Thick As Thieves

I came into Thick As Thieves with a colour-coded list of expectations. Warren Spector and Paul Neurath, the architects behind the original Thief series and Deus Ex, are attached to this project, and that pedigree carries real weight for anyone who tracks the immersive-sim lineage. What I found is a game that genuinely understands the craft of stealth at a mechanical level, then trips over its own ambitions at almost every structural decision. The setting is legitimately interesting. Kilcairn is a fictional Scottish city circa the 1910s, where gaslamp architecture collides with low-magic, and the Thieves' Guild operates as a kind of organized-crime consultancy. You play as one of two available thieves: the Spider, whose grappling hook gives her strong vertical mobility and smoke grenades for quick disengagements, or the Chameleon, whose guard-disguise ability is locked behind progression and, when you finally unlock it, underwhelms because guard variety is thin. The core heist loop across two maps, the Constables Guildhouse and a second landmark location, involves reading patrol routes, managing your noise output (crouch-walking generates almost nothing, sprinting reaches guards reliably at range), banking loot at stash points before your pockets get too heavy, and racing a timed extraction once objectives are complete. The Vistara Diamond functions as an equippable X-ray tool that highlights guards, traps, and treasure through walls. It removes genuine tension on lower difficulties and becomes a crutch that the game almost requires you to use constantly. The progression system is where the strategy-minded player will feel the friction most. The second character, additional difficulty tiers, and most tools are gated behind level requirements and contract completions across the same two maps. Replay variability comes from shifted guard configurations and randomized objective locations, and that does buy the levels some longevity on early runs. The problem is mathematical: once you have the maps memorized, the randomization is not deep enough to force genuinely different decision trees. Higher difficulty modes add turrets, drone patrols, and Heavy Enforcers who cannot be approached from the front, which is where the game briefly shows what it could be. Novice and the tiers below it are tuned so forgivingly, with guards who essentially shrug at unconscious colleagues, that newcomers may never feel the satisfying pressure that makes this genre tick. Co-op is the context in which Thick As Thieves finds its clearest argument for purchase. The map design rewards coordination, one player neutralizes a patrol route while the other moves through a restricted floor, and failed heists become shared comedy rather than tedium. The respawn system drops you back in a nearby closet minus your unbanked loot, which keeps runs moving without punishing new players into quitting. Solo works, but the absence of a second voice and backup makes objective vagueness and map repetition land harder. The game launched at a price point that signals introductory content, and that framing is accurate: this is explicitly billed as the opening chapter of a larger planned world, with future maps and characters promised. Whether those updates arrive fast enough to hold the playerbase is the bet you are making. For strategy and systems-minded players, the honest read is this: the mechanical foundations are cleaner than the reception suggests. Guard sight cones, sound propagation by surface type, stash-point economics, and the loadout choices around six gear items all show considered design. The problem is that two maps and one fully accessible character is not enough content to stress-test those systems before the novelty collapses. If you are new to stealth games, the accessible difficulty curve and forgiving respawn loop genuinely make this a low-stakes entry point worth considering. If you are a genre veteran who has cleared Thief on Expert or optimized Hitman routes for score, you will exhaust the interesting decisions in a single session and spend the rest grinding for difficulty unlocks that should have been available from the start.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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