I think Mandalore said it best in his review: "It keeps going?"
(potential spoilers ahead)
I was three years old when thief deadly shadows came out and my mom, a bit older in age, loved the thief games and I loved to sit beside her and watch them. They enamored me and when I wasn't playing outside I was inside playing thief on the family PC, mom's work laptop, or dad's personal laptop. I learned all about the fixes like taffer patcher and even once remember having to change some line in a file and set an affinity to make thief gold run on windows 7, which by the way thief gold was a present for Christmas one year. I would, with my mom's help, make wooden swords and walk around the house, mimicking guard animations from all three games, zombies, apparitions, you name it. For halloween I was always, except for two years, a character from thief until I grew out of it. I was a mechanist, an enforcer, Garrett (of course), a hammerite, and strangely enough the guard with the purple tunic and green pants because he had a mustache and I thought that was cool.

Even after growing up I still come back time and again, I loved watching FenPhoenix and still do occasionally go back and binge half his channel over the course of a few months every few years, so hearing him for the first time as a Hammer without knowing he was part of this project was jarring. My friends all thought the thief series was so lame because of outdated graphics and not being some invincible super soldier but for all intents and purposes just some guy trying to pay rent. I played so many FM's and watched every video I could. I played thief 4 once and only once. I wish I could say I didn't have some sort of bias about this game, but hearing poor reviews on the first two games make me seriously upset, (I defended thief 3 the same way until recently when I played it again as an adult.)

When I met my wife she loved to hear me talk about all my interests and when I told her about thief she told me she would be happy to play it with me. We sat down and as often as we could, I'll take my office chair, roll it out of the way, put the recliner under my desk, she sits on my lap, we light a few candles, we only play when it's dark, dog's come in go to sleep, and we play some thief. She became just as entrenched in this game as I did and I got to share my love, explain as much lore as I can if she didn't pick up on it, try not to spoil things when she asks me a question I know will be revealed later on, and just have fun. When I quit building playgrounds I had no idea what I was going to do to make money and for a long time we didn't play. Roughly around the height of that little scare the Black Parade came out, I watched a video or two and shelved it for later, I could not wait to play. Well, we finally sat down last week and every day she comes home, I have all my tasks for my new business finished or delegated to my employees, I pull the recliner from the corner of the room, we light some candles, and we play some Black Parade. I'll turn 24 in two days and this is the best thief campaign I have played in my more than 20 years playing this game I love so much, including the originals made by TTLG.

I felt the need to make an account so I could write this review and personal letter to the devs to let you know just how enamored I am with this project. I know about the horse in the first mission from accidental spoilers, but other than that this was all an unknown and immense treat for me to experience a year after it's release. The first mission alone it took us 2 separate sittings and about 4 hours of play to find out I missed about 500 loot at the end. WOW! The vertical scaling through the missions both up and down in some missions was breathtaking, sometimes we just sit and look out at what these designers created in awe, maybe more so myself than her. The custom animations all the way down to the scrappy beggar sitting down in the street was so amazing to me as someone who knew every animation by heart and acted them all out as a kid. I loved watching the hammerite engineer forge himself a hammer in St Graimal's so much I watched him for at least five minutes, maybe more, toiling with his work to create a tool of the Builder.

I played this game so much to know when the AI will break and ignore shadows and bum rush you, and either I played this one better or the careful intricacies and attention to detail you guys put into this made it an almost non-existent issue. We didn't even really find any bugs. It wasn't until the Brand before I really got stuck and it was my own fault where I could not find one of the paintings and had to look up the final location. Again, that was me being dumb, thinking the room you drop into from the attic was one I already had been inside of. In Where Old Faces Fade going underneath the manor and seeing the front foyer but inverted made me do a double take and put a big dumb smile on my face, which shortly fell when I heard slow heavy footsteps clomping around while I walked through. The sound design and atmosphere that was created through these ques and triggers at various places made the scary missions scarier and put that unsettling feeling in the bottom of my ribs and pit in my stomach that I get such joy out of really put the experience at the top for me, as I horror is one of my favorite genres. And the horror!

I felt the Brand was my personal favorite mission, though it's fighting for first with Death's Dominion because the Bone hoard was my all time favorite original mission and so any chance to dungeon dive is exhilarating and the sense of "It keeps going?" was pushed to the forefront the entire time. Initially The Brand disappointed me when I did as much City exploration as I could and I come over the wall to see what I assume to be Hawtrey manor sitting right there within touching distance. Then we take the dive into the water, swim up and find a corpse that disappears moments later after turning around, climbing higher and excitement grows as I realize this isn't the manor, this is part of the sealed section, an hour later reaching the top of a wall once more and my face hurt from smiling so much when I saw how much I had experienced to not even get close to the Manor yet was breathtaking for me. The sentiment of "It keeps going," is not at all a bad thing to me. The supernatural evil the campaign shifted to was natural and done in such a way it was a stark reminder of the way the original games handled it, from basic jobs to goal focused finale made me feel a certain way in my chest. My wife loved reading every bit of lore in the Keeper compound even though she fell asleep a few times because of how long it took us (4 hours in one sitting)

All this to find out just how much I missed, such as not paying enough attention to the riddle in Death's Dominion to follow and find the undead slaying sword was unfortunate when I found out but also a rush because I get to play this campaign all over again. The loot goals though seemingly large are met each and every single time often times exploring the city before even arriving to the "main event" of the mission. I took so much time exploring and examining every little detail and I obviously had more exposure to this and other FM's than my wife, so maybe I got more out of it, but she is every bit as enthralled and our end to our time playing this was a somber moment for both of us. The last week this became our comfort activity, as she was t-boned at the intersection at the end of our street and when I met her out in the cold and she was obviously shaken up, the first thing she asked was "Can we play some Black Parade when we get home?"

My brain is moving faster than my fingers can type so I understand this review may be all over the place but I hope that the devs read this and take to heart just how wonderful of a project this was for you and was for us. I disregard reviews that say it's too much and too long, when I wish it had been longer. Your creativity was unlimited, and yet stayed true to the lore of the base games, perfectly encapsulating everything I found so magical about the series as I grew up. I'd wager that if the original staff from TTLG were to look at this they would say it more closely resembled what they had in mind during those initial pitch meetings rather than what they were able to make. I hope my sense of nostalgia doesn't dissuade people from reading the review and thinking I am incapable of critical thought, but I try to look at things objectively and objectively speaking, with the talent, skills, and tools you guys have you delivered a sensational project that I will pour many tens or even hundreds more hours into during the course of the next few years and even the rest of my life, that I can share with my kids the way my mom shared with me, and as far as I am concerned this campaign has become a staple and standard part of this game that I as one of thief's older and more enthusiastic veterans will enjoy for many years to come.

I truly lack the words to describe how I feel about this project and so I want to say thank you instead of good luck. Thank you for your work, creativity, and general amazing example and golden standard you have set and I hope that this isn't the last time we see such a jaw-dropping feat come from your team, and I hope that you have become the shining example of what is possible when super fans of this beautiful game come together to create the same magic others feel when they play their favorite games.

Again, thank you!