Why Dishonored Is The Best Batman Game Ever Made

The amount of control it hands over to the player is key. The most popular incarnation of Batman is always presented as a character of restraint. He has one rule: do not kill. The moment he uses his power to take a life is, in his mind, when he becomes just as evil as the villains he fights. This pops up all the time in pretty much any modernish Batman-related media, whether creators are harping on it incessantly with overwrought monologues or they’re creating an alternate universe just so they can have Bats kill someone for the novelty of doing so. More than the toys and the rich sad boy routine, that one rule is his thing. It’s what makes him who he is. The Arkham games are content to let us play around with Batman’s stuff but they always wrestle control away from us once a fight with a villain is finished. We don’t get to decide what happens with the Joker after we’ve beat him over the head a bit; the game sends us zooming toward the next story beat. We never have to make the choice of restraint; we don’t even get the option. For all of Arkham’s fun combat and flying mechanics, it keeps the most important part of crafting Batman’s identity out of players’ hands.

Dishonored casts you in the role of Corvo Attano, who, like Batman, is ridiculously overpowered thanks to a host of gadgets (and mostly optional super powers). Upon release Dishonored received some criticism for not being challenging and there’s definitely a measure of truth to that. Less than half an hour after the game starts you’re given all the tools you could ever need to overcome every obstacle you come across, and that’s not even taking into consideration the numerous power ups you can get throughout your journey. It’s a laughably easy game if you run through slaughtering people left and right in every level. However, this is also a game that invites you to make your own rules, that gives you power and then lets you loose upon its world. It rewards the creative and the patient by challenging you to live in defiance of its assertions that “Revenge Solves Everything” and “The Boldest Measures Are The Safest.” Dunwall, like Gotham, is a diseased city and you can either help cure it or make it more sickly depending on your actions.

If you play Corvo as someone who values all human life, the game becomes incredibly difficult. You’ll probably find yourself backed into a corner by foes a lot, armed to the teeth with all sorts of nasty, tempting devices that you’ve picked up along the way, and you’ll have to make a choice: flee and hide, try to take them out with tranquilizer bolts or—to hell with it all—kill every single last one of them. A pacifist playthrough of Dishonored forces you to confront your own power and your responsibility of it in nearly every situation. Do you slaughter the four men guarding this post with your crossbow from a distance? Or maybe try to sneak by? What about tranquilizing them and hiding them in a dumpster? There is a tangible cost to aggression. Killing will result in the world becoming a darker place, with plague rats showing up at every turn, and a bleak ending for the game. Whereas minimizing how many people you hurt will result in a happier, if not particularly joyful, ending. This is the standard morality system that a lot of games abide by, showering you with gifts and praise when you’re decent, slapping you on the wrist when you’re an asshole. However, because that reward or punishment ties directly into how you constantly handle situations throughout the game (as opposed to a few big cutscenes where you have to make a choice while a timer counts down) it meshes well with the rest of the game and whatever ending you get feels like you earned it.

Dishonored, if you allow it, can paradoxically be just as much of a game about resisting the temptation of power as it is power fantasy; that’s what the openness of its design allows for. As much fun as Arkham is, that series never make us confront our own power. It’s just unquestioned that Batman will do The Right Thing and needs no input from us even though this is a medium where player interaction is the crux of everything. Having situations where the player must question the use and consequences of their own powers is the difference between being Batman and being Batman. It’s a seemingly small thing, choosing not to let players be Batman all the time and, again, it’s probably for the best. Otherwise you’d have immersion and continuity problems that go alongside players making their Batman kill criminals in the street. However, Dishonored, which is not beholden to any previously established continuity, gives us that vital choice. We can be murderous monsters, sure, but it also lets us be the vigilante, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, making the decision to save a city instead of giving into a powerful, ever present thirst for revenge. The hard but virtuous road over the easy, bloody one.

I’m still going to give Arkham Knight a spin eventually but there’s this inescapable notion I have that I’m just going to be playing Batman on autopilot. I’ll be cruising around in the Batmobile, maybe descending from the sky to punch criminals in the jaw while warding off the legion of nightmares the Scarecrow sends after me, and it’ll all probably be good fun for a bit—but will the thrills last for the whole game? Will I even care that I’m playing as The Caped Crusader if the game doesn’t ever let me face the decisions he does? Rocksteady’s combination of solid combat, genuinely thrilling movement and devoted fanservice has aged well over the past few years, but it’s difficult to get excited for yet another Batman game when there’s already a game loaded into my PS3 that understands and emulates the character so well, a game that grants me nearly unlimited power and tries to teach me why that’s such an awful burden.

Javy Gwaltney devotes his time to writing about these videogame things when he isn’t teaching or cobbling together a novel. You can follow the trail of pizza crumbs to his Twitter or his website.