I hate to say this about a fan project, but I honestly don't get the point of this when Thief fan missions exist. The stealth mechanics, movement and AI are all clunkier than in Thief, and all that was very apparent trying this soon after Thief 2X. The custom missions are obviously a big part of the appeal, and what the four missions I tried seemed to have in common was huge size, high loot requirements and a low amount of interactable objects, a combination which meant that I often found myself needing more loot and ramming my face into every surface and mashing the use key until I accidentally found something that could be picked up or used.

I will shoutout the mission A House of Locked Secrets though, it had a creative setup and a well executed gimmick that I'm not sure would be possible in Thief. It also helped that it took mostly place in an open ended area and had no specific loot requirement but instead focused on varied story objectives. It was very long like the other missions, but it felt like there was constant progress rather than just spending forever scouring every corner. It alone might make The Dark Mod worth trying, but personally I'm not going to dig any deeper for more gems like it when the other three missions I tried were less than enjoyable.

Many years after its release, it's still a much better game than Bannerlord. As long as this game exists, it's unlikely that Bannerlord will really get a chance. The developers are so visionless and lazy that the game they made in 2010 still looks better than the game they made in 2022, and that's a serious problem. I don't think I'll be excited about any other game from Taleworlds after this, and they probably won't even try to develop another game, because Bannerlord took them 10 years to develop, and the result is a mediocre game that relies on mods to fill it out. But what they forgot is that the same was true for Warband. The developers also never bothered to write a story for the single player campaign in Bannerlord. Their only concern was to make an online game. But that's also true for Warband. In short, everything Bannerlord has to offer, Warband already gave to players years ago.