Dishonored Review
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As mentioned, the star of Dishonored, narratively speaking, is the game world, and how it changes as you play. While previous games like Deus Ex have dabbled in having characters say and do different things based on your actions, in Dishonored, the tone of the whole world changes and evolves. Most often, changes are contingent on how stealthily and lethally you play - if you kill lots of people, you will find more and tougher enemies, as well as more security checkpoints, watchtowers, and other obstacles in the environment to deal with. However, it happens in some excellently subtle ways as well, from dialogue that reflects your previous actions, to belated rewards for completing certain objectives, to the state of the city's plague epidemic as the game goes on. Dishonored uses its visuals, world design, and game mechanics to communicate story just as much as any cutscenes or dialogue sequences. However, there are complaints to be made. For one, Corvo is a silent protagonist, yet also has a detailed and established history. You'll get some choices in conversation from time to time, and characters in the game will speak directly to Corvo, but you will never get a sense for his personality, motivations, etc. There are a few plot holes that could have been answered if Corvo could simply speak for himself, and many scenes lack the emotional resonance they would have because it's hard to identify with Corvo as a character.
Second, the game's chaos mechanic, which determines in part the changes that happen in the world, can feel very arbitrary. How does playing violently lead to more plague victims appearing, for example, or make the weather gloomier? Dishonored imposes a right vs. wrong morality system on you based on play-style in a way that doesn't always make sense. Still, coming back to your home base after every mission to talk to the different characters there and seeing some of the changes in the world reflected in their comments is a pretty good payoff, and at the very least it's worth playing the game twice to see all the changes that occur.
Third, early in the game, Corvo encounters the Outsider, the game's equivalent of a trickster deity. Considered more or less the devil by the established religion of the world, the Outsider is a seemingly neutral figure who grants Corvo supernatural powers, because he is an "interesting" person. Unfortunately, the presence of the Outsider in the game feels very arbitrary and is never substantially developed beyond a few vague hints. I got the sense the game was building up to something with the Outsider, some great reveal, but it never came, which makes me wonder if some of the ideas here were cut due to time or budget constraints.
Finally, it might be unfair to do this, but while Dishonored has a lot of interesting themes, it doesn't really have anything especially interesting to say. Whereas Deus Ex had lots of political and social commentary that gave its otherwise entertaining story a layer of insight and maturity beyond itself, Dishonored is more of a "weird for the sake of weird" game. Beyond the idea that killing whales to harvest their technology-powering oil is bad, there is little intellectual meat to chew on. Obviously not every game needs to to be profound and meaningful, but unlike Dishonored's inspiration, it goes for style over substance, even if the style is handled quite well.
