Are there long-term consequences for homicide?

In Gunpoint, it's possible to kill guards by various means - up to and including beating them to death with your bare hands.

It seems like some quest-givers prefer this direct approach to operational security, whereas others don't. This obviously affects their rating of how you handled that particular mission.

However, aside from per-mission ratings, does a bit of the ol' ultra-violence have any long-term effects?

It appears that a murderous rampage doesn't have too much of an impact on a particular run through the game (outside of the individual mission statuses, that you've already mentioned).

However, I've noticed that killing or not can affect whether or not certain achievements can be unlocked on that particular run. So far, I've suspect that:

• You need to have killed a few of people (I don't know how many, but I got this with 4, so it's pretty low) before the epilogue to get the Acknowledged Ludonarrative Dissonance achievement, since it seems to require you to select a specific option in the epilogue referencing how you've killed more people that you've helped, which I doubt is available if you've not killed unnecessarily.

• I suspect killing anyone while doing missions for the Police Chief will mean you miss the Clean Record achievement.

• There are eight different achievements available for taking down a story-specific character in each of eight different ways. Some of these involve killing them, while some don't, so without making a kill here some of these achievements cannot be obtained.

  • There's also another achievement (Open Ended Grudge) that I suspect is intended for those who get all eight of these different take-down achievements. So without all, those you can't get this. That said, it might be bugged, as I had this achievement before finishing my first run of the game...

I just finished a near-perfect Gentleman run (I killed zero people, and only punched one person (who deserved it)). Further, I also chose story options which lead to a minimum of casualties.

As you can see from the blog post, Conway apparently counts the people who died during the story in his final tally.

The option which leads to the Acknowledged Ludonarrative Dissonance achievement was not presented while writing the blog post.

I've just finished a completely psychopathic run through (almost every mission completed at Brutal or better, though there was one I somehow got non-lethal on), and nothing particularly special was called out in the ending.

The option that unlocks the achievement was available, though I didn't select it. Besides that, it was about the same as any other ending where you have the option to kill both people in the final mission, and choose to kill them.