
76 ◾ Game Magic
of rats. Mostlikely, the player will end up toggling between these two
extremes and all the gray area in between, allowing magic to be some-
thing slippery and alien—tied into all the systems and stories of the game
world but bound by none of them.
Another strength of the Dishonored magic system is the potential for
emergent combinations of its powers. e player might use Bend Time to
slow time down, then blink behind a guard, stabbing him undetected and
triggering the rst tier of the Shadow Kill ability, which causes unalerted
enemies to disappear into ash when killed. In a talk at the Game Developer’s
Conference 2013 “ ...