If you're looking for a really really large city exploration mission with many areas to explore and things to do then The Painter's Wife is exactly what you want to play, and it is in my opinion one of the very best at what it does. What we have here is an entire quarter more or less neatly divided into two halves, the north and south districts, with many rooftops, houses and streets in between. It's a mission that is fairly reminiscent of others such as Behind Closed Doors (TDM) and Penny Dreadful 3: Erasing the Trail, with confusing but exciting trails along the heights and a serpentine, multi-tiered street layout.

The plot of the mission is very simple and bare bones, but I don't necessarily see it as a negative. The main attraction of the mission is really to open a door somewhere and see a whole new city block to explore, and the mission pulls this off quite brilliantly. There are so many places to visit it's insane and the sheer scale of the mission will have you hop around for hours and hours. There is also a bit at one point that took me by complete surprise and made my day. I can definitely understand why the overwhelming nature of the mission can be problematic for some, but I love these kinds of missions so I was delighted to play this one.

The mission has quite a lot of problems and they're mostly bugs and technical issues. The most annoying being weird collision (or lack thereof in places), some lack of consistency at times (a few unopenable doors still have handles, for example), or plain bizarre phenomena such as being able to float in the air in a couple of specific places. There are also some pathfinding issues with NPCs spinning in place and sometimes doors getting stuck and not allowing them to move from one room to another.

Even with these problems, The Painter's Wife is a tour de force. The sheer ambition, scope and mastery make this mission easily sit on the top 5 best TDM missions as far as I'm concerned. Just be warned than in its current state it does have quite a few problems that hopefully will be fixed eventually.

I have just finished going through both of your lets-play vids and fixed, corrected and added to this mission based on your observations, bugs reports and annoyances. Should be a much better all round experience for new players. There is still a few more things to fix and once those are done and I have done a quick fly through version 1.1 will get released.

There are still some bugs that stumped me and I honestly think these are core-mod bugs. But I have done my best to address these as I find them.