New Releases: Dishonored, XCOM, Fable, Pokemon Oct. 7th - 13th

The challenge for a developer creating a role-playing game is to build a bond with the player, the kind of bond where the player as protagonist not only believes in the mission of his alter ego, but cares about the characters in the game on an emotional level. The story is the essence of any good RPG, and the developer must allow the player to feel the character's anger, frustration, joy or any of the myriad emotions through that story. A great RPG builds a trust with the player and demands that role-playing be the game. And for that reason, Arkane Studios' Dishonored is a great RPG. My emotions drove my style of game play as the bodyguard Corvo, falsely accused of killing a beloved Empress and my friend. I started with the mindset that clearing my name was secondary to finding those that killed her and kidnapped her daughter, the future monarch that I had watched grow up in my time as their bodyguard. I began play in a non-lethal fashion, fully unaware that what I was about to experience went well beyond the traditional point-and-click RPGs.The citizens of Dunwall - home to the events of Dishonored - are subject to terrible restrictions on their personal freedom. There's a compulsory dusk-'till-dawn curfew for starters, which is vigorously applied by the city's guards. At sundown, doors and windows are bolted shut by industrial-sized clamps, and anyone who does somehow manage to wiggle past them is shot on sight. Things don't get much better come the break of dawn. Electrified 'Wall of Light' barriers have been erected around Dunwall to control people-flow and to quarantine poverty-stricken areas from their affluent neighbours. Anyone who stumbles into the barriers is vapourised.Dunwall's civil liberties have been curtailed in an attempt to contain a devastating rat plague that has derailed the once-charming maritime city's recent industrial expansion and left half the population dead. The city's survivors - largely members of the aristocracy who can afford the immunity elixir - cling desperately to a vestige of respectability, but that's all it is - a veneer. Dishonored's world is a grim one of routine, oppression and restriction. Except for you, of course. In Dunwall, you can do anything you please.