In Conclusion: Thief: Deadly Shadows.

I bought Thief: Deadly Shadows on a whim, back in a time where I could get away with buying games on a whim. I didn’t have any history with the series, and, truthfully, the stealth genre had never really been my thing so it mostly sat on my shelf collecting dust, aside from a couple of unsuccessful attempts to play it over the years which never amounted to much.

Now at least once a year, I get an urge to play through some old game on my shelf. So, I just sort of embraced the urge when I felt like playing Thief 3, giving the game the serious shot I felt it kind of deserved. So I dusted off the old Xbox and it sort of became my project for the past couple of weeks.

I say “project” because it was certainly a labor at parts, but after seeing it through to the end, this might also be my favorite stealth game. As I said, I’m not too big on the genre. I don’t particularly like Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid, but my favorite parts of Batman: Arkham Asylum was when I could take a stealth approach. This made me think that maybe I could get into it if the game was right.

Well, I found said game, and who would have thought that I had already owned it for years.

Part of what makes the gameplay of Thief different sort of comes from the setting. Taking place in a location simply titled, “The City,” everything carries a sort of medieval style. Torches are typically the most common light source, guards hit you with swords instead of bullets, and, as a master thief named Garrett, you rely on the shadows and your tools (You have an assortment of arrows, a club, a dagger, flashbombs for a quick getaway, a mechanical eyeball, and various other items you’ll need) to get around. It seems all sort of realistic at first, but the game also takes plenty of imaginative liberties with the City later on that don’t feel preposterous when you’re playing, even though they kind of are.

While you do deal with plenty of regular guards you’ll also run into shamans and priests who will cast spells, races of ancient people hidden below ground, ents, the undead, and plenty of other things all just looking to kill a thief. This seems like it would get really ridiculous, but the game makes it feel really natural, as was my response to it. You look forward to simple, straight-forward mansion heists where you know you’ll be dealing with regular guards, but it’s when you start having to rob places where you don’t know what will be waiting for you that you get a little more cautious.

It’s sort of an interesting way to get you to relate to Garrett. Even though he doesn’t say a whole lot outside the mission briefings, you get the sense that his motivations going throughout the game are the same as yours. That being, to fill his pockets and to satisfy his curiousity about the mystery that makes up the story.

The story certainly isn’t the strongest aspect of the game, though. You deal with warring factions, a secret organization, and a potential evil that could destroy the entire City. A lot of these things didn’t especially grab me, but it does have a few interesting parts like a murderous hag that’s only mentioned in nursery rhymes and some of the dark history of some of the locations. Mainly the mystery of it all is just dark and disturbing enough that you want to figure it all out, despite the hassle it’ll inevitably bring.

So when you get to the actual gameplay, the story is progressed through the main missions. This is where you go to a specific location, break in, and rob the place blind, usually looking for a specific item for the story, and whatever might be worth something to a fence. There’s plenty of tension and satisfaction as you battle to outsmart the various forms of security on patrol. The locations always have a very ambitious layout, as well. There’s usually more than one way to break in, and you feel encouraged to explore the entirety of the location looking for whatever may be valuable. In an odd way, I can’t help but compare it to Assassin’s Creed.

In AC, when you kill the person you’re supposed to, it goes to a cutscene and eventually you have to sprint away from guards. In Thief, you accomplish your objective, but you’re still supposed to get out of the location, preferably without being detected. This left me with a little more satisfaction like I did my job well. You’re not supposed to fight off an entire crowd of guards. If Garrett did his job correctly, they’ll either be knocked out, or unaware of his presence even at the end. This was something I always wanted out of AC, but I guess that game just wasn’t designed for it.

These missions are definitely the meat of the game, and the only problem I had with them is when they start to drag. There’s a mission pretty late in the game that represents this well. It’s honestly the scariest and most atmospheric part of the game at first, but it keeps adding objectives and you get to a point where you just want to move on. You just become desensitized to what the level did well. This doesn’t happen often, but it happens enough that I have to make note of it.

Between the main missions, you get around the City itself where there are fences, shops, and plenty more. It’s not really a sandbox system, as you unlock new rather small parts of the city as the game progresses. At the same time, though, there is a lot going on if you know where to look. You’ll find plenty of tips and side missions by eavesdropping on conversations, plenty of citizens passing by to pickpocket, and plenty of places to break into outside the main story. After all, why should a dark conspiracy threatening the entire city take Garrett off the clock?

Thief: Deadly Shadows was just a really ambitious game for its time. It has very fascinating, dark locations and a lot of options to handle the massive variety of situations you’ll run into. Unfortunately, with ambition also comes some technical problems.

The game crashed more times than I could count, there were definitely some glitches (I shared the funnier ones on twitter), the load times could be ridiculous, and even at one point the game froze on the saving screen. This deleted my save file and forced me to start the game over, making up about 6 hours.

Still, to Thief’s credit, the game was good enough that I actually was willing to make up that time (this time using an alternating save method) and I was willing to look past the technical problems to see what the game did well.

It may have taken me 7 years, but I can now say I’m very glad I got this game.

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