Dishonored - Dunwall City Trials

My honest first reaction to Dunwall City Trials was relief that it was short, followed quickly by the dawning realization that "short" does not mean "easy". This add-on takes Dishonored's core mechanics - Blink teleportation, drop assassinations, stealth, and wave combat - and places them into ten discrete scored challenges split across four categories: stealth, combat, mobility, and puzzle. No story, no atmospheric streets of Dunwall, no freedom to improvise your way through a mission. Just you, a stopwatch or a score counter, and the game's mechanics pushed to their limit. The highs are real. The stealth trials, particularly Mystery Foe and Burglar, come closest to replicating what made the base game special. In Mystery Foe you gather randomized clues to identify and silently eliminate a target without being spotted; in Burglar you infiltrate a multi-story mansion to steal six clockwork eggs while staying invisible. The Expert mode of Burglar strips you of your supernatural powers entirely, forcing you to crouch behind curtains and peek through keyholes instead of leaning on Dark Vision or time-stopping abilities - and that tension is genuinely exhilarating. Bend Time Massacre, a combat puzzle that lets you freeze time and carve through a crowd as creatively as possible, is another standout. The problems surface fast everywhere else. The mobility challenges lean hard on Blink, and Blink has always had a stubborn tendency to misfire when you are under time pressure. Timed runs like Train Runner feel like busywork. The combat trials - Back Alley Brawl's horde waves and Kill Chain's rapid-kill timer - are fun for a round or two before repetition sets in. The bigger structural issue is that the whole pack runs against the grain of what Dishonored actually celebrates. The main campaign said "here is a problem, go wild." These trials say "here is the exact solution, now execute it with precision." For a game built around player expression, that feels like a fundamental mismatch - and the Mostly Negative Steam rating, sitting at only 36% positive, tells you how many players felt that sting after the fact. Who should consider it? Players who found the main campaign's stealth trivial and want a strict, no-save, score-chasing test of the same skills they have already developed. Achievement hunters should know upfront that the completion requirements have a reputation for being among the most punishing in the series. Players who loved Dishonored primarily for its world, its atmosphere, or its open-ended mission design will find almost none of that here. Critics at launch scored it reasonably (75 on Metacritic), but the passage of time and Steam's player base have been considerably harsher.

Alex · Scout Team

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