Dishonored - The Brigmore Witches

I went into The Brigmore Witches expecting a victory lap, a short DLC coasting on goodwill from the base game. What I got was the sharpest, most focused slice of Dishonored content across the entire original run, and a real case for Daud being the more compelling protagonist. Where Corvo was a silent cipher, Daud carries genuine weight: a hired killer chasing down the witch who got his lieutenant Billie Lurk to turn on him, with a final reckoning against Corvo himself waiting at the end regardless of how you play. The structure across three missions is tighter than either the base game or its predecessor DLC, The Knife of Dunwall. You start by breaking a ship captain named Lizzy Stride out of Coldridge Prison, and the fact that this is a recycled location from Dishonored proper barely registers, because Arkane fills it with new angles and even lets you buy a guard disguise favor to walk straight through the front gates. The middle act drops you into Draper's Ward, a textile district mid-gang-war between the top-hat-wearing Hatters and the Dead Eels smugglers, and it is the most sprawling, multi-layered level in the whole Daud arc. You pick a side, strike deals, and rooftop-prowl while rival gangs tear the streets apart below you. The finale, Brigmore Manor itself, swaps urban grime for supernatural horror: gravehound skulls that reanimate if you leave them alone, Delilah statues that track your movement while crouching, witches who blink and summon blood-briar roots to pin you down. Combat-or-stealth players both get a workout, and the challenge is noticeably stiffer than anything in Knife of Dunwall. Mechanically, your Knife of Dunwall save carries over, meaning weapons, upgrades, chaos level, and all your collected bone charms travel with you. The new wrinkle is corrupted bone charms, which offer a stat boost with a built-in penalty, faster movement speed but increased damage taken, for example. Most experienced players will skip them since Daud's toolkit is already deep: Blink, Bend Time, the wristbow, and the pull-toward-you transversal power that feels great for chaining takedowns. They are a fun lore beat more than a must-use system. The chaos-tracking carries real consequence at the end, affecting how your confrontation with Corvo resolves, though it reads off Daud's choices across both DLCs rather than the main campaign, which is a minor disappointment for anyone hoping their Corvo playthrough would feed into it. The honest criticism is that the story does not quite stick its own landing in isolation. Played cold, without Knife of Dunwall, Daud's arc feels thin and the villain, Delilah, is more interesting in implication than in execution here. The roughly four-to-six hour runtime (higher on ghost or low-chaos runs) is also exactly long enough to want more and slightly too short to feel complete. But as the closing chapter of a two-part DLC campaign, it corrects almost every complaint leveled at the first half: the missions are distinct, the new district feels genuinely fresh, and the payoff is earned. If you have already played Dishonored and liked it, this is the DLC to finish on. Play both Daud chapters in order with a carry-over save and you get one of the better villain-redemption arcs Arkane has produced, told entirely through level design and player choice rather than cutscenes.

Alex · Scout Team

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