Rat Assassin
- Brand
- Dishonored
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Product Launch
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- App
- Agency
- Rokkan
Objective
Bethesda needed to warm up mass-market mobile players ahead of Dishonored's console and PC launch on October 9, 2012 — its first release ever aimed at iPhone and iPad owners. The goal was to hand them a free, instantly playable taste of Dunwall and preview the hero's powers before the full game arrived.
Solution
The player opens the app to a plague-ridden street in Dunwall and starts slicing at rats and hagfish as they fly across the screen, swiping a finger the way they would in Fruit Ninja. Landing hits chains combos and fills a meter for special strikes — a crossbow shot, spring razors, or a bone charm that triggers Bend Time to slow everything down, along with shadow and adrenaline kills. Three modes structure a session: Assassination for open scoring, Challenge for set objectives, and Timed for a race against the clock, each run ending with a star rating that unlocks new blade skins, backgrounds, and kill animations.
- 1
The player downloads the free app on a promise: hone the reflexes of a supernatural assassin by clearing Dunwall's streets of plague rats, one slice, dice, and crossbow shot at a time.
- 2
From the main menu the player picks one of three modes: Assassination, an endless survival run; Challenge, a set of discrete tasks; or Timed, a score race against the clock with no hazards.
- 3
In the core loop, rats are tossed up from the bottom of the screen over a Dunwall backdrop and the player swipes to slice them in half for points, with a single continuous swipe through multiple rats scoring a combo that boosts points faster.
- 4
Sustained play unlocks stronger tools: ten kills in a row trigger Blood Thirsty, wiping every rat on screen in one hit; a filling mana bar lets the player trigger Bend Time to slow the action for easier combos; and slicing a whale bone charm or a Spring Razor among the falling objects also slows time or clears the screen outright.
- 5
Kills can also play out as a Shadow Kill, where the rat dissolves to ash, or as an adrenaline kill, both referencing the assassin abilities of Dishonored's protagonist Corvo.
- 6
Alongside the rats, explosive objects fly across the screen and must be avoided, since touching one costs the player a life; this hazard is absent from Timed mode.
- 7
Challenge mode sets a series of tasks with shifting conditions, such as killing a set number of rats before time runs out or slicing accurately amid heavier clutter, and some challenges swap the core mechanic entirely: tracking rats with a spotlight beam, shooting them with a crossbow instead of slicing, or whacking them mole-style as they pop up.
- 8
Completing a challenge earns stars that unlock harder difficulty tiers, and points earned across modes buy upgrades — elemental blade effects like electricity and fire, new location "walls," new enemy types including hagfish — plus cosmetic unlocks such as backgrounds, slicing animations, and music tracks that give players a reason to replay for a better score.
