Dishonored gives its rat plague a place in your combat strategy

A corpse becomes part of the danger

In Dishonored, a guard’s body is not simply a finished encounter. Leave it where rats can reach it and the swarm can consume it almost immediately. That turns a familiar stealth-game problem—what to do with a fallen enemy—into a live hazard: the body may vanish, but the rats are still there.

The same threat can become a weapon. Corvo’s Devouring Swarm summons rats to attack nearby foes and feed on bodies. Its appeal is brutally direct: a crowd of small creatures can overwhelm an armored human without a conventional duel. The three-second consumption makes that power feel less like a slow attack and more like a sudden change in the scene.

A shortcut with a cost

The rats fit the game’s plague-stricken setting, but they also sharpen its stealth decisions. A swarm can clear an obstacle or remove a body from view; unleashing it can also make an already dangerous environment harder to control. The player is not choosing only whether to kill a guard, but whether to let an uncontrolled force into the space.

That tension is the point of the grotesque speed. The rats make violence seem efficient while showing how quickly it can spill beyond the target.