In the decade since Arkane Studios released the first Dishonored, it has produced some popular and award-winning titles. Most recently, Arkane's temporal FPS Deathloop was praised for its performances, design, and interesting mechanics, and it received multiple Golden Joystick Awards and The Game Awards nominations and wins last year. Despite the studio's recent successes, it is an element of one of its older games that still stands up as some of Arkane's best work, both in terms of visual and mechanical design.
Released in 2016, Dishonored 2 was a follow-up to the successful Dishonored, which critics thought was a refreshingly thoughtful and well-designed change of pace to some of its more militaristic and bombastic contemporaries. Dishonored 2 continued the stealth focus of the previous game, with a first-person perspective and action-adventure aspects. Players could choose to continue to play as Corvo – the protagonist of the first game – or as Empress Emily Kaldwin. While the industrial whaling city of Dunwall was a feature of the game, players were able to explore a new region with the coastal city of Karnaca as the focus. There were the same variety of missions, emphasis on player choice, and varied approaches to stealth and combat, but it was one particular mission that stood out in the minds of many players – The Clockwork Mansion.
Welcome to The Clockwork Mansion
As the fourth mission in Dishonored 2, the Clockwork Mansion was both an elimination task and a rescue exercise. Players, either as Emily or Korvo, needed to enter the Grand Inventor's mechanical house and take out evil genius Kirin Jindosh and rescue the former Royal Physician Anton Sokolov. In a race to prevent the misguided inventor from building a mass-produced mechanical army, players must navigate the ever-changing and intricately designed building to assassinate him and free his prisoner.
Of course, in both Dishonored games, one of the best features is the freedom that players have both in their moral choices and the ways in which they can approach missions. With a variety of powers and weapons at their disposal, they can either go guns blazing or more stealthy and undetected. In the Clockwork Mansion, gamers can kill Jindosh outright, or they can choose to use one of his own inventions against him to extinguish his personality and remove his memories.
As well as the different approaches to navigating the level, players will also face the formidable Clockwork Soldiers. These beautifully-designed enemies are difficult to sneak up on, and will require all of a player's ingenuity and Korvo/Emily's arsenal of tricks to deal with. However, the unique enemy types aren't the most special thing about the memorable level. One of the Clockwork Mansion's most incredible features is how the layout continually changes, with collapsible environments, mutating rooms, and challenging environmental puzzles for players to contend with. The amount of attention to detail is truly astonishing, and make the Clockwork Mansion one of the most impressive and original levels that Arkane has produced to date.
What Made The Clockwork Mansion Such A Good Level
This movable aspect to the scenery and architecture of the Clockwork Mansion in Dishonored 2 is what makes it really extraordinary. With levers that players can interact with to completely change the layout and structure of a room, these visually cool transformations also factor into the gameplay, presenting interesting puzzles and challenges that feel super unique and unexpected. Dishonored has always been a series with hidden details and designs that have real depth, but nothing embodies this like the Clockwork Mansion. The environmental storytelling and glimpses into Jindosh's complex psyche add more nuance to the already meticulous design.
The Dishonored games have many memorable settings, from palatial masked balls, dingy docks, and rat-infested streets. The varied environments are always interesting reflections of the mission at hand, showcasing the best of what the games have to offer. Jindosh's constant presence throughout the Clockwork Mansion as the evil genius tracks the player through the level and comments on their progress and actions adds to the suffocating feeling that they are in a maze of the inventor's creation. Its creepy and yet sophisticated design is at once impressive and chilling, and provides an interesting dimension to the proceedings.
Despite the Clockwork Mansion being a fairly small level in terms of its size when compared to Dishonored 2's other missions, this never feels like a restriction. The inventive approach to the design echoes the character of its creator perfectly, but also reflects the Dishonored games' commitment to pushing players to think of new and creative ways to solve puzzles and approach (or avoid) combat. It's hard for players to not appreciate the sheer work that must have gone into creating the Clockwork Mansion because the inventiveness and attention to detail is so apparent. It's a level that expands boundaries and confounds expectation, and the Clockwork Mansion is still one of Arkane's best because of that.
Dishonored 2 is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
