Dishonored II was a great followup to a great game, but it also didn’t exactly shake the rafters of gaming. Still, Arkane got a chance to follow it up, and possibly wrap up the Franchise, with Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider ($40, PS4 and Xbox One), which remixes the sequel’s levels in new and exciting ways.

The plot follows Meagan Foster, better known as the killer Billie Lurk (voiced by Rosario Dawson), as she discovers her mentor Daud (Michael Madsen) is alive and being exploited by a local crime ring. Once she frees Daud, he has one last job for her: To murder the Outsider (Robin Lord Taylor), the ancient amoral god who grants powers seemingly at a whim. This being a game franchise about steampunk ninja wizards, it’s possible. But it’s not going to be easy, and the Outsider is playing a game of his own.

Everything about Death Of The Outsider is stripped down; there are only three voice actors, many of the levels are pulled from Dishonored II, you only get three magical powers, and the game is shorter, although if you enjoy probing elaborately designed levels and pulling off stealth runs, arguably something this franchise was built for, this’ll eat all your free time for a week. We wound up beating it in about eight hours, on one playthrough. It’s even pared down the morality system; Billie is skeptical killing the Outsider will achieve anything, but she’s also not terribly concerned about the body count she racks up getting there and the game does little more than slap your wrist. Arkane has also balanced your power set. Your teleporting power has a much shorter range, but you can set a marker and leap to it at any time; your “Dark Vision” lets you freeze time and explore the level, marking enemies and valuables. You also pick up new goodies throughout the levels, like the enemy restricting Hook Mine.

That’s not the only way Arkane has ramped up the challenge. Even on standard difficulty, there’s more enemies, they have more overlapping patterns, and the exquisite level design is just complicated enough to make either going in swords swinging or trying to sneak around tougher on players. And there are new areas, most notably the game’s brilliant centerpiece bank heist, that will make fans of the Thief franchise fondly nostalgic.

Interestingly, this game arrives right as Kotaku writer Jason Schreier starts promoting his book about how video games are made, one of the key lessons of which is that the current system is completely unsustainable. We live in a gaming era where a video game has to break records just to make its money back. The floor is now, for many major titles, four or five million copies, across all platforms, in part because a game needs to be many games at once; a single-player experience that’s rich and deep, a multiplayer experience that will keep you coming back, and whatever else the dev team can whip up to “add value.”

You see the cracks everywhere. Sony and Microsoft teaming up to consume GameStop, the seemingly unstoppable rise of microtransactions, the price cuts that arrive just a month or two after a game comes out to undercut GameStop with the hope DLC sales and those loot boxes will make up the margins.

Death Of The Outsider makes the case that it doesn’t have to be this way. The game’s main selling point is its narrow focus. It knows exactly what it wants to be. There’s no tacked-on multiplayer mode from a different developer, no loot boxes, it doesn’t even make a big deal of its voice cast. It is a game where all the energy went to the parts you play. It may thriftily make use of past level design, but it approaches those levels in wildly different ways that make them fresh. In the end, the lesson here is that a good video game is made in the playing, not the extras.

Verdict: Clear Your Calendar

This review was conducted on the PS4, with review code provided by the publisher.