May 13, 2020, 11:43 p.m.   (Last edited: 4 years, 1 month ago)

"The Widow's Ire" is everything that was great about The Dark Project.

Ironically, it is those things that are so often criticized about the game. While The Metal Age polished out Thief's weird bits (resulting in an excellent game in its own right, don't get me wrong), for many of us it is precisely those "weird bits" that stick in the mind and prompt us to revisit the OMs: from the mazelike, forbidding ruin of "Down in the Bonehoard" to the devious, crooked mansion of "The Sword," The Dark Project was not just a trial run, it was a truly great game with its own personality, with a sense of the nightmarish and the bizarre, even the surreal.

"The Widow's Ire" wears these aspects on its sleeve—if you care to dig into it. The premise is unassuming: just another mansion heist, eh? Weirdly, you start the first mission in a big, mostly empty mine area. The construction is a bit more "old school" than what one sees in many popular 2010s releases, putting one immediately in mind of the FMs of yesteryear. But play on, and the mission starts throwing curveball after curveball.

It is no accident that I brought up "Bonehoard" and "The Sword," because those are the two missions that the two missions of "The Widow's Ire" channel. But "Ire" is no mere remix: the spirit is there, but the author brought much of their own creativity to bear on the construction and the planning, as well a few clever tricks and surprises. If the architecture is simple by the high standards of today, even of its time, this is no drawback, for the author truly knows the art of "simple" visuals, and has produced plenty of strong imagery in these two missions, from the starkly beautiful to the skin-crawling. Equally strong are the layouts, with most major areas and objectives having more than one entrance (often more than two), and plenty of satisfying loops, from the small to the large (loops within loops). The layout of the first mission in particular is a work of art, allowing you to feel more and more lost while cleverly guiding your progress.

The story, unless I missed something, doesn't seem to develop much, at least explicitly. The texts you find here and there provide some background, but perhaps not many "answers," and few of the twists and turns fans of story-heavy FMs may desire. There is, on the other hand, power in suggestion and plenty here to stir the imagination, and that is often how I prefer it.

Really, playing these two missions made me feel like I was playing my favorite missions from The Dark Project for the first time again. To anyone with a similar taste in Thief missions, I can't recommend them enough.