Before I started this FM I was already given pause by the seemingly incredibly conceited manner in which the author describes the scale of difficulty. I was not aware of GORT as some sort of Thief FM impresario, and I'm skeptical of the idea now. True enough, there are additional axes of difficulty present in The Pursuance of An Inscrutable Reciprocity than in vanilla Thief 2: A very sparse amount of starting gold, a heavy sprinkling of steel-helmed guards, and a scripted system whereby guards can communicate having seen Garrett to the body politic if allowed to escape.

Unfortunately, however, much of the mission is inexpertly created and marred by poor decisions. Spaces are oddly sized and shaped in unrealistic and obstructive ways, much of the level lacks any kind of sensical placement of loot or decoration, there is no map whatsoever available. Much of the level is visually dark but not mechanically dark, which serves only to be annoying while not remotely useful. It's not difficult to navigate, but the level design doesn't draw one to the discovery of new architecture, and so much of what exists is just utterly empty.

The final straw came in the form of the realisation that scripted dialogues between guards and civilians had been recorded with bog standard text to speech software, which is nonsensical and unacceptable. This is one to give a miss.