Ah, Dishonored 2 [official site]. A chance to right the wrongs with my approach to stealth in the original Dishonored. A clean slate where no-one has yet been massacred and no guards have been panic-killed and the guy in the chair in that room didn’t get accidentally stabbed because of a previous stabbing session which left me with a bit of a hair-trigger stab-finger. It was thus reassured that I have embarked on my non-lethal playthrough of Dishonored 2.

Six people have died so far.

I can definitely explain…

I’ve tried to keep the following spoiler-free but you might still want to leave reading it until you’ve played that first mission if you’re worried about accidental environmental spoilers? >

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I’ve been playing Dishonored 2 [official site] for nine hours but I’m not here to spoil any surprises for you, so don’t worry about precisely how much I’ve seen or what beans I might spill. What I want to do is to reassure you that developers Arkane haven’t fluffed their lines with this sequel. Quite the opposite in fact they’re firing on all cylinders.

Even if the remaining levels are so badly designed that I find them intolerable, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that would be the case, I’ve already explored enough beautifully realised and densely packed areas to see this as a sequel that understands what its predecessor did well, and knows precisely how to do it better. Here, with no spoilers, are my thoughts on what I’ve seen so far.

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I know how much you like slitting throats, so I got this Dishonored 2 [official site] launch trailer for you. It s got a lot of your stabby bloodshed in it, but also some other powers available to the discerning murderer, including annoying flies , the mini warp and becoming a living avatar of chaos . It s nothing we haven t seen before but there s some bits of plot thrown in for good measure. Which is good because plot is your second favourite thing after slitting throats. … [visit site to read more]

With Dishonored 2‘s [official site] release hovering on the gaming horizon, I wanted to take a closer look at Arkane’s sequel and its distinctive aesthetic with art director, S bastien Mitton. Our conversation touched on fashion influences, how you approach the art of a sequel, the role of tech advangements and why it’s important that Dishonored 2 went with Victorian city-building instead of a modern grid. As ever with these art-focused features, you can click on the images to see a larger version. … [visit site to read more]

We’re barrelling towards the end of the year, which means – oh gosh! – we’re ten days from Dishonored 2 [official site]. Publishers Bethesda today announced that Arkane’s supernatural stealth-o-action game has “gone gold”, which is a technical industry term for the dev team being allowed a 5-minute toilet break for a wee (to ‘go gold’) before they return to their desks and start on the first patch. This also means enough is locked in to announce system requirements and gab about graphics options. Onwards! … [visit site to read more]

Bethesda, developers of Elder Scrolls and Fallout and publishers of Dishonored, Doom, Wolfenstein and more, say that their policy now is to send out “media review copies” one day before their games come out. That’s what they did with DOOM earlier this year and that’s what they intend to do with the approaching releases of both Skyrim Special Edition and Dishonored 2.

We think this is a bad thing for you and for everyone other than Bethesda.

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Dishonored 2‘s fourth mission is supposedly about infiltrating the home of Kirin Jindosh, a sadistic inventor who must be bumped off or neutralised before he unleashes an army of automatons upon the world. But what you’re really doing in the Clockwork Mansion is invading a brain. Having already seen excerpts from a developer playthrough, I had a sense that the building’s rearrangeable mechanical layouts might reflect the character of its architect, much as Bioshock and Portal’s labyrinths do GlaDOS and Andrew Ryan. I was unprepared, however, for how extravagantly Jindosh’s neuroses infest the place, or for how cruel it feels to slip through the cracks in his amazing creation past the velvet drapes, beneath the lacquered facades and into the whirring schematics of his subconsciousness.

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Good news: a new Dishonored 2 [official site] gameplay trailer is out, with a pleasing eight-minute chunk of Emily murdering her way through a place we’ve seen a bit of before. What I saw was quite nice, but I started peeking through my fingers then stopped watching because I’d still like to be surprised by Arkane’s sneak-o-FPS.

Plbbbbbrfffff news: those silly sausages at Bethesda have announced that they’ll release the game a day early – to people who pre-order it. You cheeky bunch!

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Have a whale of a time with…no. These creative kills are whale-y good. Oh no no no.

I understand the appeal of playing a game like Dishonored 2 [official site] without killing a single person, I really do, but Arkane are sorely tempting my no harm, nn foul-festering-bloodfly-feeding-frenzy policy. A new video shows both Emily and Corvo using their supernatural skills to create deftly calculated carnage. There are doppelgangers, body-swaps, blink-kicks that send people flying through the air like footballs, and combinations of time manipulation, razor traps and vertical violence that make a stab to the back seem so simple as to be uncouth.

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You might have seen actual proper gameplay from Dishonored 2 [official site] on Bethesda’s E3 press conference stream, or maybe you read Adam’s retelling of Emily’s wee adventure. Or maybe you didn’t. Or maybe you want to see it again. Maybe you don’t even know what it is (if so: it is a jolly exciting supernatural first-person stealth-ish game set in a strange version of Victorian-y Europe). The point is, look below: it’s Harvey Smith’s twenty-minute presentation of sneaking, gabbing, and stabbing in handy moving picture format.

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