i think that your enjoyment of this game and series as a whole has a lot to do with how much you enjoy restriction. if you like save-scumming to get a perfect run, if you like being given a wealth of interesting tools and limiting yourself to just a handful, if part of what you like about stealth games is not having to constantly engage in digital murder, the Dishonored series is going to be exactly your shit. if you’re the type of person who says “why can’t i just go around killing everybody and still get the good ending,” you’re just never going to click with it. i definitely used to be the latter. but over the last few years, i’ve lost a bit of my taste for video game violence, especially involving guns, and Dishonored is a nice reprieve from constantly having to snuff out lives just to make progress in a game. it makes you feel the weight of its violence by giving you the option to not engage in it. a thing that always gets brought up when talking about this game is that a lot of the tools you have are designed for killing and that the morality system makes you feel like you can’t use all these interesting gadgets you have. a valid criticism in some ways, but i think it ignores the fact that even tho they might not all be items in your inventory, the game gives you just as many options and interesting puzzles when playing non-lethally as it does if you’re killing people. and frankly, from a story perspective, a monarch (or their vassal) going around and wantonly murdering citizens to try to regain a throne is not something you should be rewarded for with a happy ending. i think those criticisms fully miss out on what the game is trying to accomplish. which is a shame, bc i think it accomplishes it extremely well. it just requires you to come to the table with a certain understanding of what you’re in for.

tl;dr i don’t think a lot of people who play games are used to them having the same kind of social contract that we have in real life, and when they’re asked by a game to exercise self-control they bristle against it.