[SPOILER WARNING]

Dishonored is, in my opinion, a brilliant game. I could spend hours waxing Dishonored’s Strengths. But there is one aspect of the game that some cite as a flaw, that I think is yet another pro. Many people say that dishonored’s two paths, low and high chaos, or non-lethal and lethal, are imbalanced. The thing is, I agree on that. NerdCubed demonstrated that lethally, you can finish a mission in 10 minutes, but non-lethally, it takes half an hour.

I think the fact that killing people requires less skill and time than avoiding violence adds to the impact of the ending and re-enforces the themes of the game. It’s easy to be a bad person. The game shows you that all the way through. Hiram Burrows, a bad person, usurps control of the empire. Admiral Havelock, another bad person, betrays you and eventually his cohorts. Both Burrows and Havelock committed their crimes in the name of the empire. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If Corvo goes the high chaos route, then his story is no different. He easily blinked through the city slitting the throats of unwitting (and witting) guards, bringing the rightful ruler back into power, but at what cost? It matches the depressing ending of the game. Throughout the story, the good guys lose, unless Corvo is a good guy. if he goes through low chaos, he avoided violence, and showed that the just always triumph in the end. It matches the lighter ending of the game.

Some say that the mechanics for violence are just more fun than the mechanics for non-violence. They’re totally right. But that just feeds back in to how being bad is easier. Sure, you could drop that triprazor in front of the door your assassination target is about to walk through, shredding his body into tiny slices of person, but then would you be any better than that genocidal maniac you’re fighting to take down? Taking into consideration what happens to them if you don’t kill them, you might be, but that’s another article altogether. The point is: the mechanics and the story feed into and off of each other, resulting in a game that drives its points home subtly, but well.