One of the great things about working through the backlog of old FMs is that occasionally, I encounter something that is actually rather clever, but virtually unknown. The Thieves Quarter is one such mission. It is a short city/haunted-cathedral mission which has a remarkably cool and interesting enviroment.

The start of the mission is a low quality city enviroment, nothing special but playable enough. However, the majority of the mission is based around a haunted cathedral, with a group of thugs camping out in the front half, and a bunch of undead in the other. This effectively leaves you with 3 different distinct enviroments.

Gameplay wise, the stealth is mostly fine, however some of the "traps" and more interesting features do lead to a bit of frustration. There is a particularly unique enemy which is in my opinion quite cool, but is also not particularly good for gameplay, as it is very unlikely you will know it is there, before it's already trying to kill you. (And also messes with the other AIs on the map quite badly.)

There are 3 reasons why this mission only gets a 4, rather than a 5 or 6 out of 10. first of all the mission has some very obviously broken brushwork, second of all, a couple of locations require rope arrows to escape, and can easily softlock you. The most important issue however, is that one of the puzzles seems to require you to do something which is not hinted at in the slightest as far as I can tell. It's the sort of puzzle which you are more likely to solve by accident than by design.

A lot of interesting ideas, some pretty interesting technical details, but nothing here is worth returning to compared to more modern FMs. Despite this, I did enjoying playing this one much more than my rating might suggest. Had the solution to that one puzzle been hinted at more clearly, and had the brushwork been cleaned up, this would have been a very solid FM.