Thief: Deadly Shadows is Surprisingly Good

There are two things I've been persistently hearing about Thief III: Deadly Shadows for over a decade: first, is that it's an inferior disappointment compared to its highly-regarded predecessors, and second, is that the Shalebridge Cradle level is so good that it completely makes up for all of the game's shortcomings. Upon completing the game, I feel like I've been somewhat misled all these years. There's a ton of notable detraction from the precedents established in Thief and Thief 2, but it's really not a bad game at all, or even a bad Thief game. The Shalebridge Cradle, meanwhile, is a really well-designed level, but it didn't impress me nearly as much as the constant years of hype led me to expect. 

There are merits for both arguments -- I can agree with both, to an extent -- but I feel like people have been exaggerating the extreme positives and negatives of this game for years, when Deadly Shadows is just kind of an average game all around. There's a lot to criticize in this game (and indeed, I'll be doing a lot of that below), but there's some really good stuff at work here, too. It's a pity that the game had to compromise so much for a new platform and a new audience, and that some of its more brilliant ideas didn't work out like Ion Storm intended, because I actually kind of like Deadly Shadows, despite all of its flaws. 

I absolutely hated the game at first, though. Everything about it felt horribly wrong, because just about everything was different -- usually for the worse. It's as if, in the process of moving to a new studio and designing the sequel for a new platform, the development team took the successful, proven blueprints of Thief and Thief 2 and threw them out the window, electing instead to reinvent the wheel, only to end up with some kind of octagonal contraption. Sure, it vaguely resembles a wheel, and it does roll if you push it, but it's really bumpy and just not very good.

Garrett's bedroom in his apartment.

A lot of the changes seem to stem primarily from consolization. Because of the original Xbox's inferior memory capacity, levels couldn't be as big or as open as they used to be, resulting in more compact level design broken into multiple loading zones. And because console audiences were perceived as more casual than the PC audiences that played Thief and Thief 2, levels in Deadly Shadows are a lot more linear, and valuable loot sparkles brightly so that it's easier to see. The tutorial is particularly disappointing, with its glowing footstep trails that show you exactly where to go, and its full screen text prompts that pop up to tell you exactly what to do. It's important that a game explain to you how things work, but that much hand-holding up front was almost insulting to me, and the text prompts and glowing footsteps were completely immersion breaking.

It really makes you wonder if anyone at Ion Storm had ever heard of the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Thief 1 had a perfectly fine, if simple, tutorial section where you got to play as Garrett going through his Keeper training. It was basically an obstacle course with an on-screen character talking to you, explaining how things work and issuing commands. It was both thematic and immersive, and most importantly, it could be skipped if you already knew what you were doing. I can only assume Ion Storm made the tutorial a mandatory part of the first mission, and made it so heavy-handed, because they had little faith in console audiences to figure stuff out on their own, or to actually play the tutorial if it wasn't mandatory. The first mission, then, is utterly bland and annoying because of the tutorial.

Movement has to be the absolute worst thing about Deadly Shadows, though. Whereas movement felt smooth and responsive in Thief 1 & 2, movement in Deadly Shadows is a clunky, imprecise mess. As the first game in the series to be playable in third-person, Garrett needed a complete body model with a full range of animations. To make the first-person perspective work with those animations, they plugged the camera directly into Garrett's head, which leads to a lot of clunky head-bobbing and awkward delays when you try to move or turn a certain way and find Garrett's body pulling the camera away from where you expect to be.

Surveying the situation from the rooftops. 

When you start moving from a stand still, the camera delays for a split second and then sort of zooms forward to catch up, and when you come to a stop, the camera lurches forward slightly and then pulls back. When you jump, the camera seems to stagger, and when you go up stairs it bounces almost like it's being dragged up the steps. If you turn around and then move forward, Garrett will spin out a short distance, running a small semi-circle, because his head is turned further than his body, and pressing forward causes his body to move forward and then turn to catch up to his head. Leaning has a slow, rigid feel to it -- you release the button and have to sit there and wait a full second or more for Garrett's animation to move him back into a normal upright position. Even strafing against walls, and thereby bumping into them, causes the camera to jerk and spaz unpleasantly.

