Dishonored 2 hands-on: Infiltrating the Clockwork Mansion

The Clockwork Mansion is one of the amazing environments of Dishonored 2. It’s a mansion with all sorts of mechanical gadgetry that enables the house to reassemble itself, and it’s guarded by robotic Clockwork Soldiers. Getting through it is like navigating a maze.

Game publisher Bethesda Softworks let me play the level this week for Dishonored 2, the sequel to the award-winning Dishonored by Bethesda’s Arkane Studios. My task was to rescue a friend, Anton Sokolov, and take out the mansion’s owner Kirin Jindosh.

Dishonored 2 debuts on November 11 on the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, and the PC. In this game, you can play either as father-bodyguard Corvo Attano or the empress Emily Kaldwin. Emily has lost her throne to Delilah, a mad witch with magical powers. Emily has left Dunwall and moved to the coastal city of Karnaca, where she hopes to regain her power.

I recorded about an hour of gameplay in two different videos. You’ll notice how poorly I played in rescuing Sokolov and making my way through the rest of the level. But Bethesda released a gameplay video (at the bottom) that shows a Low Chaos path for handling the mission, which is the fourth chapter and is about half way through the game.

I played as Emily and used her supernatural powers to turn myself into a rat and sneak around. I teleported from spot to spot, and took on the human and mechanical guards with varying degrees of success. You wouldn’t know it from my play session, but you can make it through the grand inventor’s mansion using stealth and non-lethal takedowns.

Here’s the first part of my session playing the Clockwork Mansion level.

And here’s another part of my gameplay in the mansion.

But here’s the way you should really play this level, according to Bethesda. This is an official trailer being released today.