This mission feels like a strange dream. Like you played through the whole Deadly Shadows campaign during a weekend afternoon and after that, you had all kind of strange dreams set in the Thief world that night. Familiar places got rearranged, uncanny layouts, mysterious dead ends, etc. Looks like Savar has used a couple of abandoned maps made by two other authors, and the end result has become to have these interesting qualities. And I like that a lot! Not to mention it is a surprisingly big and complex map with a lot of cool surprises - though there are a couple of slightly anticlimactic dead ends as well.

I miss the obscure, but definitely fascinating secret areas though. That might sound idiotic, since I was complaining about them a lot in my reviews covering the first half of the campaign - but still. I guess the previous missions have raised the bar so high (especially The Secret Room) that Veil of Deceit just had no chance. Luckily, we've still got a couple of secrets, but unfortunately one of them is probably the biggest issue of the mission: the Pagan's Crown. Finding it is a hidden objective, so if you manage to avoid activating it, well good for you - but if you don't... prepare yourself to the the most tragic, life decisions questioning, rage quit baiting, absolutely broken and sadistic mandatory platforming section you can imagine. There is absolutely no good explanation to why Savar left that part like that. No sane player would think they had to go up there, because 99% of the time Thief3's physics fails and you can't.

And this leads us to another annoying aspect of the mission: why can't we have the climbing gloves? They could have solved the previous problem - and they can even be found on the shelves at our apartment we have to visit! It's absolutely beyond me, I don't understand the logic. The same goes for the blackjack: it can be found in the Armorer shop as well, but we cannot pick it up there - because... we just can't. These decisions are absolutely beyond my understanding, and make you question why the hell did Savar spend extra time on patching up these missions to version 3.0 if these absolutely idiotic details were straight up left in them.

*sigh*
I like this mission quite a lot - despite its luckily few, but definitely bothering issues. There is a little change in terms of direction, but I think it had a really good effect on the pacing of the campaign. If you decide to play it (you should), do yourself a favor and check the walkthrough guide on how to avoid activating the Pagan's Crown objective.