Thief: The Dark Project

"Woke up in my clothes again this morning

Don't know exactly where I am

[...]

It can be no optical illusion

How can you explain?"

 

Sting - Shadows in the Rain

 

 

I was dimly aware of Thief's reputation back in high school but paid it no attention. For one thing, at the time I was busy with Half-Life and Starcraft. For another, I've never been a fan of stealth-based games, with the odd exception of truly atmospheric ones like Amnesia or Miasmata or SYABH. I prefer my enemies to see me coming, to witness my numberless armies descend upon them LIKE AN INEXORABLE TIDE OF DDDOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM !!!

 

Ahem.

Where were we?

Thief. Right. Thief made some waves at its release and is arguably the defining ancestor of first-person stealth gameplay in general. I'm trying it now (after twenty years) for actively avoiding Cyberpunk 2077 because it looks halfway decent and I'm deferring my inevitable disappointment. So I tried one of their earlier ouvres, The Witcher 2, which turned out to be crap for numerous reasons I'll get into at some later date. Given C77's inclusion of crouching, line of sight, noise, and hiding corpses to avoid raising suspicion, I decided to also check out the grand-daddy of such features' implementation into FPS.

It's not what I expected.

Alright, so in some ways it's exactly what I expected. In fact this floor puzzle with dart traps was probably as played out as the Sphinx' riddle by 1998... and has continued to persist in remaining outdated even as it's being reused today. Still, three or four missions into things, other aspects either diverge from Thief's spiritual descendants or from the expectations of its own time in interesting ways.

 

1) Oh, you mean it's the "thief" class

Being slow-paced by the standards of FPS with plenty of time to take in the scenery, later stealth-based games have tended to bank on memorable settings. Thief on the other hand seems a fairly generic mishmash of supernatural medievalism with random Van de Graaff generators and burglar alarms thrown in, a common ailment of even the better half of games until ~Y2K when more gamers started favoring more coherent, better-researched settings. Aside from zombies riding elevators, the tendency to fall back on Dungeons and Dragons is also evident in pitting your eponymous Thief against stereotypical sword-and-board Fighters and fireball-flinging Wizards and Clerics wielding blunt weapons. You're also obviously a "thief" peppering foes with arrows, instead of the later redesign of a "rogue" around overpowered backstabs.

2) Gettin' physical

More fighting than I'd expected, to the point it slightly undercuts the game's premise. Evidently its creators did not think they'd be founding a sub-genre and did not feel comfortable dropping most of the First Person Slasher elements.

On the plus side, the physics feel surprisingly realistic for something from '98, though inevitably dated by even early 2000s standards. Arrows and thrown objects follow ballistic trajectories but enemies lurch about barely moving their limbs, and sword / sap swings connect properly only about half the time and have a serious issue with verticality. (This problem was reiterated by some of its contemporaries and imitators.) I was nonetheless impressed by finding out I can accidentally kill an unconscious guard... by dropping him down a stairwell. (Ooopsie.)

3) Swash or buckle, at will

Action and stealth interweave to such an extent as to yield more freedom than you would normally find outside sandbox games. I ran the introductory (heist) mission stumbling in circles around the mansion at a dead run, trying to lose alerted guards and frustrated at exploring too slowly while sneaking; the jailbreak by murdering or incapacitating almost every enemy and setting off all the alarms just for sheer mayhem; the tomb raiding mission in uncharacteristically stealthy fashion, as I discovered I hate fighting the infinitely self-resurrecting zombies or the cave-lizard-dinosaur-dragon-whatevers. For the botched assassination I'm currently trying to clear a path as directly as I can straight through the front doors and middle of the mansion. Granted, I can do all this in large part because this first third of the game is on the easy side (on "normal" difficulty anyway) but just the fact it's not hardcoded to prevent you from doing things your own way is a breath of fresh air... from two decades ago.

4) Level-headed design

Underpinning this freedom of choice, level design should probably be considered Thief's most concrete accomplishment. Albeit sparse, the individual maps feel HUGE by late '90s standards and at least the first few are just convoluted enough to challenge while falling short of sheer frustration. Being denied a true map or detailed instructions is a cheap gimmick, and I won't deny I've cheated via a walkthrough, but it's mostly to save the time of backtracking rather than being truly stuck. The simple graphics can at once make for confusing Hanna-Barbera backdrop repetition and render the few noticeable landmarks even more noticeable. What seem dead-end corridors often loop back to an earlier point and even false paths usually reward you with some minor loot so that exploring each map so far is entertaining enough in itself.

 

At least in this "Gold" version, no area feels perfunctory or ignored, with multiple routes the norm rather than the exception. Slowly crawl up a ramp or time the perfect second to climb up a ledge. Blow a zombie up with holy water or sneak past it or lure it to a far corner and cut it down or simply run past its pathetic shambling. Pickpocket a guard by leaning around a corner or lure him away from his post with a little noise and sneak past or sap him, or arrow him to death from afar. You'll find most options, the corners and shadows and silence and verticality and occasional firepower, have somehow been provided for, either in your mission gear or your surroundings.

Granted stealth games are still not my cup of tea so I likely won't suffer the dated combat mechanics much farther into the campaign, but as with System Shock (and unlike most oldies) I can at least see how Thief advanced the possibilies of its creative medium.

Worth its renown.