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.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.