My boyfriend broke up with me over Dishonored.
No, really.
This needs some background: Dishonored is a game where you are a bodyguard who was framed for the murder of the empress (hence the title). Once you're free, you can either stand by your morals or go berzerk and kill everybody. Low body count = low chaos. High body count = high chaos, meaning more guards and more rats. (The rats carry the plague & can kill you in a swarm.)
There is also the matter of achievements, and I got two huge ones in one runthrough: Shadow, meaning that I made it through all nine missions without alerting a single enemy, and Clean Hands, meaning that I did not kill a single enemy. Another major one is Art Dealer, where you find all 11 Sololov paintings (located in the most random obscure-as-sh*t locations) Both are difficult and require a sh*tload of going back to an old save. Worse, you cannot go back and redo a mission unless you redo all the missions that come after it. In my case, I botched mission #2 and planned to go back to later, only to find out that I couldn't, and had to redo levels 2-6.
Even worse than that, you don't know if you actually made it to the end w/o detecting or killing anyone until the very end of the mission. Imagine spending nearly two hours on a mission only to find that you accidentally killed someone, which is VERY easy to do. (Usually because you left a sleeping body somewhere and it got eaten by rats.)
According to Steam, it took me a whopping
52 hours to finish this game the way I wanted to. So naturally, on the second go-through, I'm killing everybody. I get to use all the cool weapons this time that I couldn't use last time. Grenades! Spring razors! Ho, what does this bolt do? Oh, it lights sh*t on fire? Like people? Cool! Hey, did you know that you could blow people up, then attack other people with body parts? Neither did I! WHEEEEEEEE!!!! I went from killing nobody in nine missions to killing 41 hostiles in the first mission. That's the one BEFORE you even get any of your cool weapons.
It seems that killing hookers was what did it for him. Now, in my defense, I wasn't trying to kill the hookers. I do my best to make sure I don't harm any civilians. See, in low chaos, you can render people unconscious by choking them from behind (or hitting them w/a sleep dart), but every time I got behind a civilian to do the chokeout (because the stupid motherf*ckers are always screaming for help when I'm trying to save their sorry lives), they would get stabbed in the neck instead because I kept hitting RT instead of RB. (I think I was just tired.) There was one ho who was steamed to death when I was killing a targeted enemy, and I felt really bad about that, but again...there's no way to lure away the survivors.
Anyway, we got into a big fight about it and he started talking about my disturbing psycho tendencies, blah blah blah. We weren't really getting along to begin with - this was all part of my "get out and date more people" phase - but this irks the sh*t out of me somewhat. We were never compatible, and I said so from the start. I hate it when dudes pick silly fights in order to be able to say "I broke it off with her, not the other way around!" #whatevernigga
Regardless, I cannot recommend Dishonored enough. Not only will you come up with fascinating ways to both kill AND not kill people, it will apparently keep punk bitches at an arm's length. Four stars!
