Reply With QuoteOh, dear.
Every since I first played Thief 1, I've taken perverse pleasure in tormenting the servants in the games. Or should I say a servant. That stupid red-hooded little twerp from Thief 1. I love to hate him, love to torment and destroy him in every way the dark engine will allow. Pretty much all I've ever done with Dromed is create deathtraps for him. I've killed him enough times to fill several circles of hell.
I'm ordinarily a compassionate person. I despise bullies. I'm kind to animals. But that stupid servant -- his stupid blocky head, his stupid white leggings, but most of all his cowardly, shameless mewling -- it just triggers some primal, sadistic monster in me.
It would appear I'm not alone.
You don't just accidentally import a Thief 1 servant into Thief 2 (the low-detail character model with the blocky head, no less) and then base an entire level around him being abused, ridiculed, dehumanized, degraded. You do it for a reason. Because you've felt it too. The siren call of sadism that is his pathetic cry for help, the primal wrath that his dopey square head and stupid unchanging expression somehow call from the depths, like a Cthulhu hibernating in your soul.
It doesn't matter that your ultimate goal is to save him. The journey is what matters. The cut scenes in which the world stops and forces you to watch him getting brutalized for so long that you think the game has gone buggy. The dozens of guards who seem to exist for no reason but to torment him. The bureaucratic efficiency of his daily degradation, such to put an army of DMV clerks to shame. The volumes of correspondence that speak of nothing but his worthlessness, so focused and so virulent that I was almost expecting to find a bible laying around somewhere and, upon opening it, finding that Genesis 1:1 reads "In the beginning, Mr. Oh Dear sucked."
I laughed way too hard playing this mission. Cold embers in the dark corners of my soul have been rekindled. It's been years, but I need to relearn Dromed. Or at least the basics. Building rooms, light placement, lining up emitters that spit out servants with emitters that spit out firebolts...
