“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and next”.
Questa è la descrizione che Dickens ci fa di Coketown, nel romanzo “Tempi difficili” del 1854, eppure potrebbe descrivere perfettamente anche la città in cui è ambientata l’azione in Dishonored, Dunwall. Prima di partire descrivendo il gameplay, la grafica e la trama del gioco, vorrei soffermarmi un momento sull’aspetto concettuale di Dishonored.
Spesso, troppo spesso, i giochi vengono recensiti senza cercare di indagare quanto veramente siano originali, quale e quanto lavoro ci sia dietro, a cosa si siano ispirati i designer. Molte volte ci si limita a segnalare una somiglianza con un altro titolo, ma i game-designer non sono persone con una scienza infusa, da qualche parte devono aver tratto degli elementi da inserire nel proprio videogioco: da cosa hanno attinto i programmatori degli Arkane Studios?