Dishonored

Lore & Background

Dunwall is a coastal metropolis in the fictional nation of the Isles, long ruled by the Empress. When she is murdered during a public ceremony, the blame falls on Corvo Attano, her loyal spymaster, who is imprisoned in the Tower. In the darkness of his cell, the Outsider — an ancient, inhuman entity bound to the city's ley lines — offers Corvo supernatural abilities in exchange for vengeance. Corvo accepts, and the powers sear themselves into his body: the ability to blink short distances, to possess the minds of the living and the recently dead, to command swarms of rats, and to hurl bolts of dark energy. The city is gripped by the Grey plague, a virulent epidemic that has turned large districts into quarantined death zones. The Regent, who has seized power in the Empress's absence, enforces martial law, and the populace is divided between loyalists, plague victims, and those who simply want to survive. Corvo's quest to identify the true conspirators behind the assassination threads through the Royal Palace, the docks, the slums of the Lower City, and the isolated island of Serkonos, each district revealing a different facet of Dunwall's rot. The game's narrative architecture is built on consequence. The Chaos meter tracks the cumulative violence of the player's actions; a high-chaos run transforms Dunwall into a rat-infested, plague-scarred hellscape, while a low-chaos run leaves the city comparatively stable. This design philosophy — that the world responds to how you play, not just what you choose — became a hallmark of Arkane's design language and a touchstone for the immersive-sim genre.

In Their Own Story

The rain on Dunwall's rooftops tastes of copper and old blood. Corvo crouches behind a stack of salted-fish crates in the Docks, his breath shallow, the Outsider's mark pulsing faintly beneath his skin. Somewhere above, in the Regent's gilded hall, a toast is being raised to the Empress's memory — a memory no one in that room truly holds. He counts the guards. Three. Four. The rats are already moving under the floorboards, a black tide answering a call only he can hear. He does not need to kill them all. He never does. He simply needs to be in the right place, in the right moment, when the truth is spoken aloud. The city will sort the rest.

Reader's Guide

Dishonored was developed by Arkane Studios, a French studio based in Paris, and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was critically acclaimed for its level design, power system, and narrative depth, earning multiple Game of the Year nominations and establishing Arkane as a leading voice in the immersive-sim genre. The game's design philosophy centers on player agency: each mission offers multiple routes, multiple power combinations, and multiple moral registers. The Chaos system ensures that the city's visual and narrative state shifts based on the player's conduct, rewarding both lethal and non-lethal approaches without declaring one canonically correct. The franchise's influence is visible in the design approaches of numerous subsequent action-adventure titles that prioritize emergent gameplay and consequence.

Did You Know?

• Arkane Studios, the developer of Dishonored, is a French studio headquartered in Paris, making the game a notable example of a major AAA title led by a European development team.
• The game's Chaos meter means two players can complete the same mission and see a visually and narratively different Dunwall, with rat swarms, plague spread, and NPC dialogue all shifting.
• The Outsider, the entity who grants Corvo his powers, is bound to Dunwall's ley lines and cannot directly act in the mortal world — a constraint that shapes the entire conspiracy plot.
• The Little Death, one of Corvo's signature weapons, is a crossbow-like device that fires a dart inducing a brief, incapacitating stun, making it a central tool for non-lethal playthroughs.