Dunwall is a city built on whale oil, and it is falling apart. Plague rats carry a sickness that kills the poor and quarantines the rich. A corrupt regime runs the streets. And the only man who can cut through it all is a bodyguard who was framed for murdering the woman he swore to protect.
That is the setup for Dishonored, the 2012 action-adventure game from Arkane Studios and publisher Bethesda Softworks. It shipped on PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. It is a first-person stealth game with role-playing bones, and it is one of the sharpest things the genre produced that decade.
You play as Corvo Attano. He served as bodyguard to Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, voiced by April Stewart. When she is killed and her daughter Emily is kidnapped, the conspirators pin the murder on Corvo. He becomes an assassin known by the disturbing mask that has become his calling card. The mask is built by Piero Joplin, an inventor voiced by Brad Dourif.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Corvo Attano and the Mask
Arkane made a deliberate choice with Corvo: he stays silent. The designers wanted players to project themselves onto the character. It works. Corvo is a vessel, and the game fills him with whatever the player brings.
He is not empty, though. He has a skill set that rewards patience and cruelty in equal measure. He has gadgets, weapons, and supernatural abilities. The combat system is flexible enough that two players can finish the same mission in ways that look nothing alike.
The mask is the game’s best single image. It is unsettling, functional, and it tells you exactly what kind of story this is. Corvo is not a hero. He is a man with a calling card.
The supporting cast is deeper than most games bother with. Admiral Farley Havelock, voiced by John Slattery, leads the Loyalists. Treavor Pendleton, a member of parliament voiced by Derek Phillips, is among them. Callista Curnow, voiced by Lena Headey, cares for young Emily. Overseer Teague Martin is voiced by Joel Johnstone. Samuel, a commoner voiced by Ryan Cutrona, ferries Corvo to and from missions.
The voice cast runs deeper still. Susan Sarandon, Carrie Fisher, Michael Madsen, and Chloë Grace Moretz all provided voice work. That is a lot of talent for a game about a man in a skull mask.
Dunwall Runs on Whale Oil
The setting is the strongest thing Dishonored has. Dunwall is an industrial whaling city where technology and otherworldly forces coexist. Its design is modeled on London and Edinburgh between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. You can feel both cities in the architecture, the fog, the grime.
Whale oil powers everything. A natural philosopher discovered it could be used as fuel, and the government used it to develop powerful weaponry. That weaponry bred corruption. The city is a center for fishing and whaling, and the resource that keeps it running is also the resource that keeps it rotten.
The plague spreads through rats. The infected are called “weepers” because they cry blood, and they can become violent. The government uses the plague as an excuse to take or purge citizens as they wish. Order is maintained by the Tallboys, heavily armored officers on tall mechanical legs. Districts are separated by Walls of Light, energy barriers that disintegrate anyone who tries to cross without authorization.
This is world-building with teeth. Every element of Dunwall connects to every other element. The plague creates the fear. The fear creates the excuse. The excuse creates the regime. The regime creates the Loyalists.
The Hound Pits and the Spaces Between
Between missions, Corvo returns to the Hound Pits pub. It is the game’s central hub. There he meets with allies, receives mission briefings and alternate objectives, and converts recovered loot into new equipment and upgrades.
The Hound Pits is where the game slows down. It is also where it does some of its best character work. The pub is a small island of normalcy in a city that has none left.
In-game areas include loading docks, royal estates, poverty-stricken streets, and a bathhouse. Each one is a self-contained, mission-focused space designed for multiple avenues of exploration. The level design supports Corvo’s abilities rather than forcing specific paths aimed at a particular play style.
You can save your progress at any time, except during combat. There is also a checkpoint save system. Four difficulty levels modify the effectiveness of health and mana potions, along with enemy awareness, damage delivered, and responsiveness. On the easy setting, health regeneration is possible.
