The Great Clock of St. Dunbar

Lore & Background

In the world of Sly Cooper, the Great Clock of St. Dunbar is a legendary timepiece whose mechanism is said to have been assembled by a guild of artificers over several generations. The clock's face is visible from across the city, and its chimes are woven into the daily rhythm of the district below. For the Cooper crew, it represents both a professional challenge and a moral one: the clock is a public monument, and stealing its heart is an act that will be felt by everyone who relies on its hours.

The tower itself is a masterwork of interlocking brass and iron. Every gear drives another; every pendulum swing is timed to the second. The interior is a three-dimensional lattice of walkways, ladders, and rotating platforms, all suspended inside the hollow shell of the clock housing. Security is minimal in the traditional sense—there are few guards—but the environment itself is the obstacle. A misplaced step onto a rotating cog, a mistimed leap across a pendulum's arc, and the thief is cast into the machinery below.

Within the narrative of Sly 3, the heist on the Great Clock sits in the middle stretch of the campaign, after the crew has established their momentum and before the final confrontation. It functions as a test of the team's coordination: Sly handles the primary traversal, while Bentley's gadgets and Murray's brute-force interventions open paths that pure agility cannot solve. The level rewards players who read the rhythm of the clock rather than fighting against it.

In Their Own Story

The rain had stopped, but the city still glistened. Sly pressed his back against the cold iron of the outer wall, ears flat, and watched the guard's lantern sweep the lower gantry for the third time. Below him, the great pendulum swung in a slow, hypnotic arc—left, right, left—each pass throwing a long shadow across the brass walkway he'd need to cross.

"Bentley," he whispered into the comms. "I need a grapple line on the north cog. The one that turns every twelve seconds."

A soft whir of machinery. A cable snapped taut above him. He waited. The pendulum swung right. The cog began its slow rotation. He leapt.

For two heartbeats he was airborne, the wind tearing at his bandana, the entire interior of the clock roaring around him in a symphony of grinding teeth and ticking escapements. Then his claws caught the cog's rim, and the world tilted, and he was climbing upward into the dark heart of St. Dunbar, where the mechanism's true core waited behind a cage of spinning gears.

He could hear the city below, oblivious. The clock would keep ticking. But its heart would be missing.

Reader's Guide

TARGET: The central mechanism of the Great Clock, housed behind a rotating gear-cage at the top of the tower. You must reach the core, interact with it, and extract it while the environment actively tries to throw you off.

OBSTACLES: The entire level is a moving machine. A massive central pendulum swings on a fixed period, clearing walkways for only a few seconds at a time. Rotating cogs and gear-wheels serve as both platforms and hazards—step on the wrong side and you're ground into the frame. Narrow brass walkways connect concentric rings of the tower interior, and several sections require precise timing to leap across as the platform beneath you rotates away. A handful of guards patrol the lower gantries, but the real enemy is the clock itself.

POSITION IN ARC: Mid-campaign. The crew has already established their rhythm in earlier heists, so this level leans harder on vertical traversal and environmental timing rather than pure stealth. Bentley's gadget support and Murray's brute-force entry points become more essential here than in the early stages.

WHAT MAKES IT TRICKY: The pendulum's period is long enough to lull you into a false sense of security, but the rotating cogs it interacts with shift the safe windows between swings. A single misread of the rhythm sends you tumbling back to a lower checkpoint. The upper sections narrow the walkways to a single rail, demanding clean jumps with no second chances.

HIDDEN OBJECTIVES: Collectible gear tokens are tucked into the clock's inner workings—several are only reachable by riding a cog's rotation to an otherwise inaccessible ledge. A secret alcove behind the main gear-cage contains a bonus reward for players who explore the rear of the mechanism rather than taking the direct path. Completing the heist without triggering a single alarm (i.e., no guard ever spots you) unlocks a stealth bonus.

Did You Know?

• The entire level is built around a single swinging pendulum whose period dictates nearly every traversal window, making the clock itself the primary antagonist of the stage.
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves was developed by Sucker Punch Productions, the same team behind Sly 1 and Sly 2, and marked the third entry in the original PS2 trilogy.
• The level's concentric ring design means that progress is largely vertical—climbing higher through the clock's interior—rather than the horizontal, multi-room layouts common in earlier Sly titles.
• Bentley's gadget-based support plays a larger role in this heist than in most others, with grapple lines and timed devices used to open pathways that pure platforming cannot reach.