After playing so many fan missions one can begin to think that everything has become stale and played out, and then a mission like this one comes along. Wow! A Thief's training is just dripping with atmosphere, with truly striking daytime visuals and a top-tier use of music and ambient noises to create a sense of place that had me pausing several times just to take it all in.

Usually when a mapper makes a daytime mission they try to change the feel of the world to make it more peaceful and lived-in; I definitely did that for the training mission in A House of Locked Secrets. But this mission somehow creates the exact same feelings of strangeness and mystery as the best Dark Project levels and it does it in full daylight. Really impressive.

While the presentation is top-notch and is more than enough to carry the level, the story and level flow are more uneven. Regarding the story, there are lots of readables which flesh out the world, but especially in the Keeper section the readables are about small mundane problems which make the keepers sound like small mundane people (compare this to The Order readables in the Rocksbourg series). Additionally the plot doesn't have any forward momentum, but rather is either focused on ancillary knowledge or is about stuff players will already know such as Thief 3's story or shoutouts to other fan missions. So outside of getting a 'I get that reference' sensation, there's little to get involved or interested in: your actions don't change the world or the people in it.

The level design is solid, but it tends to fork into a series of dead-ends, some of which have very little gameplay in them. There's also a little bit too much marble which combined with the semi-open layout of portions of the keeper compound (where you can't see AI and sound travels a long way) make sneaking just tedious.

But all that doesn't take away from the top-tier atmosphere and wonderful presentation. This one gets a 10 because it's so unique and that uniqueness is so well done. Great job Snake!