Arkane Studios is one of the most beloved developers out there these days, but even though the studio has been around for over two decades, it truly got put on the map with the stealth masterpiece Dishonored in 2012. Going down as one of the most influential games ever, Arkane would follow up on Dishonored with a sequel in 2016.
However, you might not know that there’s a third piece to the Dishonored series, with the standalone expansion Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, which is currently free on the Epic Games Store until February 9. It’s an essential piece of the puzzle that has some stellar mission design, and absolutely shouldn’t be missed.
Dishonored mixes aesthetic elements of steampunk and industrialism to create a completely unique look and feel, largely taking place in the massive city of Dunkirk, which is based on late 1800s London. Death of the Outsider is a standalone expansion that picks up after the events of Dishonored 2, bringing a lot of lingering plot threads to a close.
Death of the Outsider casts players as Billie Lurke, the legendary assassin that previously served as one of the franchise’s major villains. The major appeal of this expansion is the answers it provides for a lot of the lore elements, as players take on the most unimaginable assassination mission ever, killing the supernatural god-like entity known as the Outsider.
While it clocks in a bit shorter than the two mainline games, Death of the Outsider still sports all the emergent gameplay elements that fans have come to love. As usual, you have access to plenty of weapons like knives and guns, but Death of the Outsider brings back the supernatural powers that give Dishonored an extra twist.
Billi’es powers have some similarities to Corvo and Emily, but with a few interesting differences. Displace is a teleportation power that lets you reach far-off areas by setting a marker, and then swapping positions with it, which can also be handy for getting out of tight spots and confusing enemies. There’s even a tremendously useful scouting power called Foresight, which lets Billie leave her body and travel the map as a spirit for a short time.
Billie also has access to some unique pieces of equipment, like a Voltaic Gun that fires electrified projectiles or my persona favorite, a talisman named Rat Whispers that lets you hear the mutterings of the rats that roam the streets, providing helpful info for missions alongside some fascinating world-building.
Death of the Outsider also sports a lot of the “immersive sim” elements that made the original game so famous, putting a big emphasis on player agency and choice during each mission. For example, the mission “The Bank Job,” gives players three different choices for infiltrating the building; the sewers, trash disposal, or rooftop. Each of these options requires a completely different approach, but once you’ve made your way inside the bank you have yet another choice, how to get into the vault. Again, you can take a sneaky approach by finding the vault key or using the vault controls, or you can go load by simply destroying the vault to get what’s inside.
The missions in Death of the Outsider mold themselves around the choices you make, and it’s clear Arkane used its experience from the previous two games to build the impeccably designed missions of the expansion.
Death of the Outsider is a smaller more focused experience than the massive sandboxes of the previous games, but that’s simultaneously what makes it so enticing. There are fewer powers but the ones you do have feel more meaningful and impactful to the overall experience. At the same time, if you enjoy the story of Dishonored you absolutely cannot miss this expansion, as it holds vital answers that tie everything from the three games together. Because of that, it’s hard to jump into Death of the Outsider without knowledge of the previous games, but those are also on sale on Epic Games Store if you need to do a little catching up.
