graphics weren’t as good as I expected. The art style is great and I’m okay with the stylized cartoonish look. But many of the textures look rubbish when up close and the characters have a very limited range of facial expressions. It wasn’t until I hit the first real mission, High Overseer Campbell, that I started to really enjoy the game.

• The reason naturally is because the levels only open up at that point and that is when you really get a sense of how many possible ways there are to go and how many options you have. This is also when I learned to appreciate the truly fantastic level design in this game. It was exhilarating to discover that you can indeed clamber, climb, crawl and jump just about anywhere. Combine that with improved agility and blink and your manoeuvrability becomes insane. Heck, you can even use Possession on rats and fish and find more ways to move around the level this way. I think it’s worth noting in many third-person view games, in order to make sure the character movement animation looks good, the places where your character can jump or climb are usually hardcoded. This isn’t a concern in a first-person view game, so you have total freedom and it is awesome.
• My pleasure only increased when I learned that you actually get sidequests as you explore the level and you can overhear all sorts of interesting tidbits of information. The Heart object even encourages you to go around activating it everywhere and on all sorts of people just to hear its many, many unique messages. I had a good time figuring out the safe combination clues and tracking down all of the runes and bone charms. Then there is the lethal / non-lethal choice in dealing with enemies and mission targets and how enemies and targets react to alarms. More choices are always good.
• It was very satisfying to see how certain decisions, even very minor ones, in a level can have small repercussions in later ones. If you knock out weeper instead of killing them, your resident mad scientist thanks you with a note and some money for providing him with test subjects. Avoid killing the wolfhounds in an early mission and much later in the game, you can see how they have been adopted by another group and you will have to deal with them once again. Apparently the chaos level has a significant effect on the enemy force composition in each level too, besides the obvious story consequences. I only played once and I went low chaos but I read up about the changes that occur due to having a high chaos level. One thing I didn’t like is how low chaos seems to be the indisputably good ending. I think it would be fairer to make both endings different without one being clearly superior to the other.

• To balance this out, I would also give more powers and tools that are useful for the non-lethal path. There are a ton of ways for you to kill, sword assassination moves, crossbow, gun, grenades, lethal traps, summoned rat swarms etc., but only two ways to knock out guards: the old choke from behind move and the sleep dart. Then there are the powers that capitalize on violence like turning corpses to ashes and gaining adrenaline. They should have added some extra options to distract and disable guards into the mix.
• Missions are generally great. Infiltrating the Boyle party was especially fun for me. You can mingle and chat with the guests, and then slip away to search for information where you’re not supposed to be. I also liked breaking into the various fortresses. This has been done to death in tons of other games of course, but due to the multitude of approaches possible here, I think Dishonored captures this standard scenario in a way that no other games have done.
• As for the worldbuilding, I think I must settle for grudging praise. Praise because steampunk is better any day than generic fantasy and there are some cool ideas in here, such as whale oil as the primary power source. Grudging because it isn’t all that well integrated, with the Outsider being a particularly clumsy way to add a narrator and magic powers into the mix. The story unfortunately is very weak, with unoriginal characters, a bog-standard plot and a surprise betrayal that you could expect to see even without the copious hints.

For a game that gave me a poor first impression, I ended up liking it quite a lot and spent more time exploring level than I expected. Highly recommended.