After standing in my backyard crushing bricks in my bare hands for an hour or two, I'm finally ready to come back and talk about Stronghold, a mission which started off kind of promising and then made me feel insane the longer it went on.

In contrast to how I felt immediately after seeing the Mission Complete screen, I do think there's a lot of cool stuff going on in this mission. Starting off in a mountain pass where Garrett's new house is set up, you're ambushed by apemen for some reason or another, and getting into the house is a little silly but fine overall. There's also a handful of puzzles and environments that have that odd early-FM jank about them, but overall looks pretty good. However, I thought it was weird that it seemed to give me 30 of every potion and like 10 gas arrows, and that's because I didn't know where it was going.

The mission's actual plot is stealing a magic sword from the Mechanists, to give to the Pagans, who will then courier it to the Hammerites. There's a few good ideas leading up to this point until you get this goddamn sword. While absurdly powerful and meant to grant a power fantasy of one-shotting battle bots, it has a neat mechanic where if any threat is within 20 feet of you, it plays a looping drum beat until that threat is dead, including blackjacked enemies. During your escape, there is an anti-thief magical spell that teleports you around the area whenever you start making progress, which the solution seems to be (according to walkthroughs and the readables in the mission itself) "keep trying to go forward until the game doesn't feel like teleporting you anymore." Compounding these two mechanics is fucking maddening. And the mission just keeps on going and going and GOING after this.

Aside from all that, in hindsight I may have personally had a bad time because I wasn't playing the mission on its own terms. The main objective being a sword that instantly kills anything it touches should've made the theme abundantly clear, but I still tried to play it like a lil stealthy boy and got punished for it. So maybe it's not so bad.

The teleporting is still annoying though. Oh shit, there's more bricks to crush.