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Emily Kaldwin has changed quite a bit since the events of 2012’s Dishonored.

The kidnapped, nearly helpless 10-year-old girl is gone. Fifteen years have passed, and in that time the daughter of the Empress has become quite capable. Now 25, Emily is a skillful assassin in her own right, following in the shoes of her father Corvo, the first game’s protagonist.

We got a chance to experience Emily in action—as well as talk to co-Creative Director Harvey Smith—during an event in New York last week.

The demo took place in the ever-changing Clockwork Mansion, the design of the nefarious Kirin Jindoh. On top of creating an army of robotic Clockwork Soldiers, Jindoh has kidnapped Royal Physician Anton Sokolov, who fans will recognize from the first game. He needs rescuing, and exactly how much killing is done along the way is entirely up to the player.

Playing as Emily feels a lot like playing as Corvo, which—according to Smith—is by design.

“I guess it’s a natural assumption based on some videos we did or something,” he said of fans assuming one character is more brutal while the other is more stealth-based. “The truth is they both can be both. Corvo can be very ghostlike, very elegant, or he can be very brutal... and Emily has the exact same potential."

They do have different supernatural abilities and character animations, though, so rest assured there aren’t simply cosmetic differences between the two.

That said, Dishonored 2was designed to be Emily’s game. Making her the protagonist was the reason for the sequel’s 15-year jump forward in time, according to Smith.

“That was really the only way we could do it unless we radically changed the nature of the game. We wanted Emily to be as capable as Corvo and we wanted to stay with our focus of like fighting, stealth and supernatural powers. So we needed Emily to be a little older.”

At 25, Emily has been an adult for years and is capable of making her own decisions and solving her own problems. “She’s realizing how much more complicated the world is,” Smith added.

So why have Corvo as a playable option at all? Simple: the developers missed him. “I’ve never been so attached to a protagonist in a game that I’ve worked on in 23 years of games as I have with Corvo and Emily. I worked on the first Deus Ex game and I never really fell in love with JC Denton… Corvo and Emily somehow have heart that I really care about.”

As with Dishonored, Dishonored 2lets the player decide just how to play. You can be careful, deliberate, stealthy; you’ll have to find ways to sneak around and stay off enemies’ radars, but it’s possible to get through the campaign without committing a single murder. Alternately, you can kill literally everyone who stands in your way and then some, including servants and civilians.

It’s tough to get through Clockwork Mansion without raising some alarms. Levers situated throughout the manor move walls and floors, opening paths to Sokolov and Jindoh. Clockwork Soldiers with tough armor lurk around every corner, though it is possible to hack them and use them against the mansion’s guards. Emily’s powerful teleportation ability is useful when getting around, making it simpler to find hidden spots behind the walls to traverse.

When all else fails, weapons like sleep darts come in handy, and there are even more non-lethal fighting options this time around that won’t leave guards and civilians in a pile of corpses. Another new ability, Domino, makes it simple to knock out multiple people at once.

“It starts linking two people, so if you link two people and you shoot one they both die. But you can upgrade it to three people and then four people,” Smith explained of the mechanic.

And in demos, players have been using Domino in unexpected ways. “We thought, okay, they’ll sneak around the room and see the people in the distance, they’ll go one-two-three-four sleep dart and take out four people at the cost of one sleep dart. But instead what people are doing are… linking the three of them, and then looking down the hall and seeing a servant coming… and then go over and knock the servant out.” Since servants go down immediately, you don’t even need to worry about them putting up a fight.

That upgrade system Smith mentioned extends to all powers, by the way. Players can collect bone charms and break them down in order to build up individual abilities in ways not possible in the first Dishonored.

“If you never do Bone Charm crafting, okay. You’ll find them and you’ll put them on your belt and you’ll have those little perks. But if you take those and sacrifice them, break them down, you get the traits back, and you get some raw whalebone, and when you build up enough raw whalebone you can take the traits and mix them together in different ways, and if you upgrade them, you can put up to four traits on one bone charm. So you can actually make some powerful combinations.”

All that stealth and strategy is great when you’re sitting on your own couch, but when it comes to a short demo, efficiency is key — and that means death and destruction each step of the way. In our demo, Emily shattered windows, blasted foes with exploding bullets and sticky grenades, and slashed off the heads of helpless servants who threatened to call the authorities.

Hey, Sokolov wasn’t going to rescue himself.

Though Smith says the idea behind Dishonored was a “faster stealth,” the murderous route is still going to be the quicker one, and in our experience stealth is much more difficult. Of course, if you’re the kind of player that likes added challenge, that’s a plus. And if it’s still not hard enough for you, Dishonored 2allows you to refuse the supernatural powers offered to your chosen character at the beginning of the game and play like a civilian.

In response to fan feedback from the first game, the developers at Arkane have made Dishonored 2’s morality system and endings less binary. It’s no longer about just killing less or more than a certain percentage of humans; different people carry different weights towards a more or less chaotic completion.

After players started using the mysterious Heart to reveal pedestrians’ innermost secrets, they were upset to find killing off a secret serial killer was no different than offing an orphanage volunteer who liked to rescue kittens in his free time. This time around, morality is a little deeper and more complicated. There’s no “bad” or “good” way to play, either--it’s just a matter of how chaotic you want to be and how that affects the world around you.

After around 45 minutes with Dishonored 2, the result is an experience that feels very much like Dishonoredin the best ways. The deeper changes, like the different endings and extensive crafting system, weren’t immediately detectable in our playthrough, though we did spend a little bit of time using the Heart to find bone charms.

Clockwork Mansion, with its moving parts and elegant design, is a perfect setting representative of the series’ steampunk, Victorian-era charm. It’s just a small piece of the full game, but if it’s indicative of the rest of Dishonored 2, the series’ jump forward in time will be a successful one.