Low-fat Quick Manual Saving
This ingredient is the “use pot holders” of the stealth genre in that it should not need a reminder. The best stealth games are all about experimentation, and sometimes those experiments blow up in our faces (especially when the games skip over some of the ingredients above). When that happens, you need to have a safety net of saves to fall back on.
We’re going to go ahead and crown Dishonored 2 as the best example of this trend, as it not only lets you save whenever but makes quick-saving “just to be safe” as easy as pulling a trigger on the pause menu. No fussing around in save menus, no deciding which save to overwrite — just quick convenience. The load times could be a lot better, but that’s true of most big-budget games. If you want to do this ingredient justice, literally copy Dishonored 2.
The loser here goes to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for a slow and annoying saving process, as well as games like MGSV, Watch Dogs 2, Shadow of Mordor, and Far Cry 4, all of which make you restart at a checkpoint or just roll with the punches. Uncool.
A healthy scoop of Discovery
This truly is the cherry on top of your perfect stealth game, but also the sturdy base that makes it all worth it. The best of the best give players a wealth of options and reward them for exploring every nook and cranny.
This is the Dishonored series, which probably still has houses and sewers in its levels that you didn’t know existed, Hitman, which constructs gigantic mansions and city blocks that are near-completely explorable, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which has a fascinating world of environmental storytelling that you might never fully see unless you take a look.
These are games that take their well-designed levels and make them more than an advantageous route to the end. They use those spaces to house a random vampire disguise that has no real purpose beyond feeling awesome to find. They tell stories and reward you for caring enough to find them. And that’s the key. Believing that taking a second look around might mean the discovery of something cool is an incredibly powerful thing for a game to pull off.
