Pretty much the way I could sum up all of nicked's mission. 😉 They're all very good in terms of mission design, atmosphere, visuals, audio (often neglected point), and variety. At some point, they're all frustratingly hard though, which is mostly the reason I can't give them the 9 or 10 out of 10 rating they would actually deserve.

Not for the faint of heart. Handle with care. Pull up your shin guards. These missions will screw you hard. Don't say that you haven't been warned.

Thank you for your review.

Are they really that hard? I didn't ever realize that. I think it's a matter of personal experience.

I also don't find them too hard. On the other hand they are gimmicky, that's for sure. They often use some interesting trick, idea. Sometimes there are challenging chokepoints, bottlenecks. But I don't think of them as hard. I think it's matter of personal preferences.

Lots of different enemies, many enemies you have never encountered before, some enemies respawning endlessly from nests unless you destroy them (which makes a lot of noise, considering it only works with fire arrows), spiders spawning from eggs you destroy, enemies spawning after you have finished an area, stone statues chasing after you, which you can't kill...

Sounds easy? Not at all. 😉

Most fan missions are harder than the original Thief missions, and, these missions are among the hardest I have played so far, if not the hardest. At least I can't remember any other fan mission which is that hard.

Fair enough, every FM author can decide for him-/herself how hard their missions should be. What I would criticize in most of nicked's mission is that they go from moderately difficult to ultra hardcore at the end. To be fair, this is not such a mission. It's rather hard from start to end. 😂

Anyway, this is a very good mission, and, I really enjoyed it. Would have done with a little less difficulty though. I would have rated the mission 9/10 easily, if it wasn't that hard. I don't mind a challenge, but, this ultra hardcore is a bit imbalanced, when you consider most missions aren't THAT hard. And, frankly, I also think that some of his missions are synthetically stretched, like, they could really come to an end at some point. For example, in this mission, I wondered why it had to be that the gate back to the starting point is barred, and you have to backtrack to an already visited location to get a key for an alternative route. I mean, at some point, you really feel like you worked enough to finish the mission. No need for more work, after an already difficult heist. Especially when it only means backtracking to an already visited location to get a key, and exit somewhere else.

I wonder why most of FMs never actually implement the difficulty that player has chosen, so that the gameplay is actually easier or harder.

I mean, often it's only about finding more loot (which is usually not hard), and not killing anyone (which I never do, anyways). Sometimes there are additional items to find, but they only make the gameplay time longer, and not harder.

Implementing game difficulty to things that you describe, would make it ideal. On lower difficulty levels, player would have less problems with new and dangerous enemies. But, again, I think almost nobody is doing that.

As for growing difficulty as game goes forward, this is standard since first video games were created. A game is getting more and more challenging as player is progressing. Personally I like when this happens, because the gameplay is getting less boring. I don't remember how it's done here in Ravensreach, as I played it long ago. But it's your review, and it seems this is not done this way in this FM.

If you want to stick with how it's done in the original Thief games, then it's indeed rather a difference in loot count, additional objectives, no kill objectives, sometimes even no knockout objectives, rather than raising the overall difficulty with the difficulty settings. But, I think I prefer it that way anyway. I always play on Expert, and, the original missions are all absolutely doable, as are other fan missions.

I can only repeat myself: The problem is the general difficulty with these missions. And, I'm really not hallucinating. I just played another mission, and, it was piece of cake in terms of difficulty compared with nicked's missions.

It's fine, I understand that different FM authors prefer different difficulties. It's just that I personally think the missions would benefit from a BIT less difficulty. Shadows on the Water by the same author isn't as hard as some (most) of his other missions. I think that one was pretty much perfect in terms of difficulty.

Thanks for elaborating. I think the same about thief-style difficulty settings.

"Shadows on the Water" had... "TDS difficulty level" ;)

And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that in "well done reproducing TDS atmosphere to full extent" way.

By the way, as we're at it: Thanks for hosting this site (I think you are the creator?). It's a really nice site, and helped me a lot figuring out which FM to play next.

Yup, that's me. Happy to hear that :)