Spoiler warnings for Mass Effect 2.

I'm not sure why I liked Kelly Chambers so much. There's definitely more exciting characters in Mass Effect 2. She was just cool is all. They seemed so good together, her and my Shepherd, two straight-talking women on a ship full of neverending melodrama, quipping back and forth along the bridge. But I was trapped in a loveless relationship with the odiously boring Kaidan Alenko. So Kelly remained elusive: the steadfast second in command, a constant source of warmth, good sense and pragmatic kindness.

Anyway, she melted. In fact, most of my crew died in that final mission, but Kelly was the first, melting down into flesh chowder in a giant frosted glass tube. Afterwards I read that the only way to save everyone was to max out your relationship stats, upgrade your ship to the nth degree, and hightail it over to the suicide mission the moment you can. Reader, that's exactly what I did. I went back to the start and put another 30 hours into that game, telling myself I was getting value for money. But in my heart of hearts I knew it was all for Kelly.

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Dishonored, developer Arkane Studios' sublime stealthy action-adventure series, is getting the tabletop RPG treatment later this year, courtesy of Modiphius Entertainment.

The Dishonored Roleplaying Game, as it's known, will initially be released in the form of a 300-page hardback Corebook, containing everything players need to begin their steampunk-inspired adventures across the Empire of the Isles.

According to Modiphius, the Corebook features an in-depth look at Dishonored's world, its history, and its people, plus a comprehensive storytelling guide. The latter includes rules for playing as various roles - which range from "grim assassins and rugged criminals, to intrepid explorers and stoic crown loyalists" - alongside antagonists and story hooks for inspiration.

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To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about the thinking behind it in an editor's blog.

The city of Dunwall is a paradox. As the pounding of inhuman footfalls echoes against the bruised sky, rodents of all sizes and colours scurry, silently coating the cobbles with death and disease. It's a life of extremes, this. Pomp and poverty. Science and superstition. The haves and have-nots. Ladies whisper and giggle in lavish dining halls, heavy silk drapes pulled tightly to hide the emaciated husks of citizens lying, and dying, beyond the manicured lawn.

Games often touch us not only because of what they are, but what they're not and, for me, Dishonored was a game that relaxed traditional gameplay in a way I hadn't quite anticipated. It unshackled expectations, permitting me to explore Dunwall's battered, broken environs at my own pace and in my own style.

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Welcome to another week of Five of the Best, a series celebrating the lovely incidental details in games we tend to overlook. So far we've celebrated hands, potions, dinosaurs, shops, health-pick-ups and maps - a real smorgasbord! I really wanted to use that word.

Best of all, it's Friday again, which means another Five of the Best and another chance for you to share your thoughts as well as sit through mine (well, ours - I sometimes rope in a bit of help). Today, it's...

Hubs! What would a game be without one? A messy pile of level spaghetti, that's what. Where would you go to chill out? Where would you chat up other characters? Yep, games would be rubbish without hubs.

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Viktor Antonov hasn't built a world like this before.

The games you know him for are bounded and largely linear. Every tiny detail has been touched by a human hand in Half-Life 2's City 17 or Dishonored's Dunwall, striking virtual places which Antonov has helped colour with particular social histories and inscribed with visual techniques that quietly guide the player to the next checkpoint. That's also true of other games that he's been involved with over the past few years, such as Wolfenstein: The New Order, Prey and Doom, on which Antonov acted as visual design director.

But Project C, as the game is currently codenamed, is very different. "It's one of the most ambitious projects I've worked on and, I have to admit, a fairly difficult one for me," he says.

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There is a saying in architecture that no building is unbuildable, only unbuilt. Structures may be impossible in the here and now, but have the potential to exist given enough time or technological development: a futuristic cityscape, a spacefaring megastructure, the ruins of an alien civilisation. However, there are also buildings that defy the physical laws of space. It is not an issue that they could not exist, but that they should not. Their forms bend and warp in unthinkable ways; dream-like structures that push spatial logic to its breaking point.

The Tomb of Porsena is a legendary monument built to house the body of an Etruscan king. 400 years after its construction, the Roman scholar Varro gave a detailed description of the ancient structure. A giant stone base rose 50 feet high, beneath it lay an "inextricable labyrinth", and atop it sat five pyramids. Above this was a brass sphere, four more pyramids, a platform and then a final five pyramids. The image painted by Varro, one of shapes stacked upon shapes, seems like a wild exaggeration. Despite this, Varro's fanciful description sparked the imaginations of countless architects over the centuries. The tomb was an enigma, and yet the difficulty in conceptualising it, and the vision behind it, was fascinating. On paper artists were free to realise its potential. If paper liberated minds, the screen can surely open up further possibilities. There's no shortage of visionary structures within the virtual spaces of video games. These are strange buildings that ask us to imagine worlds radically different to our own.

