Dishonored: Revisited

Written by: Ethan Tilley
Edited by: Samantha Hinton

Initially Posted: Feb. 2021
Reposted: Jan. 2023

Dishonored was released in 2012, and I barely even knew what it was since I was preoccupied with playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which had been released only a year prior. Every year, I’d always hear about a few of my friends playing Dishonored, but I never thought twice about it until the end of 2020, when I finally broke down and got it after hearing so much about it. Little did I know that playing Dishonored at the end of 2020 would be a completely different experience compared to playing it when it came out.

Starting up the game, I was immediately thrust into the main plot of the story, acting as a first-person perspective of Corvo, the bodyguard of the Empress of Dunwall. Not even 10 minutes into the story, the empress is assassinated by otherworldly humanoids who seem to appear out of nowhere and kidnap the empress’s daughter, Emily. The figures disappear without a trace, and Corvo is inadvertently framed for the murder and kidnapping. Since the empress is dead, and the heir to the throne is missing, a new totalitarian regime rises to power. After being sentenced to execution, Corvo is able to escape with the help of an underground group of loyalists to the former empress. He spends the rest of the game attempting to overthrow this terrible regime and reinstate Emily as the true heir to the throne of Dunwall.

During the events of this game, there’s an underlying plot point present in every single mission you complete, the plague. As I’ve mentioned before, this game was released in 2012, well before the covid-19 pandemic that spread across the world in 2020. However, since I first played this game in 2020, I was shocked with how despite specific parts of the plague being exaggerated in the game, many NPC’s (non-player characters) reactions and other portrayals of living during the plague are surprisingly accurate to the real world.

While people who get infected with the disease (called weepers) are incredibly gruesome when interacting with them in the game, the response to the plague is very similar to that of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. There are NPCs that you can talk to that say that the plague isn’t that big of a deal (mainly those of the upper class), as well as others that are fighting to survive in a part of town where plague-infested rats are everywhere. When playing through the game, I drew many parallels to our current quarantine life in 2021 (although I’m thankful that “quarantine districts” that electrocute whoever tries to leave aren’t actually present in the modern-day).

Dishonored takes this incredibly well-developed setting and expands on it even further, being a game that thrives on exploration. You can use a wide range of abilities and powers in order to transport yourself around the map, looking for collectibles as well as learning more about the world that occupies them. When playing through, I became thoroughly engrossed with reading every note, every book, every little piece of lore about the world I was traversing, and it made the world feel even more real to me because of it.

While I don’t normally find myself completing games to 100% completion, I ended up doing so with Dishonored, simply because of how engrossing the story and gameplay were. It’s funny that I played through this game while quarantined at home since it seems a bit counter-productive to become immersed in a pandemic-ridden world with so many similarities to my own. I found myself looking at the city of Dunwall in terms of how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, and with every stark contrast to modern-day, I became more enthralled with learning more.

Playing through Dishonored during a pandemic is a surreal experience. With all the similarities as well as the dystopian nature of it all, it’s scary to think that one day (perhaps in the near future), the covid-19 pandemic could become so dangerous that Dishonored appears less like a fictional experience and more as a reflection of current society. However, to say that Dishonored’s plague-ridden world is the extent of what’s interesting about the game is an understatement all on its own. The gameplay is fluid, captivating, and incredibly versatile, and with its ever-adapting storyline to how chaotically you play through the game, it’s easy to find yourself playing through it multiple times in order to try out different playstyles or weapon builds. Despite releasing in 2012, Dishonored holds up incredibly well for its time, and I’m surprised I never played it earlier. Dishonored is what I believe to be one of the best games to not just play during a pandemic, but to immerse oneself in a world full of engaging storylines, immersive gameplay, and perhaps a view of what the world may become.