Dishonored - The Knife of Dunwall. 4.3 out of 5 from 129 votes. Buy now from the Microsoft Store. 9,325 tracked gamers have this dlc pack, 3,659 have completed it (39.24%) There are 10 achievements worth 556 (220) There is 1 review Estimated completion: 8-10 hours. Discovered Safe Combinations for the various safes in Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall.Certain combinations do not seem to change with each playthrough, although as with 'The Artist' in the core game, all variations should be listed when found.

A couple of months back, Arkane Studios’ creative director Harvey Smith suggested that people intending to buy Dishonored 2 should first play through the story DLCs of the original game, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, to get a better feel for what’s going on in the sequel. Not exactly an earth-shattering statement, if you're being cynical, essentially amounting to 'Developer Wants You To Play Their Game.' Thing is, Smith is absolutely right.

You really should play the Dishonored DLCs, not because they kind-of prepare you for the sequel, ‘bridge the narrative’ and other platitudes, but because they're an under-appreciated masterclass in building on and expanding the original. The way they interweave narrative, mechanics and world-building make them an inextricable part of what had come before, deepening our understanding of a fascinating video-game universe while serving as a testing ground for new ideas.

The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches are a two-part story casting the player as Daud, leader of the supernatural group of assassins known as The Whalers - and the man who killed the empress in Dishonored, leading to protagonist Corvo being framed and setting the game's events in motion. This is a story being told in parallel to one that players already know: while wallowing in guilt over his high-profile hit, Daud follows a tip-off from the enigmatic being known as The Outsider to track down a ship called The Delilah, which leads him through the rancid bowels of Dunwall’s underworld and out the other side into the mystical cult of the Brigmore Witches. Chronologically, events progress parallel to Corvo’s quest, building up to that crucial convergence when Corvo tracks down Daud (at which point in the original, you as Corvo must decide whether Daud lives or dies).

The first major departure in The Knife of Dunwall is that, unlike Corvo, Daud has a voice. Not just any voice either, but Michael Madsen’s voice; a distinctive, weathered purr forever associated with both Tarantino cinema at its most ultra-violent (“Hey, what’s going on? Can you hear that?”) as well as its most tender. As retired hitman Budd in Kill Bill Vol. 2, Madsen reflects on his murderous act of treachery, admitting “that woman deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die” - a thought that echoes through Daud’s opening words in the DLC. “I knew I’d pay for this one. Maybe I deserved to.”

Madsen’s world-weary range suits Daud, a man defined by violence whose ‘greatest’ act in killing the empress triggers a hitherto-suppressed introspective streak. In hand-drawn cutscenes Daud talks with the hammy poeticism of a hard-boiled Max Payne imitator, describing “a city that ate up innocence and weakness”, and how things in Dunwall are “always tangled like a bag of snakes.” These cutscenes shift Dishonored's tone from steampunk revenge quest to something more like steampunk noir - with Daud's character at the centre, a man in crisis, desperately looking for his own personal redemption.

In Dishonored Corvo’s muteness helps keep the player's focus on his goal; you have choices to make along the way, but are ultimately in service to the should-be empress and will stop at nothing to seat her on the throne. No questions asked. As you play through the game, you witness the privation caused by the plague and poor rulership of Dunwall, but ultimately you’re an aloof figure whose true home is conspiratorial hideouts and corrupted high society; the 'real' Dunwall feels like a place you pass through on the way to more pressing political matters.

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Where Dishonored showed how the the city is manipulated from above by the puppetmasters and elites, in the DLCs we see the grinding clockwork gears below, the working class industries and low-level criminals. The first mission takes place in a whale slaughterhouse, where the tragic creatures are mutilated and killed for their precious oil - the power source for the entire city. It’s the moodiest setting in the game, the combination of briney seawater and butchered viscera creating a sickening atmosphere. It’s a confrontational place, too, showing the miserable origins of the iridescent blue oil that until now you’ve been blithely using as an explosive. What was previously just a tool is suddenly a morbid, fascinating outcome of how Dunwall works.

The Butchers who work at the slaughterhouse are burly, nasty types who’ll happily test their whale-slicing buzzsaws out on human flesh (they’re super effective), but the journals and letters you may or may not find along the way convey the hopeless world of Dunwall’s working classes. A letter you come across in the flat of a butcher reveals how he had to quit his studies at the Academy and start working at the slaughterhouse to support his wife (whose father died in an industrial work accident), bemoaning how he was now dismembering the creatures he once had an academic fascination with - and how his wife doesn't understand his unhappiness. The kicker being, when you turn the next corner and bump into the likely author, do you leave him to this miserable life or give it a short, sharp ending?

