Thief Master Thief Edition

The dark is the best thing in this game, and I mean that literally. I've played plenty of stealth games where shadow is a stat; here it is a place you stand in, thick and slow, lit by gas lamps and candle flames you can snuff out yourself. Eidos-Montreal built a version of the City that is genuinely oppressive to walk through, all wet cobbles, muttering Watch patrols and rain hammering on tile roofs. Put on headphones and the sound design alone justifies a playthrough. Everything else about the 2014 Thief is a negotiation, but that atmosphere has held up since its February 2014 release. Mechanically it is a first-person stealth game where fighting is a punishment rather than a plan. Garrett carries a blackjack for anyone careless with their back, a bow with a rotating set of arrow types (broadheads for the rare fight, water arrows for flames, blunt and rope arrows for reaching things you shouldn't), a claw for climbing, and a lockpicking minigame that asks you to feel for the tumblers while a patrol walks past outside. The loop is simple and good: case a route, douse the lights, pick every pocket in reach, leave with more loot than the job asked for. Missions are chapter-based and stitched together by a City hub full of side jobs, client contracts and locked apartments, with your take feeding into gear upgrades. Full controller support is here and it plays fine on a pad. What disappoints is the geometry wrapped around all that atmosphere. Coming from Thief 2, or even from Dishonored, the levels feel narrow. Vertical routes exist, but rope arrows only attach to pre-approved wooden beams, and far too many transitions are a squeeze-through-the-gap animation or a door hiding a load. The City hub in particular spends your patience on navigation instead of giving you somewhere to plan from. The story of the Baron's Watch and the trouble Garrett gets dragged into is delivered at arm's length, and Garrett himself is written so tersely he barely reacts to any of it. The Watch AI is inconsistent too, clocking you through a doorway in one room and losing you behind a crate in the next. Mostly Positive at 75% across 24,000 Steam reviews and a 70 on Metacritic is, honestly, about right. The thing that saves it, and the reason I still point people at it, is the custom difficulty screen. You can strip the assists out one by one: kill Focus so the game stops highlighting loot and slowing time during pickpockets, drop the objective markers, ban killing, ban knockouts, cut yourself off from saves. Played that way, with most of the HUD gone, the corridor design matters less because you are reading rooms with your eyes and ears again instead of following a glow. That is the version of this game worth your time, and it is buried behind a menu plenty of players never open. Ghosting a mansion for a full loot sweep without laying a hand on a single guard is a great evening. So pick this up if you want a moody, sound-led sneaking game and you're willing to assemble your own hard mode out of the options menu. Skip it if what you actually want is an immersive sim with a toybox of powers and levels you can crack open from six directions, because this one keeps its hands on the wheel far more than its ancestors did. It does one thing exceptionally well, and that one thing is being in the dark.

Alex · Scout Team

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