izigame.me

Take note - this is how to design a game.
Dishonoured is an immersive sim set in a grimy world, where you get revenge on a cabal of unsavoury rich people.
It's also one of the best designed games I've ever played.
It gives the player a lot more respect than other games would have the courage to do. Other games would tell the player most of the necessary information through either lengthly cutscenes or an NPC whispering instructions in your ear of what to do next. In Dishonoured, most of this information comes from in-game dialogue between NPCs. You have to actually listen in to enemy conversations in order to get information about your targets' behaviour and weaknesses. This builds immersion: the game rarely needs to take you out of the experience in order to tell its story. Of course, you can just ignore the conversations completely - the game won't stop you, and you'll still be able to complete each level just fine.
That's because of the game's fantastic level design. In each mission the target is holed up in a highly visible building that stands out from the surrounding environment. I turned off objective markers for the entire game and never once got lost or unsure of where to go next (I would encourage all players to play with markers off, it really adds to the immersion and forces you to take in the environment more).
The levels themselves are fantastically open, with vertical movement being a core focus. I've often believed all the stealth games in the world can be marked on a spectrum from 'hunted' to 'hunter' - are you hiding from an unstoppable enemy, or are you sneaking up on an unaware victim? In dishonoured, you're certainly the hunter. Equipped with the ability to teleport, you can climb basically every surface and approach situations from entirely new angles. If you invest in some acrobatic abilities, you can bypass virtually every encounter in the game by using rooftops to climb past them. Some might view this is overpowered, but in dishonoured it's just another way of approaching the game.
Which brings us to the concept of player agency.
Dishonoured is a stealth game at heart, but the form that stealth takes is up to the player. You could
A) Be stealthy because you were never noticed, in and out like a ghost
B) Be stealthy game because you meticulously assassinated everyone in your way one by one and threw the bodies in a river or
C) Be stealthy because nobody is alive enough to say otherwise.
The game encourages this by making every tool at your disposal equally powerful. Sword strikes, grenades, sleep darts, razor traps, bullets, rat swarms: they all neutralise enemies instantly. Or you could possess a rat or jump to a rooftop to sneak past the guards without having to use any consumables and without them every knowing you were there.
The world is a sandbox playground where every strategy is equally viable.
In other games they might have tried to balance every option, to make sure that every playstyle had the same amount of strength. But fun should always come first, and that's something dishonoured understands. Instead of making encounters designed to counter specific playstyles in the name of balance, dishonoured leans in the opposite direction - guards stand on high ledges that they can be blasted off, explosive cans are left out in the open for you to pick up and throw, groups of enemies stand in clustered groups where a razor trap is guaranteed to take them all out instantly.
Dishonoured encourages every playstyle equally. It's only unfortunate, then, that the player's actions are reduced to a moral binary at the end of the game - massacre everyone, and you get a bad ending. Kill a moderately low amount of people, and everything is rosy at the end. I will admit that the fact that the world changes as you head toward these two binaries is a nice touch.
The story itself is quite a simple revenge narrative but it's still sufficiently engaging. There are some fun characters, some good worldbuilding, and it's mostly told without cutscenes, which is always a plus. It could probably use with more setup before everything goes to hell, and could have been a bit more adventurous, but it allows the player to get immersed in the world and creates some cool narrative moments, which in my eyes is enough.
TL;DR: Great game, great design, if you like being in control of the narrative and/or world it's a must-buy.