First off, it is completely worth noting that during the demo it was let loose that the some visual minds behind BioShock, Half Life 2 and some mechanical minds behind Deus Ex are working on this title from inception. This completely explains why it has the look and feel that it does. This settled things a bit for me to know that it wasn't just a rip off of those franchises but more of a brain child of what the two could become. Hence the steam punk feel and the stealth action game play.
Now that the look-a-like thing is resolved a bit, let's move into what was actually shown and what I got to play. One of the big things that is interesting is that they have taken the dynamic game play form and supped that up even more than I have ever seen. In the demo I was shown, and played, it was stated that there were upwards of eight different ways to go about the mission at hand. For instance the demonstrators showed a kick run and gun while murdering everyone and then replayed the level being completely stealthy using the environment and "accidents" to assassinate the targets. I tried to play through the same stealth way but messed up at one point which lead to me having to hunt down one of the targets who was alerted well before I made it there.
While on that topic of multiple play styles, this also leads to a different style to the story. It wasn't clear if it will be different endings, but the story and NPCs will change based on your "morality" in the game. Meaning if you are a cold blooded killer and just murder everything you will most likely have more people not too happy with you while you will show more loyalty if you kill only your 'marks'. There is even an option to not kill a single person in the game, which I am assuming has its own bonuses and negatives attached. Not to mention most likely its own story extras.
So how does it actually play? Well to break one of my pet peeves listed in other articles, quite a bit like those above mentioned title. The only big difference is that it felt like they kept the best parts of those games and melded them all together. The "magic" system did take a little bit to get the hang of, but once I did it was smooth sailing and trying to figure out all the different angles to attack the objectives at hand.
Even though I only had about 15 minutes with my hands on the game, what I played and saw has me doing a 180° turn on my original assessment of Dishonored. I kind of want more now and don't want to wait until October 9th for it to finally come out. But it always seems this way for the best things doesn't it.
