Bluehawk

The five mushrooms can be found: I really enjoyed this mission on my first playthrough, but when I replayed it a second time to try and get all loot and secrets and ghost it, I ran into some nasty RNG that basically soft-locked me. I'm surprised a little that we didn't get to hear the baby weird screams as described in the journal, or enter the baby's room with the crib at some point, but the imagination may be scarier than anything you can easily achieve in the game engine. A great little mission to play on the 31st, short and sweet but chewy like taffy.

Are you confusing Randy Smith with Harvey Smith?

I tested it just now and I can reach the ladder just fine, as long as I hold down the run button while swimming.

I always wondered about Karras's helmet in T2. Is there an in-game explanation for why it has such an elongated cranium? Is he supposed to be a mutant with a big brain, or is it just hubris? Did he steal his helmet from the "Precursors" of the Lost City and it serves as an oblique reference to skull-binding practiced in several real life ancient cultures? Sorry if this is off-topic.

In the Tenements there is a scholar who has left a Book of Enigmas in his room. You must seek to understand "The Octagon Weird". If you want a better hint, open the spoiler. If you just want the solution, open this second spoiler.

I find the light-gem/shadow balance to be quite strange in places, where the ground beneath your feet appears pitch black on default settings, but your light-gem is glowing faintly and you'll be in such a narrow space that you can't help but aggro an enemy (the dogs in the caves are especially hard to ghost past). If you crank up the brightness and gamma, you can see the edges of shadows more clearly but the whole aesthetic of the game is ruined. Sometimes you'll open a door near a light and the baked lightmap is static but your illumination seems to be dynamic, so it looks like there's a shadow flush with the doorway but your gem will light up anyway from direct line-of-sight with the lamp. If there were stencil shadows being drawn, this ambiguity wouldn't happen, or otherwise if enemies had more levels of alert with a forgiving curve, it wouldn't be such a touchy issue. Several times I thought to myself, "The Dark Mod did this a little bit better..." but these are still early days and I'm sure these features will be improved, since they're so fundamental. Things like light graduation and enemy sensitively levels will probably takes months or years to hone in perfectly and I'm liking what I see so far. The combat is meh, but optional, the world-building seems promising, and I love the look of the game. It's also great to hear the vocal talents of Stephen Weyte and Terri Brosius, though the VO is a bit sparse in the demo.

This might sound odd, but I wish it were easier to kill rats in the Dark Mod using the sword. Presently it feels nearly impossible and you're better off using broadheads. There are maybe only a handful of times when you need to kill a rat, like in Chronicles of Skullduggery 3 or arguably Full Moon Fever, so it's not a huge problem (or a problem at all), but in an immersive sim, skewering a stationary rat on the tip of your sword really shouldn't be so tricky.

The teller key simply opens the front door, you got it from the keybox in the lobby. The "teller safe key" is what you need.

My go to answer for this question used to be Metal Gear Solid 1 for the original Playstation, but then I wondered now if I experienced it fresh for the first time today, as an adult in 2022 playing it as an old retro game on an emulator, I'd probably appreciate it academically, but not be totally enraptured by it as I was in 1999, when it was genuinely new and cutting edge for gaming, and like something I had never experienced before even in film or literature (I wasn't well-read at the time). This thought experiment would work better with recent releases that haven't had time to age yet, and don't have mountains of essays written about them to colour your expectations, but I can't think of any modern release that amazed me enough to warrant erasing them from my memory and playing them fresh again. But on the other hand, I didn't play Thief Gold and TMA until long after their release and they definitely still hold up today as fresh experiences, regardless of how "dated" they look, sound and feel, so maybe MGS would still amaze me... I'm just not sure. I'd definitely recognize more of the references and rip-offs Kojima was leaning on and it would be a different experience regardless.

Melan's 3rd mission in the Penny Dreadful series, "Erasing the Trail", has a hidden memorial to Lady Rowena, a much-celebrated FM author for Thief 1 and 2, who passed away in 2016, not long before this mission was published. To access the memorial:

I think dropping ray-tracing into Thief 1 and 2's levels would ruin their designed shadows and make sneaking around impossible, but a new game built from the ground up with raytracing in mind could be interesting.

No, you'll find the "skeleton key" in the hands of a skeleton.

One problem I had when replaying this mission recently was that fighting the skeleton in the shop would sometimes attract the attention of the guards on the street, so I had to quickload two or three times just for that opening sequence. And also the guards walking through the rain and thunder don't seem to have their hearing appropriately handicapped, so the player is at an unfair disadvantage generally when sneaking through those noisy environments.