Not too long ago, I finished off playing Dishonored, my
silent killer teleporting all around the city putting his knife to peoples’
throats and ending them something quick.
Actually, he didn’t tend to do that too much. Where in Skyrim, Red was something of a
mass-murderer (I called her “the extinction event for humanity” at one point),
Corvo was actually very polite with people.
Well, most people. He would politely
walk up behind them, and then politely choke them out, and then politely hide
them while they slept so no one would stumble upon them.
It didn’t always work, of course. I was climbing a massive lighthouse at one
point and could not find an easy way around one of the guards. So I loaded my crossbow with my patented
(non-lethal) sleeping darts, took aim, and shot the guard. He clutched his neck, stumbled a moment, then
fell off the edge of this huge lighthouse.
I don’t think that guy survived.
But still, most times it worked out well. I could climb all around the city and drop
down near people, choking them out and putting them away. I enjoyed choking out the last person in a
line of people who were chatting with each other. They others would keep talking while I
dragged one of them away. Then I would
come back and wash/rinse/repeat. Soon I’d
have a pile of bodies all stacked up, all sleeping together.
Occasionally I would get a little frustrated with the
game, give it a quick save, and then rush out and kill anyone I saw. At the end of the day, I’d be standing in a
mess of blood, smiling. Then I’d go back
to the save point and try to beat it without killing anyone. Like the whole last run-through had been a
dream. Does that make me a sick man?
Anywho, my whole goal was to kill as few people as I
could without constantly restarting the missions to get fewer kills. I had a pretty good record, usually getting
between 0-3 kills a mission. Except one
of the missions – the third one. In this
mission, there was a tower that would constantly zap anyone that came around
not wearing a uniform. I learned about
its lethality first-hand. I snuck up to
choke out a guard in uniform at one point, and in the middle of choking him,
the two of us were zapped by the tower.
He died and I got knocked away.
Another zap and I was dead. Okay…
maybe I should just ignore that group of people then.
I slipped past the tower and then in my exploring, I made
my way back to it and rewired it so it wouldn’t shoot me anymore (my first
rewiring!).
At the end of the mission, after recalling only a couple
kills, the screen came up telling me I had killed 14 people. What?!
Turns out that in rewiring the tower, it started shooting people with uniforms
on instead. So while I spent another
hour or two wandering around and checking out the rest of the city, guardsmen
constantly wandered in the way and got blown up.
After I beat the game, I went back and tried the mission
again, this time with no kills. It was
much easier after I figured out that I didn’t actually need to do anything to
the tower to make it through.
That was also the mission I learned how annoying little
girls can be. I found the Empress’
daughter who had been kidnapped, gave her a big hug, and sighed relieved. I had just spent a long time cautiously
sneaking around the building and making my way to her room without anyone
noticing. She told me she was happy to
see me, then told me to follow her. And
she took off running down the stairs.
Running! Seriousness! Not knowing what to do I started chasing her,
afraid at every turn that I would have a bunch of guards standing in my way.
It didn’t happen, of course. She was pretty smart – she knew the
guard-less route out of the building. I
told her to wait in the dark, cold alley while I headed back in the building
and got some killing done.
So Dishonored is finished. I can’t count all the different ways I died
in the course of the mission. One of my
favorites was standing on top of a train that got run through an electric disintegration
field. The next time I tried that one, I
jumped off before reaching the field. I
think I was also eaten by piranhas once, and spat at by plants.
But with Dishonored now finished, it’s time to move on to
my next game. By brother-in-law got me
Assassin’s Creed 3 for Christmas. Looks
like I’m about to get some more killing done, Revolutionary-War-style!
