Mages area is about going into the abandoned home of some mages, and commiting a bit of burglery. It is an undead puzzle mission, with a certain amount of backstory, and decent atmosphere. It's rooms are pretty decent from a brushwork standpoint, though it's more "spectacular" moments tend to fall flat. Still, the mission is far from badly built.

The mission also contains multiple puzzles. I was able to solve most of them without outside help (Though I did brute force one that would otherwise have required me to grab a piece of paper in the real world.)

This is the first mission which seems to be built to be hard as a primary goal. The fact it took half a a year for this to happen is honestly quite suprising. Unfortunately, the way this mission accomplishes this, leaves a lot to be desired. The first thing that happens in this mission is the player is dropped into a pit, and told to swordfight a haunt. There is then a locked wooden door blocking the path. Naturally I did the logical thing: I tried to bash the door down.
It didn't work.

This short interaction basically encapsulates my problem with the mission; It breaks the rules of Thief. Both including explicit fights, and mechanics which are altered for no explicit and obvious reason. This isn't automatically a bad thing mind you, but not all these changes are properly signalled to the player.

This only gets worse when you proceed into a room full of, now invincible, haunts, that look identical to the one you just murdered. The rules don't just shift from base thief, but from the standards the level just set. (Note: these ones are easy to sneak around, so you don't actually have to fight them.)

The mission also has some pretty serious bugs, there is an NPC that talks to you, with dialog I can barely hear, and the mission failed to give me the new objectives this character was supposed to grant. However, again, I did not include this in my review scores as bugs might well be newdark related.

All of this however, adds up to a mission that is frustrating, and hard, but unfortunately, also feels unfair. Numerous times I was forced to reload because the rules thief is expected to have were subtly broken. One puzzle even forced me to look up the solution online because the thing it was asking me to do would have been impossible in any other mission.

I can't in good conscience say this mission was bad, but it was certainly not a particularly enjoyable time.