"The Chalice Of Souls" is a two level campaign, consisting of a city mission and an underground brothel.
The city mission is excellent, a lot of jumping between rooftops and climbing into windows, as well as exploring the streets makes it varied in gameplay, combined with beautiful architecture makes it a fantastic stand-alone mission.
The atmosphere is thick and the scrolls you find are interesting and occasionally funny.
The second mission Isn't that good though. Set in an old Keeper cathedral turned brothel, the building is visually nice looking, but commits two FM sins: Overuse of marble, and hindering my ability to see ahead.
Marble tiling can spice up a mission and add some challenge, but nothing saps the energy out of a mission than having to creep slowly through everything due to the designer overusing it. AI in thief is also annoyingly alert to marble, to the point that just a small sound can alert like 10 NPC's far away. And how alert they are always felt random to me, I'm not a fan of this.
The second sin i mentioned is that in a lot of the entryways between rooms, hangs a piece of cloth or sheet covering the opposite room, problem with this is, the guards can see YOU, but not you them. This issue had me quick-loading just enough to be super annoying.
One aspect of the Brothel I did enjoy was getting to know the various characters in it through reading diaries and scrolls, it was nice and they felt believable.
I've got one more issue with this mission, and that's the last goal. It tells you "Find a way out". This led me to believe that I had to find some secret passage to the outside, but all i had to do was go back to where the mission began. This should just have been called something like: "Go back to where you started", to save the player from wasting their time in looking for something that doesn't exist.
I haven't been this conflicted about a campaign since I played "Shadow of Doubt" a while back, and despite not ending well I'd still recommend it.
The city mission is fantastic and the brothel is still decent for the most part, with a nice story to go along with it.
Give it a play!
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star 7 / 10
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