I get that this might appeal to a portion of the player base, but when you take the blackjack away on an all-human mission and then say, 'no kills, ' it stops being Thief for me. But that only begins the long list of problems I have with this mission.

The first impression I received was from 2 blank objective boxes on the loadout for both Hard and Expert. They do show up in-game, but something happened during the objective creation that was never noticed during "testing".

You start off with a small underwater maze with no breath potion or hint of which way to go, and can easily get stuck on the terrain while underwater! (no air-pockets to rest or get your bearings in either). Most people playing this mission will have to die and reload multiple times just to get started with the proper mission area.

Then you immediately go into a bright room with 9 spiders. While I'm not against the inclusion of spiders, the combat in this game engine isn't solid enough to have you fighting so many opponents. In fact, that is the point... You aren't supposed to be able to, so frustration is fully understandable when you CAN'T, or as stated earlier, have to die many times trying to either figure it out or get lucky.

A guard heard me crouch walking on stone from 3 floors up. People in other reviews are massively understating how sensitive the guards are. I finally quit when a guard was blocking a doorway. This happens in a few places, but in this case the room brush didn't carry sound and so he couldn't hear me and I can't kill him, and I don't have a blackjack, and he didn't respond to thrown hammers or arrows shot in front of his face and I realized, I don't have to punish myself, so I quit. I finished all but 2 objectives and really don't see the point.

The mission building was ok, but nothing jaw-dropping. A lot of wall seems were either not snapped to grid or just not cleaned up properly.

When people say this mission is "hard," it's not a compliment. This mission is not cleverly difficult; it's filled with gotchas that make no sense due to how glitchy the AI is. It reminds me of earlier missions that set light_bright on the final mission and filled rooms with tile floors and tons of guards, and thought they created a 'challenge' for the players. What makes this worse is that this level is more deceptive. It looks competent until you spend time playing it, only to find out that time was wasted on something that really falls outside the genre of the original Thief campaigns.

I think you're doing the mission a disservice by panning it without trying harder (it's not harder than lots of others - it just comes to my mind for example that the beginning of The Lost City is practically identical, overall number of initial spiders there = 10) or using specific in-built features that are common sense - like running from some enemies or using spaces that are impossible to enter for human NPCs (admittedly a feature I can't recall from anywhere else but apparently a deliberate design consideration on author's part for this particular mission as it later also indirectly earns you a nifty way of disposing of the human enemies). Overreliance on BJing all may come at cost of natural agility for a Thief.