Jan. 25, 2021, 12:01 a.m.   (Last edited: 3 years, 10 months ago)

The Sealed Quarter was one of my favorite locations in The Dark Project, so naturally I'm always on the lookout for missions that explore that aspect of Thief's setting to add to my queue. Unfortunately there's not as many as I'd like, since most of the well-known undead missions favor other kinds of locations. Lost Among the Forsaken is a notable exception, but there's a few others that might slip through the cracks. Dark Messiah is one of them.

The story is about what you'd expect: Garrett is tasked with stopping a rogue Hammerite priest who's been fooling around with Pagan magic by stealing two key items. Naturally, doing so requires an excursion deep into undead territory.

The mission looks and sounds pretty good for its time. The textures are all stock as far as I could tell, the constructions easy to look at, the ruins convincing. The most interesting thing about it visually is its use of colored lighting, including the reddish glare of burning buildings, and the strange purple glow coming from certain parts of the haunted Hammerite complex you must explore, giving the mission a distinct atmosphere despite the familiar textures.

There's a lot to like about the mission's structure as well. It starts out in a small section of the city, including a Hammerite church you have to return to right before the mission's end. This implies some backtracking once you complete your business in the Sealed Quarter, but actually getting all the way back takes you through a haunted tomb with its own set of challenges and rewards. The author is also kind enough to spawn extra baddies when you revisit certain areas, effectively giving the illusion of pursuit. This and one or two other aspects make Dark Messiah a bit more dynamic than the average FM.

All that said, there's some aspects of the mission I wasn't too keen on. Especially in the first parts of the map, there are plenty of seemingly barren side rooms. That's not to say there isn't the requisite loot or any readables that flesh out the story—there's even some cool bits of wordless storytelling here and there, implying a certain attention to detail—but there's a number of places that seem to serve no purpose at all, unless they all contained secrets and I somehow missed every one of them. These include rooms it's no harder to rope up to than the required areas you need rope arrows to access, and they aren't hard to spot. Strangely enough, some of these places include standing or patrolling guards that in some cases can't possibly reach the player, or in a few cases even harm the player unless the player comes up to them because they carry swords. I suppose the intention was to make the world seem more populated, but it only meant frustration when I spent time getting up there to no purpose.

Still, taking everything into account, I'd say it's a worthy mission: not just because of the rarity of its theme, but because the core aspects of the mission—atmosphere and general gameplay—hold up well, even after a second play. I'm glad to include Dark Messiah in my personal canon of undead missions.