I have played Dishonored in the amount of three digits of minutes, and am fully prepared to present you with words placed in coherent sentences so that you may learn what I think.  I'm also prepared to do so while deftly spoiling nothing at all about the story.  You're welcome.  In case you've been living under a rock for the past six months or so, Dishonored is a stealth-based assassination game set in a steampunk-ish Victorian Era city.  That's all I need to tell you about the story.

Let's start with the thing that I always start with when I talk about a game:  How's it look?  The answer is great, and the only complaint I have about the graphics is that the human characters do not look very good.  Everything else is fantastic.  I do look forward to the day when human beings are rendered within a computer game in a way that is realistic, especially the FACES.  Until then, though, it's not too difficult to overlook such things.  If you're wondering what my problems are with them in this game, there are a few things:  Their bodies are disproportionate in a lot of cases, where their hands are too big, or their heads.  Their hair doesn't look like it's separate from the rest of them, and looks like wax.  And the lip-synching is bad.  Sometimes you can see their entire row of teeth through their face when they're talking.  But, I digress.  In my opinion, aside from LA Noire, no one has rendered a human correctly.  I'm picky.  Chances are, this isn't something you're going to really care about.

As you may or may not know, the lead artist on this game was the lead artist for Half-Life 2.  It shows. The levels very much feel like Half-Life 2 in ways that are subconscious.  It's a feeling you get.  A vibe.  It's in the overall structure, how the debris is scattered about, and how you can climb here and there in a similar manner.  The result is that I immediately feel at home in Dishonored's levels, and that's a very good thing indeed.

Most wonderfully, the controls are excellent and it's clear that the developers took the time to optimize them for the PC.  The mouse is oh-so-smooth, and that makes me very happy.  It's a shame that I'm actually inclined to comment on such simple things that should be a given when it comes to a game, and the fact that I am doing so suggest that far too many games actually botch this up.  It's true.  But thankfully, Dishonored is a wonderful experience when it comes to the controls.

But let's stop talking about these things and get down to the really important things, shall we?  After all, this is a game created by Arkane Studios and backed by Bethesda.  Rage may not have been what you thought it should have been, and it may have had a bumpy start in the graphics department until they patched it, but you have to admit that it was VERY smooth.  And of course Skyrim, also, is VERY smooth.  So perhaps in this particular case, the above commentary was unnecessary.  But you know what they say about making assumptions.

So how good is the stealth, exactly?  The answer is that it is very, very good.

It's all in the little things.  I'll give you two excellent examples of the little things this game does that improves upon the whole idea of sneaking around.  When I go into a bush, it actually feels like I'm in a bush.  As I'm crouched down, before I sneak into the bush I can tell that even while crouched I'm still just a little bit higher than said bush.  But when I go into the bush, my character crouches down EVEN FURTHER to make sure he's quite hidden within the leaves and branches.  Next, I was hiding along the side of a traincar.  To my surprise, the person I was sneaking up behind suddenly turned around and started doubling-back.  As soon as he would round the corner of the traincar, he would see me.  The area underneath the traincar was quite narrow -- I could tell that I wouldn't fit under it even crouched. But still, in a panic I dove for it.  And my character ducked down even lower and slid underneath it, and the guard walked by me without noticing me.  This is brilliance, simply stated.

And these are just the small things.  Some of the things that matter more include:  For once, in a stealth game, it doesn't seem like you get seen when you should not.  It's so easy to make things more difficult simply by making you fail by simply being seen, and increasing that difficulty further by making your easy to be seen.  Dishonored handles this differently, and it's all about choice.  There are several ways to approach any level, and the game even gives you your options the very first time you're faced with such decisions.  Would you like to sneak in from the rooftops?  Or perhaps you'd like to disable the defenses and walk right in the front door?  Or would you like to explore around and find a secret way in?  Hell, you could even possess a rat if you'd like!  So instead of punishing you for not completing a level the way it was intended, you instead are given many avenues of possibility and can choose whichever one you like best.  And if you make a mistake, it's not always fatal.  You can handle a few guards head-on if necessary, and the block-and-counter system is quite good.  It's just not as fun or satisfying as doing it the hard way, and THAT is what makes this game special.

Finally, just let me go on the record and say that I'm in love with the level design of this game.  RPS was absolutely correct when they said that you should definitely and utterly ignore your objectives.  Just don't even look at your goal marker.  Cover it with duct tape if you need to.  If you want to get the full enjoyment out of Dishonored, then follow this advice:  When you enter a level, simply start sneaking around and explore every nook and cranny.  Your primary objective is secondary.  Go do it after you've discovered everything else.

As you can see, I had quite a lot of say about a game that I've spent just a few hours playing thus far.  It's deep and engrossing, it's a style of gameplay that has been rare in recent years, and it's just downright enjoyable and fun.  It's stealth done right, even more right than it was done in Deus Ex.  As long as you go into the game expecting that, knowing what you'll be doing, and knowing that this isn't some run-of-the-mill action game, you're going to love it.  If you go into it and try to COD it, you're going to have a bad time.