Acquiring New Ventures is sick as hell from front to back.

ANV is a wonderful mix of modern linear/cinematic level design and more classic, open-ended Thief LD. It continually fluctuates between guided design and nonlinearity in a way I found consistently engaging and deftly handled, which is partly due to the fact that every single beat of the mission feels distinct and hand-crafted. The linear moments are tightly paced and finely tuned, and the open portions are impressive in their scope and detail.
There are so many custom effects and moments on display throughout — you get a full-on in-game cutscene, stellar environmental storytelling throughout, you get breakable glass lights, you get custom material sounds all over the place. The lighting is great as well, it’s unconventionally colorful in a lovely way.
This mission is a stream of pleasant surprises, none more of which I’ll spoil here.

What we have here is an incredibly polished and professional piece of work, and a hell of a debut for the author.

And finally, it doesn’t overstay its welcome! I finished in just over two hours, and was having a blast the whole damn time (as I’m sure you could’ve guessed by now). As soon as I was done, I knew it had cracked my Top 10 Favorite FMs, for sure.

That said, it’s not perfect — there are some noticeable bugs. A special weapon you acquire (in the 1.0 version) has a unique effect that stuck around in world space whenever I switched from it to another weapon, and there’s some wonky collision bits that made platforming occasionally (only ever mildly) frustrating. An example of that would be some of the pipes you clamber up during the very final climb in the last few minutes of the mission.

Overall though, loved this one. Can’t wait to see what this author does next. A 2-3 mission campaign of this quality (with a slightly more complex, engaging narrative) could be some really legendary shit.