Why didn’t I play this before now? Gee, I couldn't tell you, but I’m glad I finally did. Thief has a lot going for it that appealed to me on a basic level: mostly bow-based combat (I love archery in games), sneaking/stealth, a sarcastic protagonist, some weird level design. You spend one level (“The Sword”) navigating what is effectively a lunatic noble’s fun house mansion, filled with doors on ceilings, plants growing indoors, and so on and so forth. The game lets you play with various types of arrows, which I found very satisfying to use. Water arrows, which put out lights so you can hide, Rope arrows which let you climb things, Moss arrows which let you walk over surfaces without making noise. The game could have all this cool stuff and still be lackluster, but fortunately Thief goes the extra mile.
Back when I played through the four Metal Gear Solid games, I recall being disappointed by how little a factor stealth tended to be, especially since MGS is the game that immediately comes up when one thinks of the stealth sub-genre. Thief, released in the same year as the original MGS, gave me the experience that I actually expected. The main character, expert thief Garrett, is not a super soldier like Snake. Shadows and ranged weapons are his chief advantages against the guards and monsters he’ll be facing. Furthermore, alerting enemies makes them suspicious of Garrett until they are dealt with, meaning that getting caught puts you at an extreme disadvantage; there is no brief period of hiding until your foes lose interest. I don’t think this is an objectively better system, but it does give the game a greater sense of tension, which is one of its main draws.
Thief‘s survival horror elements make it positively nerve-wracking to play. Zombies don’t usually scare me (and I am an easily frightened white boy) but the ones in Thief are downright terrifying. It’s funny to think that this game came out in 1998, the same year as Ocarina of Time, and some people were scared of the Redeads. Part of what makes the horror sections of Thief work so well is Garrett’s vulnerability. You carry very few weapons capable of handling the undead and a single hit from a zombie can put Garrett in the red. Thus, much of the undead stages are spent avoiding encounters with zombies or trying to get them together so you can kill a bunch at once. One stage of the game stands out in my mind: the chapter called “Return to the Cathedral.” Here, you are tasked with retrieving a spooky possessed eye from a cathedral overrun with the undead. In stages like this one, the single greatest quality of Thief shines more than ever: sound design.
This game uses sound better than pretty much anything else I’ve played. There’s not much music to speak of, but the ambiance of stages makes everything feel tense, and the various creatures’ sound effects are disturbing enough to rattle anyone. Because you spend so much time hiding in the dark, the sounds of footsteps and shifting become a valuable tool from the very start. A loud noise can often alert enemies, for better or worse: I often found myself shooting arrows to distract enemies or finding ways to maneuver around tile floors. It seems like an odd thing to praise sound design over everything else in a game, but it’s something that most players take for granted, often because sound is just not as important in some titles.
Another twist that Thief pulls, which I initially hated but ended up adoring by end game, was the use of unreliable maps. In most action-adventure games, you get a map that shows where everything important is or even fills out as you play, which is all well and good. Not in Thief. Garrett is a shady hoodlum, and he only gets access to crappy old maps that have vague instructions, missing details, and sometimes downright incorrect information. In a few stages, you don’t even get a map because Garrett’s in unknown territory. The great thing about this is it adds to the immersion so much: you really feel like a thief working on no budget with nobody to help you out. Naturally, this also adds to the survival horror feel of the game, but it’s worth mentioning on its own because I don’t think I have ever seen a game use bad maps the whole way through on purpose.
Thief has three difficulty levels (which you can adjust at will in each stage), but unlike many games they aren’t solely based on the number of enemies or Garrett’s health total. No, the difficulty levels in Thief instead add new objectives to the stages. I thought this was an interesting way to handle challenge relative to player experience. I played the game on Easy (I’m awful at first person games) and found it plenty challenging and very satisfying for a first go, and now on a replay I would still have more of the game to explore. It adds something to the game for people who might want to come back to it. You don’t see that in every game.
If I have to complain about one thing in Thief, it’s the final stages. They don’t test much in the way of stealth, and when they do it’s disappointing. The game’s later enemies go down the same as earlier ones: a blow to the head from the dark. While it’s fun figuring out how to sneak up on stuff, the developers probably could have come up with a few more creative enemy designs, as I had basically mastered the tried and true techniques by then. Still, this ends up being minor in the scheme of things and didn’t bug me much for about twenty hours, and the game makes up for it by construing a great situation in which stealing something actually saves the world. Thief ends on a cliffhanger, and I’m very much looking forward to playing the sequel.
9
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