Just finished Dishonored, Seems like playing a no kill game would be hard Options

[Wounded Ronin]

I just finished Dishonored. I thought it was one of the more challenging games I've played on the Unreal Engine, since it sort of requires you to fence by parrying, you can take damage while in the middle of your attack animations, and enemies have unblockable moves like the front kick that knocks you back. That being said, that actually made it more challenging and awesome to rush headlong into enemies and try to take them down with the sword like some kind of kabuki hero.

I understand that the game is supposed to play out differently if you manage to sulk through the missions without killing anyone, or while killing few NPCs. I don't know, I think that would be next to impossible to do without effectively cheating by save scrumming. The fact is, if you alert a single enemy, all the enemies on the map that are anywhere nearby dogpile you and you're forced to kill them. The game really limits your non-lethal options...you can RNC unaware enemies, but that becomes impossible once they are attacking you, and you can only carry 10 non-lethal rounds for your crossbow. So it's sort of like if you get attacked by more than 10 enemies you pretty much are forced to slaughter them.

I actually tried to have a low-lethality game. Before each mission I stocked up on non-lethal ammo and spent lots of time trying to sneak around to use the RNC. But basically, a single slight screw up and the result is a huge melee like at the end of Homer's Odyssey.

The other thing is that after you spend lots of time looking through walls with Dark Vision and sneaking around trying to get the perfect RNC, and then things go wrong and you die, it's like AARRRRRHHHHH do I want to spend another 10 minutes painstakingly trying to repeat all my steps so they work out this time, or do I just want to forget about stealth, attack everyone directly, and just get on with the story already?

Has anyone played this game and had any success attempting a no-kill or "low chaos" game? Any thoughts on whether the game works well when played that way, versus just trying to proceed through and meet all the objectives?