Dishonored 2: The Clockwork Mansion as Thesis

Arkane Lyon released Dishonored 2 on 11 November 2016 with a PC port that ran badly for weeks, a marketing campaign nobody remembers, and the best individual level anyone has built this century sitting in the fourth mission slot.

Kirin Jindosh is a genius engineer in Karnaca and he lives in a house that moves. Pull a lever and the walls of the room you’re standing in fold away, furniture retracting into the floor, a new room assembling around you out of the parts of the old one. It’s a magic trick performed at architectural scale, it’s flawless, and Jindosh narrates it at you the whole time with the smugness of a man showing off a party piece.

The Clockwork Mansion is the mission everyone cites. The reason it’s the best level in the game is the thing almost nobody mentions, and it happens the moment you stop pulling the levers.

The trick is that you can refuse the trick

Behind the transforming rooms is the machinery that transforms them: a lattice of tracks, gears, gantries and half-lit crawlspaces where the furniture goes when it isn’t being furniture. And it’s a real space. Arkane built the guts of the illusion as a navigable level, with its own routes, its own guards, its own paths to every objective in the mansion.

So you have two games in one building. Pull the levers and you experience Jindosh’s designed sequence, on Jindosh’s schedule, seeing what Jindosh wants you to see. Or find a way into the walls and move through the mansion’s underside, arriving at rooms from directions the reconfiguration never intended, watching from inside the mechanism as Jindosh’s stagecraft rearranges an empty auditorium for an audience that left.

That’s the entire immersive sim thesis in one building. The designer builds a performance. The design’s real quality is measured by how gracefully it handles you walking out of it. Jindosh is Arkane satirising the level designer — a man so pleased with his machine that he never considered someone might prefer the crawlspace — and the level is the studio proving it can take the joke.

Compare it to what a linear game does. A scripted set piece breaks when you refuse it, because the script has a next line. The Clockwork Mansion has no next line. It has a floor plan, and the floor plan is complete whether you’re in the parlour or in the ceiling.

A Crack in the Slab, the second proof

Mission seven does the same thing along a different axis, and it’s the more technically outrageous of the two.

Aramis Stilton’s manor is derelict in 1852. You get a timepiece that shows the same building in 1849 through a window in your hand, and switching between them is instant and seamless — both versions of the manor are loaded, populated and running simultaneously, and you walk between them mid-stride. A collapsed floor in 1852 is intact in 1849. A guard in 1849 is a corpse in 1852. A locked door in one era is an unlocked door in the other, which makes the level a puzzle where the key is a decade.

The Void engine was doing something genuinely difficult here, and Arkane spent it on a mission most players see once. What matters is the design logic: the level again gives you a machine and again refuses to police how you use it. There’s no correct route. There’s a building with two states and a switch.

Both missions descend from the same lineage. Thief established that a level should be a place with rules rather than a corridor with events, and Deus Ex proved that letting players break it is a feature you can build a genre on. Dishonored 2 is the point where the lineage got the budget to build the argument out of moving parts.

The mansion has one more trick worth naming: the Jindosh Lock. It’s a logic puzzle — five women, five drinks, five heirlooms, one grid — guarding the door to Jindosh’s laboratory, and the solution is randomised per playthrough, so nobody can look it up. It is a genuine pencil-and-paper riddle sitting in the middle of a stealth game, and Arkane gives you an alternative: find the physical route around it instead. Solve the puzzle or break the wall. Either answer is the game’s answer, which is the same offer the mansion has been making since the first lever.

The Mostly Flesh and Steel option makes the offer once more at the largest scale. Decline the Outsider’s mark at the start and you play the whole campaign with no powers at all — no Blink, no Far Reach, no Domino. Every level in the game, including the mansion, remains completable. Arkane built a game around supernatural mobility and then verified that the buildings work without it, which is a level of structural honesty most studios would not survive.

Two protagonists, two mobility grammars

The other structural decision is Emily and Corvo. Pick one at the start and play the whole campaign as them.

Corvo has the first game’s kit: Blink, a short-range teleport that’s still the sharpest traversal verb in the genre; Bend Time; Possession; Devouring Swarm. Emily has a new one, and it’s a different design temperament. Far Reach is a grappling pull that commits you to an arc rather than a blink’s instant hop. Domino links up to four targets so that whatever happens to one happens to all. Shadow Walk turns you into a low, fast, horrible thing. Doppelgänger drops a decoy that can be made to fight for you.

Domino is the standout because it’s a force multiplier for the game’s non-lethal design. Link four guards, drop one down a shaft, and four bodies fall. It’s the sort of ability that a cautious studio would have gated behind late-game unlocks and a cooldown measured in minutes. Arkane hands it over early and lets you find out what it does to a courtyard.

The contradiction the series never solved

Here’s the honest complaint, and it’s a big one. The chaos system asks you to feel bad about the toys.

Dishonored 2 builds an armoury of beautiful violence — the crossbow, the sword, Bend Time, Domino, a dozen ways to make a guard’s afternoon end — and then attaches a world-state counter that darkens the city, adds bloodflies, hardens the ending, and grades you on restraint. Harvey Smith has said the team wanted high chaos to be a legitimate playstyle, and the 2016 game is less punitive about it than the 2012 one. The endings still rank you.

The result is a game whose systems argue with each other. The mechanics say: here is a physics-literate sandbox, do what you like. The chaos meter says: the game will think less of you. Players respond exactly as you’d predict — they ghost, they quicksave every ten seconds, they reload when a body is spotted, and they play a lavishly expressive game as a stealth-perfectionism exercise with the F5 key worn smooth. That’s a real design failure, and Prey — Arkane Austin’s game from the following year — avoided it by having no morality meter at all.

Where to play it

PC, patched, is fine now; the launch performance problems were fixed and it’s cheap. The Death of the Outsider standalone from 2017 is worth the evening.

Play as Emily first. The Clockwork Mansion is mission four, so you’ll reach it in about six hours. When you get there, pull the levers once to see the trick, and then spend the rest of the mission looking for the seam.

Spoilers below

Delilah Copperspoon is Jessamine’s half-sister, which is the sort of revelation a lesser game would have built a mission around and Dishonored 2 more or less files.

The genuinely clever move is Stilton. In 1849 you can find Aramis Stilton in his manor at the moment before Delilah’s séance — the ritual that binds her to the Void and makes her effectively unkillable, and which drives Stilton irretrievably mad in the process. Interrupt it. Knock him out and drag him somewhere the ritual can’t touch him, and step back into 1852.

The manor is intact. Stilton is alive, sane, tending his garden in a house that was a ruin ninety seconds ago, and the whole Dust District mission you may have already played has quietly changed shape. And Delilah’s binding never happened, which means the final confrontation has a mortal woman in it.

The reason this lands is that the game never announces it. There’s no cutscene congratulating you. You walk out of a manor into a different city and work out what you’ve done from the evidence, which is the same skill the Clockwork Mansion trained: look at the machine, find the seam, apply pressure, observe the building rearrange.

Jindosh, meanwhile, has the best non-lethal elimination in the series. Strap him into his own Arc Pylon, throw the switch, and the man who built a house that thinks is left alive with nothing in his head. Arkane spent a whole mission letting a designer show off his machine, and then let you use the machine to erase the designer. The Clockwork Mansion argues its case in brass. The ending of it just puts the point in writing.