Ah, Thief 2. One of the best stealth games ever made. No, scratch that. The best stealth game ever made, although some people may argue that Thief Gold is better. It doesn't really matter since Thief 2 uses the same engine as Thief Gold and they're both excellent games.

Thief has one of the most in-depth stealth systems ever designed. Different surfaces cause different footstep sounds: carpet is silent while marble is very loud, meaning you have to walk more slowly across marble to not alert the guards, while you can safely run across carpet without triggering alerts. The sound system is the best ever made, even modern stealth games can't hold a candle to it. Visibility depends on light level, you are almost invisible in shadowy areas but guards can easily detect you in well-lit areas. And the game's minimal interface always provides good feedback on how visible you are via the light gem.

Level design is great, too, but overall a bit weaker than its predecessor. The best levels are the bank and Life of the Party, big sprawling levels that allow you to tackle objectives in any way you want. Good stuff.

But the real kicker is FAN MISSIONS. The vanilla game itself has 15 missions, each of which will take you anywhere between half an hour and two hours to play through. But once you're done with those, the wonderful world of community-made fan missions awaits you. You may wonder how I racked up so many hours on this game. It's because of fan missions and Dromed, the game's level editor, with which I work on my own fan missions.

I only bought this game here in late 2019 or early 2020, but I've been playing fan missions since 2010, so my actual playtime is much, much higher than what's tracked by Steam. There are over a thousand fan missions out there for you to play. A lot of them suck, of course. But just as many of them are decent. And a couple of them even surpass the original missions. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Thief fan mission scene has created some of the best level design ever. Some fan mission designers went on to work as level designers in the game industry, such as hipbreaker who was hired by Arkane to work on Dishonored 2, or skacky who was hired by 3D Realms to work on Wrath.

Here are some great fan missions I'd consider absolute must-plays: Ominous Bequest, Broken Triad, Rowena's Curse, The Seven Sisters, Bad Debts, Disorientation, Breaking the Stone, The Sound of a Burrick in a Room, Endless Rain, Ascend the Dim Valley, The Widow's Ire, Heist Society, Tales from the Cleft: Vandal, Shoes & Dresses*. And that's just a narrow selection of some of the best. There's plenty more where that came from. You can easily spend thousands of hours playing fan missions. I've been playing them for over ten years and still haven't played all of them!

*okay Shoes & Dresses is merely a mediocre mission and not a must-play, but I made it so I gotta shill it