Great moments in PC gaming Celebrate your favorite game memories in bite-sized pieces.
dishonor
Year: 2012
Developer: Arkane Studios
I never fully understood the appeal of Pacifist Run in gaming. I’ve lived on this planet for decades, and I’ve spent all those years without killing anyone. Why would you want to play a game where you can kill people? no Kill people, especially when the game is full of great lethal weapons? This is finally your chance to taste the harmless killing spree!
What I do understand is the appeal of the additional challenges that come with the pacifist run. Stealth has to be perfect because if things go wrong, you can’t start an explosion right away. Easy kills become complex knockouts, and corpses must be safely hidden to avoid alerting more enemies. Learning level layouts and enemy patterns requires observation, planning, eavesdropping, and memory. This is like a speed run, but then work slowly and carefully.
This seems like a great way to play your favorite games again. Back in 2012, there was nothing I loved about him more than Dishonored. I was looking for an excuse to play again, but was determined not to kill anyone to change the situation. (In Dishonored, if you kill a lot at the start of the game, it’s okay that later levels will give you more enemies and even more downer endings.)
I quickly learned that Dishonored’s pacifist play wasn’t to my liking.Killing and disposing of people in Dunwall is too bad fun. There are mines that slice people with barbed wire. You can rewire your electrical grid to vaporize enemies that pass through it. You can summon a swarm of rats to eat people. And am I just supposed to smother the men unconscious and hide their still-breathing bodies so they can stay alive? What am I, the Good Samaritan?
But I did it, traveling more slowly through Dishonored’s levels for a while, carefully observing and learning the patrol patterns, picking the perfect moment to make a non-lethal attack, and then suffocating me. I sneaked away to carefully hide the sleeping guard. outside. But in the end, things went sideways.
It started on one level in a room with some tall bookshelves. I strangled the guard and stunned him, but there were several others nearby, so I took the sleeping guard and threw him onto a tall ledge. It was so high that even a passing guard could not notice the body. Perfect.
These shelves became my go-to corpse storage at this level. I strangled someone and carried it on my back and put it on the shelf. The problem was that the shelves got crowded quickly and I had to lay one on the floor while he sorted two others already there. While doing so, he heard a noise and saw the man on the ground being eaten by mice. group. It’s not exactly my fault, but it still counts as a failure.
I started at the last save point and again stuffed the shelf with some corpses, only to be spotted by a guard because I was in a hurry and panic and kill him. I did it again, this time dealing with another while slamming one of the sleeping guards to the floor. A mouse ate him again.
I don’t know how many times I tried to get 3 different guards on top of those ledges, but things didn’t go well, and each time someone died, and my pacifist steps were repeated many times. I messed up many times.
I distinctly remember the last time I tried it, I was staring at three bodies sleeping on a shelf. It seemed like we had finally done it. Then, as I watched, one of the guards slowly slipped off the edge of the ledge. He landed on his head and broke his neck. Again he failed.
are you OK. are you OK. I’m done with this eggshell-necked mouse bait guard. I stabbed one of the sleeping guards to death, threw another off the shelf, and watched him bounce on the hard floor before the rats swarmed. Then I decided to deliberately kill all the other guards throughout the level. I killed them in the most gruesome way possible, including the guards that I would normally ignore.
And it was so liberating and satisfying to just attack everyone after carefully crawling, gently neutralizing the enemy, trying over and over again to bring the corpse count down to zero! That’s why I’m not a pacifist. Not killing people made me a much worse killer than I ever was. I’m going to use violence from now on. Because otherwise things will be very dire.
