I wondered whether he would maybe calm down in there and forget about my interruption but for that to happen I should probably have hidden the rest of the first guard's body and not just, for example, moved his arm to the fruit bowl. The key target had been spooked to the point that he had rushed into the previous room. My choke felt like a bit of an empty gesture at that point given at least one person was getting a stabbing so I just flailed at the two guards one after another until they fell over. I did start the choke but at that point one of the others was like 'THAT'S EMILY KALDWIN'. I think I fumbled the choke because I find the key bindings a bit peculiar for Dishonored 2 and just sort of stood behind him faffing a bit. I decided to choke one out from behind a flower pot while the others were facing away. In this room I had the option of killing or not killing a key target en route to accomplishing my goals, but there were also two other guards wandering about. In retrospect I maybe could have used it to distract the guards in the next room but I think I left it in a fruit bowl. I carried the arm around for a while but I'm not sure what the plan was there. Was this going to just be a domino rally of choking and sleeping? So I sort of stabbed him to make sure that didn't happen and his arm fell off. The idea of waiting in that room to potentially deal with the next room's inhabitants and having the guy wake up and kill me suddenly loomed large. Unfortunately the waiting and the positioning had taken a while and I'd forgotten whether these people could regain consciousness after a period of time. It actually worked out and there he was, lying on the floor asleep. He was a guard doing a circuit of a room as I waited in the hall to pick my moment for a sneaky choke hold. The first one was maybe slightly more my fault than the rest.

I've tried to keep the following spoiler-free but you might still want to leave reading it until you've played that first mission if you're worried about accidental environmental spoilers? It was thus reassured that I have embarked on my non-lethal playthrough of Dishonored 2. A clean slate where no-one has yet been massacred and no guards have been panic-killed and the guy in the chair in that room didn't get accidentally stabbed because of a previous stabbing session which left me with a bit of a hair-trigger stab-finger. A chance to right the wrongs with my approach to stealth in the original Dishonored.

Dishonored 2 mission 7 effects