Likewise with your target, Rothwild, who you can learn lost both his parents to industrial accidents and turned to crime to feed his brother and himself - but he's still something of a monster. Even more than the base game the DLC mixes world-building into your big decisions, presenting the side of the city neglected by the pompous upper classes Corvo mingles with and murders - then tying it back into the judgements you make while playing.

The Rothwild Slaughterhouse isn’t the most spatially complex location in the game - large rectangular spaces separated by enormous metal doors - but such compartmentalisation feels appropriate for a character on a nightmarish spiritual journey. Each doorway transports you from one site of brutality and injustice to another - a torture room where workers’ hopes of unionising are swiftly zapped out of them, a waste pipe full of whale guts, and… this thing pictured below.

In a haunting moment, you discover a whale - alive but disembowelled, bleeding out, and suspended in the air by a crane - crying out hopelessly as its one remaining eye darts around in pain and confusion. You have the option to electrocute it, killing the animal almost instantly. This may be an act of mercy, but the sight of the dead whale with its eye popped and jaw hanging open is harrowing, denying us any sense of having done the right thing. It’s an early hint that there will be no confetti or round of applause at the end of Daud’s story. You may go on to save Emily, just like Corvo, but Daud's only comfort is the somewhat nebulous one that your choices “always matter to someone, somewhere.”

The DLCs expanded the concept of the world in Dishonored “the world” as a place with its own cuisines, traditions, economies and places. The canteen in the slaughterhouse serving grub like Eel Stew, Mushroom Bread and ‘The Duchess’ Knuckles’, the endless journal entries about whales, the vicious sea that’s described with near-mythical reverence, distant continents evoking untold adventures, the little tidbit that the Hatters street gang make a killing in their textile factory by manufacturing shrouds for plague victims; all these things stack up to paint a rich picture of a world that Arkane knew we’d want to explore further. The level of detail was its own kind of statement, that Dishonored was here to stay.

The mechanics were equally forward-thinking. It would have been easy for Arkane to endow Daud with the same abilities as Corvo, seeing as many of us were just beginning to master them by the time the short campaign ended. Instead they changed things up and, in most cases, improved them enormously.

Daud’s Blink now stopped time as you picked a place to teleport to, encouraging more audacious parkouring - now you could easily blink while high-jumping or plummeting from a building. Instead of messing around with rats via Corvo’s Possession and Devouring Swarm, Daud summons assassins to his aid and pulls objects and people towards him telekinetically - both abilities encouraging aggressive, smash-and-grab playstyles. Needless to say these skills also fit Daud; a man of dark influence with fiercely loyal companions, whose surroundings whoosh towards him. In the hands it feels a huge contrast to Corvo’s more subtle, scurrying, and perhaps finessed presence.

These small changes force players to re-learn Dishonored's basics, instead of just sending us on ‘another adventure.’ More playful mechanics are introduced, alongside tweaks like the Corrupted Charms (which boost certain abilities at the expense of others), and new tools like stun mines and chokedust - which in the process improved the non-lethal toolkit hugely, one of Dishonored's only failings, and gave it a little Batman swagger. There is more evolution in this DLC than in most annual AAA franchises.

An oft-cited problem with Dishonored was that it was so much more fun to be bad, despite the narrative pulling you the opposite way. With the impressionable young Emily looking up to you with pearly innocent eyes and sniffing out your every sin like a Catholic priest’s pet alsatian, you felt obliged to sleeper-hold your enemies to death instead of dallying with the brutal fatalities and rat swarms - even though that was the really fun stuff. The DLCs are a palate-cleanser, addressing one of the few standout issues in the original game by making Daud morally hazy, and at a crossroads between his violent past and repentant future. There is less stake in whichever path you choose (particularly as your Chaos resets after the first DLC), allowing you to change your approach throughout instead of constantly worrying about triggering a ‘bad ending’ for having fun.

On that note, however, the one area where the DLC does stumble is the ending. Whether Corvo chooses to kill Daud is dictated by your Chaos level in The Brigmore Witches, irrespective of what happened in the main game. It makes Corvo’s decision purely karmic in nature, an omniscient moment, when of course there's no way he could have made a judgement based on Daud's actions.

You could look at it another way. With Corvo’s blade at Daud’s throat, The Outsider muses about what a shame it is that “Corvo doesn’t know the real story” of Daud’s heroics. There’s something circular about that, harking back to Daud’s own resignation at the start of the DLC and the sense his fate is no longer is his own hands. What better way of emphasising the theme of your actions shaping the world than by forcing you to relive decisions you once made - however unenlightened - from Corvo's side?

The Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches show videogames’ potential when it comes to alternative perspectives, presenting us with details that make us reevaluate our understanding of a world as well as bolstering the main game's ideas. I’ll never look at a tank of whale oil in the same way again. That might seem a small thing but, by showing us the horror of life for the city’s poor, Corvo’s quest to restore order feels even more significant in hindsight.

