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The whole point of a stealth game is to blend strategy with action, with a little more emphasis on the strategy aspect. Ideally, once the player has identified the approach and method, he executes a careful attack and takes out a room full of guards without a single one ever noticing. When it works, you feel like a complete badass: You are ninja. You are the bat. None may stand against you.

When it doesn't work, you're Jerry fucking Lewis, all sticking your biomechanical boots of silence into a bucket of fish and tripping into a wall of vaporizing light as the befuddled guards laugh and record your twitching with their steam-powered iPhones so they can upload this shit to Dunwall's Funniest Home Videographs later. As the player, you're supposed to learn lessons from these mistakes, and hone your next approach accordingly. After you've screwed up a few times and refined the perfect attack, you become that seamless blur of death again.

"Hey! It's OH SHI-"

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That is not what I do.

If I miss a jump and fall down a trash chute while the sentries chuckle at my ineptitude, I'll immediately reload and charge in there to just stab them all in the neck. See, a stealth game can't just leave you helpless if stealth fails. They have to give you an out if you're discovered, so they almost always build in a combat mechanic as well. The problem is, once you learn that combat mechanic, it's way easier to run into Murderham Palace and start cutting Victorian bitches in the face than it is to orchestrate a series of perfect assassinations.

And so a typical game of mine involves a pair of guards carefully whispering to each other about the master assassin who may be stalking the very night around them, only to be interrupted by a raging psychopath sprinting right down the middle of the street, hurling explosive whale fat and frantically hopping about while firing off an electric blunderbuss. That's how every level in Dishonored ends for me: I slowly, carefully sneak around, hiding bodies and laying traps, until I accidentally hit the wrong button and fall off a building. Then I think "Fuck it, I'll just suicide next mission," only to find that, when the smoke has cleared, the high clergymen whose wine I was supposed to discreetly poison to "make it look like an accident" got drop-kicked to death in the ensuing melee and I'm too lazy to reload and do it right.

Buy Robert's stunning, transcendental, orgasmic science fiction novel, Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, right here. Or buy Robert's other (pretty OK) book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead. Follow him on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

For more from Brockway, check out 5 Reasons GTA IV Is The Worst Great Game Ever Made and 5 Real Skills Video Games Have Secretly Been Teaching Us.