You know, I’d heard at one point in my life that Felicia Day was somehow associated with the Dragon Age franchise. I’d never looked up how or why, since it made sense that she would be based on what I knew of her career up to that point, but I found the answers to those questions recently when I decided to launch myself into the first of two narrative DLCs for Dragon Age 2. All of the story-based DLCs for DA2 are in-game narrative asides rather than entirely separate campaigns like most of the DLC had been in Dragon Age: Origins, so I’d planned on waiting until I felt confident in my builds during the latter part of Act Two or early Act Three before I tried any of them out. So, with having reached Act 3 a couple weekends ago, I decided to spend a Sunday evening playing through one of the DLCs and was surprised to see Felicia Day’s Dragon-Age-ified face staring back at me from my monitor. It was unmistakably her from the very beginning and entirely surprising that they essentially stuck her face onto a character in the game. I know that’s a bit more common in modern video games, what with motion-capture technology and all, but I was surprised to see it from a game from the very early teens. I haven’t really looked up most of the other characters and their voice actors to see if any of them look similar, but I’d be kind of surprised if they did. It really wasn’t that common of a thing back in the day and, frankly, I found it rather distracting the entire time I spent playing the DLC since I’ve watched Felicia Day in a lot of other things and seeing her in rough animation was unsettling.

Outside of this weird reminder of the real world in my video game, I had a pretty good time with the DLC. There were a lot of NPCs that were easy and enjoyable to hate. Plenty of obnoxious nobles full of strange eccentricities and even a few familiar faces that I didn’t really hate and even one that I did. The game did a great job of setting up a collection of people whose day you won’t mind ruining as this quest, originally pitched as the theft of a precious jewel, gets mired down in philosophy (positive) and then murder as people eventually get what is coming to them. The DLC starts with an ambush that is largely negated by the introduction of Felicia Day’s character, an Elf assassin of some kind who goes by the name “Tallis,” and then the whole crew runs off to the mountains to use a Wyvern Hunt as a cover for stealing “The Heart of the Many” which Tallis described as an important jewel, but this heist is actually cover for Tallis meeting person selling Qunari secrets to their enemies (the Orlesians hosting the party). The Wyvern hunt goes quickly (even if the setup for it can be a bit tedious and the battles weirdly difficult), there’s a garden party as you attempt to sneak into the castle, a fun stealth-based exploration mode (unless you chose violence), a trap, an escape from prison, a bunch of looting, and then a whole lot of killing. The story is pretty interesting (if somewhat basic), especially following on the tail of the Qunari stuff from Act 2, and worth the few hours it takes to play through it.

The whole thing really takes advantage of the time jumps that show up in Dragon Age 2, separating out the game into three acts. There’s three whole years between each act and, since I went after being named Champion of Kirkwall, the game heavily referenced that as Hawke’s reason for being invited on this trip. Plus, as I said, doing it after completing the Qunari-heavy Act 2 meant that I had a lot of context for what went on in this DLC that I might have been missing otherwise. The dialogue options in the DLC, Mark of the Assassin, make it pretty easy to get all of the information you need to play through it, but having the greater context helps a lot, especially because it really adds a level of complexity to the picture of the Qunari culture and religion that is somewhat absent in the other parts of the game. You still don’t ever get to explore why some people might abandon the Qun and its people, which feels like a particular loss in this DLC since a person’s decision to do exactly that is the whole reason the DLC is happening at all, but you get a more nuanced take on why someone might choose to join it beyond the oft-repeated “certainty of purpose” given by everyone in the base DA2 game.

Honestly, if it weren’t for the uncanny valley feeling of seeing Felicia Day’s unmistakable face in DA2 era chunky animation, I probably would have enjoyed this with few reservations. Or even enjoyed it more, since I wouldn’t have had this one thing constantly breaking my suspension of disbelief. If a game (or any piece of media, really) can get you to buy in and stay bought in, you’re generally willing to ignore a lot of stuff you otherwise wouldn’t or maybe even enjoy it, if you’re bought in enough, and this game just couldn’t keep me in because of this decision to attempt to realistically depict Felicia Day’s face. I don’t know if this decision was a budget thing or a “chance to show off” kind of thing, but it threw me off. Just like the whole “throw-your-elbows-out-to-duck-walk-amble-forwards” way that everyone walked. It was so startling and uncanny. I feel like I remember that style of walking from Dragon Age: Inquisition–which saw a lot more actively animated scenes in comparison to DA:O and DA2–but I know for certain that there wasn’t any of that Ministry of Silly Walks stuff in Dragon Age: Origins. I think it might not have even been present in the base game for DA2. Or, if it is, they managed to hide it enough that I didn’t notice it prior to this DLC. It just felt so off-beat.

I really hope the next DLC is a bit more narratively engaging. I enjoyed this one, but it was maybe an hour or two too long for what it was. Sure, I probably could have sped through it a bit more quickly if I didn’t decide to do all the side quests and everything, but that’s not how anyone plays RPGs. You gotta do a bunch, if not all, of the side quests. It was interesting enough, at least, to make me want to spend the time playing it on a day that I was nigh-delirious from comingled exhaustion and stress (my worst night’s sleep after changing my mattress was the night prior to the day I played this DLC), but I really don’t feel like it left much of an impression on me. I know that my lack of emotional connection to the game was the sleep deprivation and stress, but I can remember every part of the game clearly and just don’t really have any kind of favorable impression of it other than that it happened and that it wasn’t bad. That said, considering how awful Golems of Amgarrak was, I think this DLC still lands in the “it’s worth a play” category.