Dishonored: Mission 1, “Dishonored”

This is the first of 29 missions in the Dishonored series that will be analysed and reviewed on this blog. Royal Protector Corvo Attano returns to Dunwall, capital city of the country of Gristol and seat of government for the Empire of the Isles, from a diplomatic trip to Tyvia, Pandyssia and Serkonos seeking assistance for the rat plague that has torn through the city. Unfortunately he brings dire tidings, as the other nations have resisted Gristol's appeal. He has returned early, but not early enough to forestall the murder of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin. As she greets Corvo Jessamine is attacked by assassins who seem to appear out of thin air, and although he fights them off their leader materialises behind the Empress and brutally kills her before abducting her daughter Emily.

You play through this entire section and see it all from the game's first-person perspective, walking through areas of Dunwall Tower that will later be part of a climactic level of the game, playing hide and seek with Emily and greeting Anton Sokolov. Sokolov is one of the Empire's leading thinkers and inventors, and is responsible for the whale oil-fuelled steampunk technology that powers it. The attack on the Empress functions as a combat tutorial, and is actually the catalytical moment for everything that happens in this game, its DLC, its sequel and the standalone expansion Death of the Outsider. Each of the protagonists you can play as in the games is present at this moment - Corvo himself, the assassin Daud, his right hand Billie Lurk, and Emily. This is the moment that defines these characters and the journeys they will go on in the fifteen years following.

With her dying words Jessamine begs Corvo to rescue Emily, before Spymaster Hiram Burrows and High Overseer Thaddeus Campbell arrive on the scene and accuse the Royal Protector of treason and murder. The last thing you see is the hilt of a sword as one of the guards knocks Corvo out.

We rejoin Corvo six months later as he awakes in Coldridge Prison scheduled for execution the next day. Burrows has seized control of the Empire and now rules from Dunwall Tower. The mission is to escape in one piece and rendezvous with mysterious friends who have contacted Corvo from the outside, before getting to Corvo's real motivation - rescuing Emily.

Even though it is years old now, the original Dishonored just looks and feels so good. It has its own characteristic art style, and a grimy world from which the aroma of whale oil and slowly roasting rat skewers practically wafts.

For me the operative word for this opening mission is tension. There are many tense moments in the series, particularly emergent ones, but I am really impressed by how I feel really against the odds and pretty tense throughout this level. Dunwall itself, with its brutalist prison, festering sewers and general feeling of having gone to the dogs (or rather rats) is a big part of this.

The level proper is a pretty straight road, leading you through the prison and out into the sewers as you escape from the Dunwall authorities who once answered to you. It is more corridor-based than anything else in the game, but uses this as an opportunity to rapidly tutorialise things like stealth, observing and listening to guard patrols, shutting off security systems, the combat, drop attacks and so on in sequential order.

One clever moment is where you hear two guards grumbling to each other, spot an opening above them and – because it is an immersive sim – crawl up above them. However, as you plan how to take them out, you see a swarm of rats appear and attack them, stripping them of flesh with alarming speed. This is a brilliantly macabre and surprising setpiece, and it teaches you how threatening the rats are in this game. A puzzle in which you need to distract the rats with human corpses so you can open a gate demonstrates how to manipulate them to your will, and suggests how useful they can be if you can “persuade” them to help you out somehow.

Having traversed through this linear level, picking up a planted weapons stash, opening a safe with the hallmark immersive sim combination 451 (famed for its use in games by Looking Glass studios) and avoiding or disabling various traps, Corvo will meet with Samuel to be taken to the Hound Pits pub, your headquarters throughout the game. You meet the conspirators, including Admiral Havelock, Lord Pendleton and Piero Joplin, who will provide your mission briefings, occasional sidequests and (in Piero's case) function as your merchant.

Havelock and Pendleton take Corvo under their arm so to speak, and round the bar of the Hound Pits they tell him their plan - to rescue Jessamine's daughter and eliminate Burrows, restoring the Kaldwin family to the throne. Corvo is to be the dagger to the cloak of intrigue and information gathering they have already spread across Dunwall.

After all of this, you meet the Outsider, the enigmatic god whose stakes in earthly matters throughout the Empire of the Isles will increase throughout the series but who is for now chiefly interested in providing mystical abilities to individuals of note such as Daud and Corvo. You immediately get the series' famous ability Blink, and can thereafter begin collecting Runes to purchase more powers. Blink is the signature supernatural power in Dishonored games, allowing you to aim at a distant point on any axis and instantly teleport there. This opens up vastly more routes and ways to circumvent or get the drop on enemies, as well as a way to quickly travel medium distances. You also get the Heart, which contains a spirit - later confirmed to be that of Jessamine Kaldwin. This can be used to learn more about people and enemies you encounter throughout the game.

Having introduced the fundamentals of violent or stealthy play followed by the game's magical aspects and the main cast and plot, the level is efficient in quickly setting up most of what the player needs to know.