And while I’m waiting for a guard to patrol toward me, I have the time to blink to a nearby room and disable two others. In my experience, that would be when you restart from the last checkpoint or hide in a locker for two minutes in any other game. If a guard is about to walk around the corner into the hallway I’m crouched in, I often have a way to escape. In Dishonored, I always feel like I can control a situation by adjusting my position. It ignores the confinement of stealth games, speeds up the laborious process of sneaking, and gives me options when I’m caught.īlink would be nothing without level design that incorporates it. In some ways, Batman: Arkham Asylum did it with Batman’s ability to grapple to gargoyles near the ceiling, but blink isn’t tied to specific rooms, and it not only allows vertical movement but horizontal too. And that’s when I saw the blink ability, broke my years-long abstinence, and finally played my first stealth game.īlink remedies my problems with the stealth genre. Out of some tortuous need to see what I was missing, I watched a few videos of other people playing it. I had forgotten about Dishonored until it finally released. I had been tricked into that before, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. I stopped reading as soon as I found out it was primarily a stealth game. A Victorian-era setting, a cool mask, rats, and a rad art style. I remember flipping through the Dishonored issue of Game Informer.

I couldn’t find a stealth game I enjoyed, and I began to believe I would never. I got excited about games like Hitman and Splinter Cell, brought them home, popped them into my console, ripped the discs out and left them at the bottom of my stack of games. I wanted to like it, but I was overwhelmed.

I couldn’t run around and shoot every guard in the head, and when they saw me, it was all over. Not only could I not read Japanese, but I had no idea how stealth games worked. I’ve avoided stealth games ever since I played a Japanese demo of Metal Gear Solid.

Dishonored blinkk