Into The Odd
Amazing mission, I had heard a lot of hype around it but hadn't had the chance to play it yet. The complex maze of industrial machinery that lives just below the city streets and sewer systems is already pretty interesting and then you get to the fantastic and impressively unique spooky shrine below even that. Climbing up and down through these areas back to the city above was really immersive. The least interesting part of the mission for me was the actual manor location with the main objective, funnily enough, but none of this mission was bad by any stretch of the imagination.
T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age
Replayed it for the first time in about 15 years or something. I felt like I needed to refresh my opinion of it since it was the very first FM I ever played.
The level design is complex for the limitations of the non-NewDark Thief 2 engine, very high quality for the time and it does look very good by those standards. The level list has some real standouts in it. In particular Down Among Dead Men (the crypt robbing mission), The Cure (the sealed quarter hospital mission), the train segment of the Shadowing the Enemy is very unique (would have been preferred if it was extended and was made to be the entire mission) and A Question of Knowledge (Hammerite cathedral mission), of Ill Repute (Brothel Mission) and The Grand Hotel are all pretty good human-enemy missions, despite being a bit light on difficulty overall and lacking in real practical uses for the wealth of items you are offered the campaign as a whole is quite fun and definitely worth playing.
I liked the inclusion of the new arrow types, in particular the Ice Arrow for Majora's Mask-style ice platform freezing and platforming across water, that is a great idea for an addition to the Thief imsim formula, adds some potential to level design that can be taken advantage of in more different ways, I would love to see this Ice Arrow mechanic in some new FMs. Unfortunately in T2X it doesn't really do much with the levels to truly take advantage of the new arrow types and the potential they have to impact the game. Would have been much better for higher difficulty missions with more routes through them to have these extra arrow type options open to the player. Items-wise I think the levels are severely undertuned in difficulty (there is an overabundance of resources mostly), and the shop items selection is pretty damn weird (sometimes you'll be offered some absolutely useless items for what kind of mission you're on, water arrows on a map which has no torches worth dousing or something). You end every level with mountains of items you'll never use and the shops offer mountains of items you'll never use too.
The voice acting, characters, story and writing is all pretty much absolute garbage. Wow it's bad. Nothing about this fits Thief at all. A lot worse than I remembered it being but I was in my teens and had much less of an eye for quality in fan/indie projects back when I first played it, maybe I just memory holed it entirely because really all I did remember about T2X after this long was some of the levels.
Shadow of Doubt
Yes... I replayed it, there's something to be said for conquering some Thief PTSD and returning to something you know gave you a headache on your first time through it. After T2X's lack of difficulty I was really wondering if I should give Shadow of Doubt a retry, especially since I know that Schlock (whose missions I like) in particular has a fondness for Sperry's style. I applied some patches for some of the missions so they would work on NewDark and played through the entire thing on Expert (no kills allowed unless stated and no blackjack given, often forced ghosting as an objective forcing a reload) in one long ass 7 hour session. The first mission (Walking the Edge) still bugged out on me entirely and I was unable to finish it legitimately (objectives failed to update somewhere halfway through the mission so when the Hammers ambushed me in the streets the mission wouldn't end despite me having done what I know to be the objective), the embassy building on that level is extremely difficult to do without a blackjack and without alerting 20 guards and escaping. I ended up force-ending this mission since I'm 99% sure I actually did complete what the objectives would have been were they to update. Tears of Blood was okay aside from my general dislike for forced ghosting, it still has far far too many keys even though half of them aren't needed to finish the mission (there's something like 15 or so unique keys you have to cycle through). All Astir is very low detail and again very hard without a blackjack, making your way to the deck of the ship without having a pack of guards chasing you can take a little effort. Broadsword of Sheol is everyone's favorite one from this campaign and while I do like the atmosphere it sets up I'm still miffed about the brazier pressure plates to open that one door, along with some of the savescummy platforming required.
And then we get to Nightcrawler, where the entire campaign which is coasting along on an "okay" and sometimes even a "this is good/interesting" rating decides to shit its diaper and fall down the stairs. Nightcrawler is a fucking mess. It includes a billion keys forcing linear progression, some adventure-game tier puzzles that you are forced to engage with, forced ghosting on Expert so a lot of waiting around for guards to pass so you can go back and forth through this place and on top of all of that there's also an intentional softlock placed in the map where you can fall into the underground water reservoir and not be able to get out, so if you saved in that seemingly open area that doesn't lead anywhere (until later) you are stuck and forced to reload an earlier save or restart the mission entirely - now, I didn't get caught out by this one this time, because I already got caught by it last time and I remembered to make hard saves every five minutes, but it might be the biggest sin of all in this map. It's really impressive how Shadow of Doubt can take such a hard nosedive in quality right at the end. I also played the bonus mission included (Tuttocomb's Tomb) and it was mostly fine, it had a bit of an obscure puzzle with dousing a specific torch with a water arrow to access a necessary objective but it's nothing compared to Nightcrawler's jank, though I savescummed a lot on this level because it was really hard and I wanted to make the most of my gas mines (no blackjack, of course).
Ascend the Dim Valley
Lovely breath of fresh air. From the title you can probably guess that it's very vertical, which it is. I really liked navigating this mission though I don't have much to gush about for it. It looks very unique, is cool and it plays well despite the unique layout which has likely never been attempted in such a way before.
Brainchild
Another Sperry mission, after Shadow of Doubt I figured I may as well... This one is a sci-fi sort of thing in a giant industrial maze spaceship sort of thing? I don't know the
deep lore but the concept itself is fascinating. It's full of long cramped hallways, pipes, jumping puzzles and the occasional respite in an open space. There are almost no enemies here and it's 90% exploration and finding your way out of this place (unfortunately via a bit of a keyhunt, I would have preferred more platforming). Going to go out on a limb here and say this mission itself lent a hand in inspiring the mechanical underground areas of Into The Odd, since I already know Schlock likes Sperry's stuff.
Shadow Play
A fairly standard mansion heist, did not take very long to beat and it was not very difficult but it is definitely nicely made. It's certainly not
as impressive as some of Schlock's other missions but I still liked it.
In & Out
A fun romp. The mission has pretty much everything and I had to laugh at parts of it here and there. Very large and very fun to explore and it packs a campaign's worth of level variety into one mission. Good shit.
)
