Review: Mark of the Ninja

Before playing it, I had heard good things about Mark of the Ninja, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it exceeded even my initially high expectations.  The game starts out with you as a ninja waking up in the middle of an attack on your home base.  After saving your leader, he orders you to take revenge on the man responsible, so you take on the Mark of the Ninja using special ink that gives you special abilities, but will also drive you insane.

Gameplay itself involves sneaking around heavily fortified areas, using darkness and distractions as your tools to either bypass guards undetected or take them out.  Other guards will investigate and raise alarms when they see dead bodies, so you can either hide them or use them as bait to lure the other guards into a trap.  The representation of lit areas, enemy flashlights and fields of view, and sound rings make the sneaking aspect of the game crystal clear when you're safe and when you're not, which is exactly what is required for a good sneaking game.  The game also gives you plenty of ways to get through/past guards in most cases giving plenty of replayability to try different play styles.  You also unlock different outfits that enhance certain traits, but cause disadvantages (e.g. one suit is completely silent when running and lets you equip two distraction items, but you can't equip a sword, so you can't kill anyone) so even if you're not good at a certain play style, you can try with the different costumes.  It really does make it a very different game when you go through normally vs. going through not being able to kill anyone.

Once you complete the game, you unlock New Game+, which I was questioning the purpose of the entire time since you can select any previously beaten level to play at any time.  It turns out New Game+ really ups the difficulty.  You no longer see sound rings, your field of view is more realistic (you can't see everything that's behind the way you're facing), and there are more guards.  This gives even further playback to the game if you really want a challenge.  This game is now tied with Dishonored for my favorite stealth game ever.

Review: Dishonored

I think I've finally figured out why I have such a high standard for sneaking games.  If done well, they are my absolute favorite genre, but it's very easy to make them drive me insane.  Sneaking games let me indulge my meticulous side, but if the guards' don't walk in patterns or my sneaky character walks into an ambush during a cutscene or it isn't clear why I got spotted, I will inevitably make the game infinitely harder on myself by being determined to still knock out everyone using stealth and then I will resent the game for not letting me play it right.  Fortunately, Dishonored does no such thing.

The men and women of Arkane Studios have done a wonderful job of truly letting the player decide their own playstyle and having it work throughout the entire game.  There are never any zombies that always spot you no matter how sneaky you are.  Cutscenes never place you somewhere you wouldn't have gone yourself.  There are always at least three or four paths to your destination (unless it takes you into another area, these are generally funneled into one or two entrances).  If you want to fight your way through, you can.  If you want to sneak past everyone on the ledges, go for it.  If you want (or need) to go through every avenue, then you can.

The choices you make can also affect the story, but sadly, this isn't as rewarding as the gameplay itself.  Essentially if you're not playing the sneaky, nonlethal game, you are going to make the game harder on yourself later on.  So although the game lets you play how you want, it definitely rewards one playstyle over all the others.  On the one hand, this is a good message.  Killing is bad.  It will make your life harder.  But from a gameplay perspective, this is kind of harsh for players who want to cut a swath through the city of Dunwall.

Another interesting aspect they added is that if you knock out a guard and then they get killed, it counts as you killing them.  So you have to be very careful when placing knocked out bodies lest other guards spot them, a rat swarm eats them, or they are lying in an inch or two of water (apparently the water won't wake them up and instead they drown).  This not only added some strategy to my playthrough, but it also created this game's OCD moments where I'd try to put the guys somewhere safe, but also somewhere where it would be funny to think of their reaction when they wake up.  So one guy went on the Lord Regent's bed (ruler of the entire city) along with one of his maids - hope he wakes up before getting caught!  Other guys would go in piles on top of each other or as close to sitting on chairs as I could make them.

If you enjoy sneaking games in the least, then I highly recommend this one.  It's the first (in my memory) to let you be completely sneaky from the beginning of the game to the very end of the game.  It's also pretty rare for a game where you're an assassin to let you play through the entire game without killing anyone, but this one manages it.