Dishonored Honours Us With Details

Dishonored being, you might recall, the next game from Arkane (now augmented with Deus Ex mega-brain Harvey Smith), and one with a very pleasant whiff of the immersive sim about it. Meaty facts are reserved for the latest dead tree edition of Game Informer, but a new overview gives us the first screenshot and a better sense of what's going on in this world of optional assassination and rodent-bothering.

So, while the concept art we saw the other day suggested something heavily Half-Life 2y, now we've got something with a bit of a New World vibe. You'll play as imperial bodyguard named Corvo, charged with protecting an empress but falsely imprisoned by a corrupt noble. You get out, of course, because you're amazing. Of course you are! You're a videogame hero. But you also have mystic powers such as time-slowing, rat-summoning (it's this year's bees) and healing, which you can combine in various ways for added biffosity and clever tactical thinking, such as distracting guards then psychically possessing one of your rodent horde to make good your escape.

It's making me think of both Skyrim and BioShock 2 to some degree, but there's also a little Thief and Hitman in there, in that it's designed to be a stealth and assassination game rather than an all-out actioner. However, the option to unleash untold carnage is in there, with the game world and its story reacting to how aggressive your actions are - but, allegedly, in a non-punitive way.

More over on Game Informer, who will apparently be dribbling out all manner of further factoids over the coming weeks.

Oh, and you'll also note from the screenshot that there's first-person sword-fighthing, which perhaps speaks to the Dark Messiah heritage.