You can look at Dishonored as a game about taking many keys and opening many locks, much like Deus Ex or Hitman. However it is also a game which immediately gives you a magic key that opens every one those locks. There should have been no free spells, not blink or god-vision. Blink itself obliterates more than half of the game's level design (Dark Vision will clean up whatever is left). I'm going to take a hard stance and say they didn't properly design around it. Like... if you took Human Revolution and added blink to it, it would feel just about as overpowered as it does in Dishonored. One way to look at it is that the game is very vertical, but enemies and most obstacles are horizontally inclined and work very poorly against vertical combat or stealth. Solutions using Agility (lol), Possession, and so on become marginal alternate paths branching off the shorter straight line.
I also think exploration is too guided (the heart lol. Everything is gold, this feels like Twilight Princess), the game lacks any sort of punishment (alarms are lol), and combat is quite easily solved (though I like it enough. The gun feels surprisingly good to shoot). There are too few powers, a few powers are really lame, mana is too plentiful (and unnecessary in some cases), and, maybe one of the game's biggest failings, it fails to garner any sort of specialization (not in powers, not in upgrades, and ultimately not in tactics). Bone charms don't do a good enough job to elevate that last problem. Saves are done terribly and the game practically begs you to spam quicksave (literally, on a loading screen) This game takes on a stylish painted look, but it spends most of its time wanting to look like Fallout 3. Character models are unappealing to me for the most part, errs too much on the side of cartoony to me (mainly with the hands and limbs).
This is kind of a bigger thing, but: I really wish stealth games didn't just make lethal and non-lethal approaches mostly the same. "Ghosting" it would have been quite interesting if it had virtually no non-lethal options. Blink would certainly make up for it. That being said, as the game is now, it is only duller by taking on challenges like no kills or pure stealth.
Funny enough, I kind of like the story. Less controversially, I like the setting too (if they make another one, a pirate game would make sense). Voice acting is particularly weak though. Music pretty much sucks across the board. There is like one tune that I'm going to bother recall and it plays on cue every time you dock, which deflates it after the first few times.
I don't hate the game, but I'm probably going to be spending more time beating it up since its being received as the bee's knees. If nothing else was interesting to you this year, then I would even recommend it for its good moments and maybe fantasize about its failed potential.
Anyway, with an extremely friendly UI (which I assume people turn off), mostly simplistic sidequests (the non-lethal solutions feel like pushing a button and making something that couldn't fit naturally in the game's environment happen), blink, dark vision, very forgiving alert status, and no instance of fail states upon discovery (even Assassin's Creed had these)... maybe you can see why I would say it is the most accessible stealth game I've played. Mind you, I'm not saying it is bad because it is accessible, but that is where its flaws led it.
It is funny because I was planning to just plop this somewhere in my top 10 for 2013, but it might not even make it in as a runner-up. After being told that this year sucked so many times, I was somewhat starting to believe it, but right now the list I'm gathering is quite cutthroat. I could do a top 18 at this point and I'm similarly expecting Xcom, Far Cry 3, and Hitman Absolution to be a threat (and I would hope so or my list is going to have a poor ratio of western games).
EDIT: The fact this game doesn't have throwing knives is a damn shame. I would use bend time II constantly.