Three years on, as the long-awaited sequel arrives, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches are a standard-bearer, rubbing shoulders with The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine as a model of DLC done with confidence, imagination and respect - both for the original game, and the players enraptured by it. Arkane used these DLCs as a petri dish for new ideas, seeking to move the series forward instead of settling on the prevalent DLC tendency of milking a proven formula by giving it a lick of paint or a bunch of new missions and an arbitrary new weapon, area, vehicle, whatever. It’s no coincidence that in Dishonored 2 we’ll see an all-speaking, all-narrating Corvo with a Blink that stops time, while Emily will be able to reel in objects and people from afar; Daud’s lonesome journey provided not only a narrative bridge, but a creative one, and his spirit lives on.

I never really got to appreciate the game over screens of Dishonored in my first couple of playthroughs, where ghosting through the towering squalor of Dunwall was as effortless as it was, more frequently, clumsy. There's an uneasy intimacy I have with them now, though. I think over the few hours of The Knife of Dunwall, the first truly substantial DLC for Arkane's 2012 wonder, I spent more time staring at their austere, swirling art cursing my luck or stupidity than I did exploring the strange new locations the standalone campaign presents.

This expansion is, to put it less than politely, bastard hard. Where there'd be one guard patrolling a perimeter in Corvo's campaign, here there'll be four - and where there'd be one solitary walker, here there are mobs of armoured butchers wielding hulking buzzsaws that spit out painful sparks. Progress is a case of trial and many errors that can push the playtime well beyond five hours, but, as ever, once you stumble across your own solution, it's delicious. The Knife of Dunwall is effectively just more Dishonored, and that of course is a very good thing.

The Knife of Dunwall runs parallel to Dishonored's main tale, placing you in the soft leather boots of Daud, the master assassin who plotted Corvo's downfall and who killed Empress Kaldwin. Daud's story starts in that ornate gazebo where Corvo's fate was set in motion, before taking its own path across three missions that are set to be concluded with a second instalment later this year.

There are similarities between the two protagonists, of course, but The Knife of Dunwall does well to define itself with a litany of subtle differences. Daud's a slightly blunter tool than Corvo, and his skillset pushes you towards high chaos and a pile of corpses. A couple of his new powers are awkward analogues at first - the ability to summon assassins by your side initially feels like a less satisfying alternative to the devouring swarm, while the heart is replaced by a new vision mode that's nowhere near as smart - but they eventually settle into their own vicious groove.

His blink ability has been retooled slightly, allowing you to teleport mid-air, but it's Daud's grisly gadgets that steal the show. Arc Mines act like little pocket walls of light, disintegrating anyone unfortunate enough to step in their path, while Chokedust grenades churn up clouds of dust that provide perfect cover for you and any allies you may have summoned to clean up quickly.

If it's never quite as entertaining as Corvo's campaign - the omission of powers such as possession that favour a more stealthy approach certainly smarts - it's at least entertaining enough to experiment with the new toys, and to see Dunwall through Daud's eyes. But the new perspective is slightly underplayed. Michael Madsen's performance as Daud at first promises to explore the conflict within an assassin who eventually expresses regret over the consequences of his actions, but it's only ever fleetingly returned to. It is, perhaps, something that will play a larger part in the second half of Daud's story, but right now it's a far from satisfying part of The Knife of Dunwall's make-up.

Price and availability

• Xbox Live Marketplace: 800 Microsoft Points
• PlayStation Store: £7.99
• Steam: £7.99

Not that it matters too much, because it's Dunwall once again that's the star, and any fresh opportunity to explore its sprawling majesty is a welcome one. Of The Knife of Dunwall's three missions, the last is a retread of a location found in the original game, the second a slightly over-familiar remix, but it's the first that warrants the price of admission.

The Rothwild Slaughterhouse is a fine creation, and one that's as worthy as The Golden Cat or any of Dishonored's other highlights. Cast in orange early evening light, it's an impossibly tall warehouse that's been caught in the throes of a heavy-handed industrial dispute, allowing you to pick through the debris as some of Dunwall's extremes clash together.

As a play space it's thrillingly wide, a courtyard coursed with clumsy pipework and littered with ribbed corpses funneling into a central building that can be explored through high walkways or through sticky sewers. There's a centrepiece that's worth discovering for yourself, and all around it are a handful of little stories playing out that you're free to lend your hand to or to just casually observe.

It's all that's great about Dishonored, essentially, a subtly tweaked and well fleshed out return to the dirty streets of Dunwall, and its handful of shortcomings and taste for blood over stealth are never really enough to stop it from being essential. Best mmorpg games for pc.

8 /10