Whilst many impossible formulations are orientated towards the future, there are also plenty from the past. The castle in Ico is one example of this. During the Renaissance, Europe was obsessed, not with future utopias, but with ancient Greece and Rome. While the box art of Ico is famously inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, the long shadows and sun-bleached stone walls only make-up a portion of the game's mood. It is the etchings of Giovanni Piranesi that best capture what it's like to explore the castle's winding stairs and bridges. Piranesi's imaginary Roman reconstructions were absurdly big - so colossal you could get lost in just the foundations. In a similar way, Ico's castle is impossibly large, the camera zooming out in order to overwhelm you and build up the unfathomable mystery of its origin and purpose.

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It's easy to understand why brutalism has been such a potent source of architectural inspiration for games. The raw forms - solid, legible and with clear lineation - are the perfect material for level designers to craft their worlds with. Simultaneously, these same structures are able to ignite imaginations and gesture outwards, their dramatic shapes and monumental dimensions shocking and attention-seizing.

Brutalism is a branch of architecture that spans roughly 30 years (1950s-1970s). It was borne out of the devastation of two world wars, when there was a need to rebuild. In this aftermath brutalism became a vital global phenomenon. If you live in a city, you've no doubt passed by a hulking example.

The term derives from a French invention: b ton brut, meaning raw concrete. This is the structure's most prominent feature - sheer concrete surface, often left rough, exposed or unfinished. Significant in the emergence of brutalism was the architect Le Corbusier and his Unit d'Habitation. Built from reinforced concrete, the housing unit was an attempt to create what Le Corbusier called "a machine for living" - a place that met our every need. It was a thoroughly modern, progressive and even utopian conception of architecture. Regardless of the visual force of brutalism, it's impossible to divorce it from this socio-historical background.

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Arkane Studios has confirmed that its superb first-person assassination series Dishonored is "resting right now", with no further instalments seemingly currently planned.

News of Dishonored's dormancy comes via Arkane Studios lead designer Ricardo Bare (speaking to VG247 during QuakeCon), who qualified that, "I can't say definitively what might happen down the road, anything could happen".

The original Dishonored launched back in 2012 to much critical acclaim, with reviews celebrating its superb world design and the sometimes dizzying freedom with which the game's supernaturally enhanced assassination missions could be approached.

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If you're looking for an expert on immersive sims, speak to Randy Smith.

The 43-year-old American game designer, who lives in Austin, Texas, cut his teeth on the Thief series while working at both Looking Glass and Ion Storm, the two studios considered to have birthed the genre.

After Thief, Smith collaborated with Half-Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov at Arkane, developer of the recent Dishonored and Prey immersive sims, on projects that never came out. Meanwhile, in 2008 Smith, alongside fellow designer David Kalina, founded a new studio called Tiger Style, and designed indie games Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (2009) and Waking Mars (2012), before a Spider sequel, subtitled Rite of the Shrouded Moon, hit Steam in 2015. But unlike the first Spider game and Waking Mars, Rite of the Shrouded Moon flopped.

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There may be spoilers for the Dishonored series of games ahead.

"The Void is unspeakable. It is infinite and it is nowhere, ever-changing and perpetual. There are more things in the endless black Void, Kirin Jindosh, than are dreamt of in your natural philosophy" (Letter from Delilah). Despite the best efforts of natural philosophers, the world of Dishonored is defined by occult, unknown influences. Here, we performed dark magicks, battled witches, conversed with spirits, and even traversed the distance in-between worlds during our vendetta-fueled travels through Dunwall and Karnaca.

Any inquiry into the metaphysics of Dishonored stands and falls by the Void, that shadowy realm that is the source of all magic, witchcraft and arcane knowledge. Even the Outsider, who appears as an ancient god that grants his arcane mark to the player, ultimately derives his powers from the Void, not the other way around. But the Void is an elusive place that doesn't give up its secrets readily, and we as players don't understand it any better than the seekers of Gristol or Serkonos who struggle to catch so much as a glimpse of it. So, what exactly is the Void, or rather, how should we think about it to make sense of it?

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