Stealth, Combat, or Something in Between
Dishonored’s central promise is that you can finish it without killing a single non-player character, including boss characters and mission targets. That promise holds. Every target has a non-lethal option, and finding it is often more interesting than the obvious one.
Co-creative designer Harvey Smith gave one example. A player completes a side mission for a character. In return, that character has two of Corvo’s targets kidnapped and enslaved. That is the game’s moral logic in miniature. Your choices do not just change your ending. They change what kind of person you are in the world.
The story and missions change in response to how violent you are. Magical abilities and equipment are designed to be combined for new and varied effects. The game wants you to experiment. It rewards you for it.
The Outsider, a powerful being, imbues Corvo with his abilities. The game never fully explains the cost. That ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. It keeps the supernatural elements from tipping into exposition.
What the Two and a Half Years Built
Dishonored spent two and a half years in production. Several versions of the game were developed before Dunwall took its final shape. That iteration shows in the finished product. The pieces fit.
The game has four difficulty levels, a checkpoint system, and a save-anywhere option. These are quality-of-life details, but they matter. They let the game meet players where they are.
Here is the running order of what a new player should expect:
| Phase | Location | What Happens |
|---|---|---|
| Prologue | Dunwall | Corvo is framed for the Empress’s murder |
| Early game | Hound Pits pub | Corvo meets the Loyalists, receives briefings |
| Mid game | Royal estates, docks, streets | Missions branch based on player choices |
| Late game | Bathhouse, government districts | Targets can be eliminated lethally or not |
| Endgame | Dunwall | The story resolves based on accumulated choices |
The ranking of the game’s best elements, from strongest to weakest:
- Dunwall as a setting, and the whale-oil economy that drives it
- The non-lethal design, which makes every target a puzzle
- The Hound Pits hub and its cast of Loyalists
- The Outsider’s powers, which are fun but less interesting than the world
- The silent protagonist choice, which works but costs Corvo a personality
That last point is worth pressing on. Corvo’s silence serves the player. It does not serve the character. By the end, you know Dunwall better than you know the man you have been controlling for hours. That is a real cost, even if it is a deliberate one.
Where Dishonored Stumbles
The game is not perfect. The stealth systems can be unforgiving in ways that feel less like challenge and more like punishment. Enemy awareness on higher difficulties leaves little room for error, and the checkpoint system does not always land where you want it to.
The supernatural abilities are a mixed bag. They are fun to use. They are also less interesting than the world they exist in. The Outsider’s gifts feel like a concession to power fantasy in a game that is otherwise more thoughtful than that.
The moral choice system is the game’s most ambitious idea and its most uneven execution. It works. It changes the story. But it also flattens some of the nuance. Violent play is punished, and non-violent play is rewarded, in ways that can feel mechanical rather than organic.
None of this sinks the game. It just keeps it from reaching the very top tier.
The Verdict on Dunwall
Dishonored is a game about a city, and the city is the reason to play it. Dunwall is one of the great settings in modern games. It is specific, coherent, and built from ideas that connect to each other. Whale oil powers the weapons. The weapons breed the corruption. The corruption creates the plague’s political cover. The cover creates the resistance.
That is not just world-building. It is argument. Arkane built a place and then built a case for why that place is the way it is.
The game’s flexibility is its other great strength. You can play it as a ghost, a butcher, or anything in between. The story responds. The missions respond. The world responds. Few games of this era committed to that idea this hard.
The voice cast is a genuine asset. Slattery, Headey, Dourif, Sarandon, Fisher, Madsen, and Moretz give the game a texture that most stealth games do not bother with. They are not stunt casting. They are the reason the Loyalists feel like people.
Dishonored earns its reputation. It is not flawless. The silent protagonist costs it something. The powers are less interesting than the world. The morality system is blunt in places. But the core of the game, the city and the choices you make inside it, is exceptional.
This is a game worth playing twice, once loud and once quiet, just to see what changes. Most games do not earn a second run. This one does.
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