Apologies for our lax updating lately, Pike and I have been completely engrossed in WoW’s Mists of Pandaria expansion. Contrary to our prior cynicism about WoW and Blizzard’s direction, and our nostalgic view of the Burning Crusade era, MoP is quite honestly the best WoW has ever been. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about, that’s just an excuse for being lazy.

In between long stints in Pandaria I’ve been putting some hours into some other games; XCOM I’ve already talked about, and I’m going to write something about The Walking Dead soon having just got it last week on the advice of my bro Barry Manilow, but today’s topic is Dishonored.

In Dishonored you are Corvo Attano, the strikingly handsome personal bodyguard of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin and her daughter Emily. Within a few minutes of starting the former is killed in front of you and the latter kidnapped, with Corvo arrested and thrown into prison for the foul deeds. So begins your career as a nightmarish magic assassin. Now, do you guys remember BioShock? Remember how it was hyped as a game with a huge variety of possible playstyles, but which really turned out to have only a tiny handful of situational options and tended to be very samey? Well, Dishonored is everything BioShock was promising to be; you truly do have a good array of tools and abilities to play with, and you can play in some dramatically different styles. Stealthy thieving pacifist, stealthy and precise assassin of your target and nobody else, stealthy murdered of everything, noisy murderer of everything, using or not using any of a half-dozen neat abilities. It’s a really neat mix.

What really sells it though is the world and level design. Both on the aesthetic level and in the literal “how things fit together” manner, Dishonored is a tour de force. The world works perfectly with your skills to let you explore in a way that never feels forced. When you use your skills in some creative manner you feel like you’re clever for figuring it out; routes are generally shown and/or hidden sensibly and you feel sneaky when you find them. The city of Dunwall, where the game takes place, recently underwent a whale-oil fueled Industrial Revolution, and is filled with all manner of devices relating thereto. It’s also beset by the “Rat Plague”, which is carried by the creatures and causes massive hemorrhaging. Upwards of half the city is dead of it, and when you see mounds of corpses disposed out, and entire districts abandoned, it’s a truly grim vision. All but the very wealthiest experience the troubles arising from this – you’ll see peeling paint and cracks in the walls of all but the most important buildings and those belonging to the very richest. It’s one of the most immersive and unsettling dystopian settings I’ve ever explored.

It’s also Asshole Simulator of the Year, for my money.

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Now, to step away from Videogames for a moment, even thought Pike won’t give my head peace once she sees it. There is a TV show I would briefly like to mention. It is a show about superpowered people. But it is a show which is not about the powers, it is about the people. The powers are things to be dealt with, with realistic constraints that never seem like forced efforts to hamstring people but rather clever and logical downsides. The characters are amazing and you want to spend time with them, the show is witty and hilarious a lot of the time, but also dark as fuck at times. The show is called Alphas, and I would really quite like to see them make a Season 3 so if you like great TV go watch it and talk about it!