*Spoiler free. Combined review discussing Dishonored, Dunwall City Trials, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches.*
I've never been a fan of the silent protagonist. Dishonored and its two DLCs, "The Knife of Dunwall" and "The Brigmore Witches" present an interesting opportunity to play as both a silent and a voiced protagonist within essentially the same game. The main game has you playing as Corvo Attano who has a backstory but is otherwise a blank slate for you to control. Both DLCs put you behind the eyes of Daud, an assassin that you first run in to as Corvo. It would have been jarring to suddenly strip Daud of the voice he had in the original game, so he retains it into the DLCs and, in my opinion, they are better for it.
As Corvo, you sit and listen as characters monologue at you or talk to each other. As Daud, you have conversations, relationships and motives of your own. Giving your protagonist a voice makes him or her interesting, allows for natural conversations and doesn't force the game's writers to avoid lines that would normally elicit a response. And it doesn't come at the cost of robbing players of making choices at key moments, as the DLCs demonstrate.
There are positives to get to, but let me get through one more negative first. Dishonored's primary story and characters are mostly predictable, standard fare. NPCs are limited to the aforementioned monologues that are generally kept short in favor of gameplay. Both DLCs are significantly better in this regard but don't expect RPG levels of depth. The voice acting, however, is all around excellent.
The main attraction of Dishonored is its gameplay. It's a fusion of stealth, parkour, magic, and both melee and ranged combat. All slickly delivered from a first-person perspective. Besides the blink spell (short range teleport), you are given the choice of what spells and upgrades you want to unlock first to best match your play style. There are two general play styles that result in different endings to the game: the nonlethal (often stealthy) "low chaos" path and the "high chaos" path that revels in death and battle. This is true in the DLCs as well. Whichever style you choose, the level design will allow you numerous ways to get around and sometimes multiple ways to accomplish an objective. Game length can vary wildly with high chaos being the quicker route.
While Dishonored's story may be lackluster, the atmosphere of the world it takes place in is wonderful. The art and sound design both excel at bringing this place to life. The soundtrack takes a more subtle, atmospheric approach that gets the job done but is otherwise unremarkable. You'll find notes and books scattered throughout the game that fill in the details of what goes on in this world. I hesitate to list this as a complaint, but there is a spell that significantly alters how the world looks for the worse but is so useful that I rarely turned it off. It allows you to see enemies through walls while tinting everything orange (similar to the Batman Arkham games' detective mode).
Dunwall City Trials is exactly what it sounds like it is: purely gameplay. No story, no impactful player choices, just arcade style pursuit of high scores. I would suggest replaying the rest of the game at a different chaos level than your first playthrough and then if you're still hungry for more, play these.
Dishonored: 7/10 --- 16 hours*
Dunwall City Trials: 5/10 --- 3 hours*
The Knife of Dunwall: 8/10 --- 6 hours, no alerts or kills*
The Brigmore Witches: 8/10 --- 7 hours, no alerts or kills*
(* estimated playtime for my single low chaos playthrough)