Gaming: This Thief Fan Mission Has You Play A Blind Character Trying To...

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

I think I just ate a compass. By that I mean a magnetic one, not a pointy one used to draw circles. I'm not stupid. I just can't see, you see, and when you can't see it's a lot harder to tell whether an object you just picked up might be edible.

Hence, when I plucked a star-shaped object off a door and my inventory labelled it as "food?" as it does with everything, down it went, costing me two points of health and any chance of knowing where north is. Not that a compass would have been much use to me anyway, given the whole lack of vision thing.

This would probably be the weirdest thing to happen in most games. But in Selection Day, it doesn't rank within the top ten.

I first heard about Selection Day via Romain Barrilliot, the Arkane Studios level designer and mastermind behind Thief Gold's excellent fanmade campaign The Black Parade—who recently helped me figure out how tall Thief's protagonist Garrett is. Selection Day is a newly released fan mission (or FM) for Thief 2, which Thief's relatively small community has produced thousands of since the first game launched. So when Barrilliot described it as "one of the most unique I've ever played", I knew that I had to try it.

Selection Day takes place in the far-flung, post-Metal Age future of Thief where the City is plagued by two possibly-linked epidemics—sinkholes and blindness. As the sinkholes transform the city into a jumbled, semi-ruined labyrinth, the blind are guided through the maze by an elaborate braille system. This involves traditional signs with patterns of raised bumps, supplemented by strange eyestalks through which the City's unseen masters (known as Ocular Superiors) communicate. There are also machines that project braille into the air to lend primordial vision to those within proximity—one of my favourite nuggets of Selection Day's tremendously involved worldbuilding.

You play as a court judge on their way to preside over an important ruling, when an Ocular Superior unexpectedly leads you to crash through the window of a mysterious building. Here, you are given a simple objective "Seek Remedy for Your Blindness".

Naturally, playing a

Source: PC Gamer