Nephentes on 21/7/2020 at 04:49
I really liked the gameplay of Malazar's Inscrutable Tower, I hope to find again this surreal atmosphere in other future missions.
Spyrano on 21/7/2020 at 16:18
Finished with 4105 loot on expert. Another great puzzle mission! Loved the architecture, the enemies, the surreality of it all. Thank you!
Ghostly on 21/7/2020 at 22:21
Had a blast experiencing this surreal atmosphere as this has sentimental values embedded given I can recognise all the assets being used in The Sword OM from Thief - The Dark Project, thoroughly enjoyed taking my time getting used to the crazy creative logics and not once did I feel stuck nor frustrated, this is exactly the kind I would love to see more of in a fan mission.
Made it all the way through with only 300 loot missing in total. :)
caqo on 22/7/2020 at 08:49
Nice FM, Looks beautiful. Puzzles are great, and having many objects to pickup, it opens your mind about what to do with them. Excellent Nicked!!
trefoilknot on 24/7/2020 at 15:33
Very interesting mission! I finished in about 90 mins, getting almost all the loot. I only needed to check the forum once (I didn't notice that the vice on the desk would frob).
Definitely had a good time with this one. I'd say I spent 85% of my play time experiencing joy/wonderment; 15% experiencing frustration while looking for stuff; and 100% experiencing severe envy of Nicked's creativity and skill. (Yes, they add up to more than 100% because they're not mutually exclusive.) How does he manage to churn out TWO top-caliber missions within a couple months of each other?!?!
Highlights:
1. The statue women---freaked me the F out on a number of occasions. And just such a brilliantly conceived and executed idea!
2. The Escher-esque room---I couldn't tell, was each iteration actually created from 90 degree rotations of a base room? It seemed like it was changing in other ways, as well.
3. The non-euclidean geometry throughout. Very creative use of teleportation.
Overall: 9.5/10. My only real gripe is that the world is rather cluttered with stuff which makes it difficult to know, at a distance, what objects are interactive versus just there for the vibe. This is a matter of personal taste, of course. Personally, I prefer more of a "Chekov's Gun" approach to mission design. Of course, this is likely why some players find my missions overly sparse.
tone_lord on 25/7/2020 at 03:21
OK. I have a question. I'm trying to work my way around and
WHAT THE F IS THAT???
Oh, man. That is diabolical. (I think I peed just a little. Well, my wife was watching and she definitely did!)
MrMunkeepants on 25/7/2020 at 06:22
thank you, nicked!
I had a very good time (took 1:30 but missed ~700 loot)
I needed help in a few places, mostly around using the horn, but there were some great neuron-firing moments when I realized I had unlocked a new path to reach an area that was blocked previously. Also, some really cool new models?
I didn't particularly like the initial shoot-off-the-lock mini-puzzle, or the times where the weeping angel statues couldn't be avoided (since they can't be neutralized).
My favorite moment might be walking out of the cave into the sunny late-afternoon autumn environment, with the sunlight picking out the swords planted in the ground :o
Karras35 on 25/7/2020 at 12:36
Shooting out one mission after another! Can't wait to play it, but sadly I have little time these days:p
Akaiā¢ on 26/7/2020 at 12:20
I just finished the Mission. I like this Kind of riddle missions where you ve to use your brain cells to progress. Best puzzle for me was the library puzzle . The puzzles where fair and doable with some thinking and had no annoying endless searching. The only Thing i didnt like was the Shoot the lock with an arrow task.
Atmosphere and Soundtrack were great 9/10. Level design was good 8/10. The Sky with the sunset is one of the best looking I ve seen yet. Highlight was the view above the sunset valley from the top of the Tower.
Riddles belong to the best we had in any thief Mission yet = 9/10.
Overall the Mission is great and a 8,88/10
Thanks for the good map. Keep on doing great Riddle stuff. A Riddle map with some more Hd Textures and Objects (trees etc.) would be great.
baeuchlein on 26/7/2020 at 18:59
I'm usually not a fan of rather linear missions resembling some of the earliest adventure games. Haplo's missions often fall into that category, and this one as well. My problem with such missions is that things come to a sudden halt once I cannot solve one of the puzzles needed to win. Can be pretty discouraging.
However, I only experienced that once in this mission, near the end. I had a hard time reaching the charred remains of the unlucky apprentice and the Ifrit, and after that, only found the way to where I could get rid of the Ifrit by accident. Well, I can survive one such problem in a FM, I guess.;)
Other than that, some objects that were either very helpful (mostly readables) or even needed to get through the mission, were placed in a way that I often overlooked them. For example, there was the main part of the Serpent staff as well as a readable in one corridor, and the readable was barely visible through a window, so I needed several visits to the windows to find these two objects.
However, since the mission was just short of being too long, I still like it.
I disagree with Corsair's idea to make the Ice beasts invincible. I could just get past them on easiest difficulty level with the fire arrows found in the mission and climbing onto a roof to be able to fire on them without getting killed beforehand. One fire arrow less, and I would not have passed the third beast up on a ledge - it neither let me pass by, nor did it fall down by any event. Maybe we could settle on making the beasts invincible only on Expert difficulty?
Something else... The "Descr" field in the fm.ini file is overloaded with extreme amounts of text. AFAIK, this field is not meant to hold all the information from the Readme file of a mission, but rather some short description, like "Garrett tries to steal a gem from a deceased mage's tower". In fact, the contents of the Readme did not fit in there and are cut off. And if one just adds a few characters to one of the fields above this field, FMSel gets severe problems handling the file, and even refuses to let the player view another Readme file (e.g., the one in the player's native language). At least that happened when I fumbled around with a slightly modified version of that fm.ini file.
Oh, by the way... The runes on the right of the Golem diagram do make sense after decoding, while the ones on the left side appear to yield something in a language I don't understand. Is that really a language, or is it a fake one?