A lot of actions actually lock the controls up on you, which can be a significant immersion-breaker. When you pick a lock, the game zooms in on the lock and doesn't let you move or look around until you disengage from the lock. When you pick up a body, the camera takes control and locks your movement and camera control while Garrett kneels down to grab the body. When you blackjack a guard, the controls and camera lock up while Garrett executes the attack. The same happens for getting on or off of a ladder, or when you jump in or out of wall-climbing.

The result is a movement system that feels clunky, awkward, unwieldy, and imprecise. Part of the reason Thief 1 & 2 were so good is because the movement system felt snappy and responsive; it was easy to do exactly what you intended to do and made you feel like you had a tight kinetic control over Garrett's movements. Deadly Shadows makes Garrett's movements work at odds with your intentions, often leading you to fall off ledges (and die) or to bump into things (and alert guards), and just generally making you feel like you're controlling a bumbling, drunken buffoon, which shouldn't be the case for a so-called "master thief."

Don't turn around the corner. Nothing to see here good buddy.

Melee combat was also changed for the worse, perhaps in an effort to emphasize the stealth system over combat. I criticized the combat in Thief 1 & 2 for feeling clunky and sluggish, but at least it had some good ideas; more importantly, once you got the hang of it, you could actually fare pretty well based on sheer skill. Garrett's sword has been replaced with a pitiful dagger in Deadly Shadows; you can't block attacks anymore, and you can't aim a certain way for different types of attacks. All you can do is mash the attack button and flail wildly at an extremely close range. Any time you go into combat, you're guaranteed to suffer a ton of damage because the system is just so terrible, which means any time you get caught by guards, you have to run away or else reload a save file.

It's especially problematic because now, in order to execute a stealth KO with the blackjack, you have to be directly behind an unaware guard. It used to be that you could knock out a guard from any angle, as long as you were close enough to hit them and they didn't notice you. You could even run directly up to a guard in a well-lit room and hit him from the front, if you could catch him by surprise by getting to him quickly enough. Knocking guards out felt natural in Thief 1 & 2; it was intuitive and enabled you to do whatever made the most sense in the scenario, whereas Deadly Shadows makes it feel artificially restricting. Consider that, if a guard is sitting in a wooden chair at a dining table, he's completely invincible to knockout because his back is protected. If you whack him in the back of the head, he brushes it off like a hit from rolled-up newspaper, and turns around to kick your ass.

Then there are all the weird technical changes and issues. There's no setting in the options menu to adjust mouse sensitivity, and you can't even get to the options menu while in-game; you have to save and exit out to the main menu. The field-of-view is set uncomfortably low for a first-person game, and the menus and fonts look like something out of the early days of RuneScape. I also encountered numerous glitches, including countless times when Garrett got stuck in a jumping animation, floating around on the ground unable to do anything. I got stuck on the terrain countless times and clipped through walls on occasion. The physics are pretty wonky, too, with Garrett sort of floating in mid-air for a second at the top of his jump, and wooden barrels and boxes that frequently make colossal, thunderous noises when you lightly brush your elbow against them, and ragdoll effects that break NPCs' spines in half as they collapse backwards on themselves.

Ridiculous ragdoll effects, complete with atomic blue object highlight.

A lot of other features that had become staple elements of Thief 1 & 2 are inexplicably missing in Deadly Shadows, and their absence is immediately noticeable and off-putting. There are no more cutscenes before mission briefings; all you get is a menu screen that shows Garrett's narration in text form, along with his usual voice-over. You can still lean left and right, but they removed the ability to lean forward. Swimming is completely gone, thereby removing entire aspects of level design. Rope arrows are gone, replaced by wall-climbing gloves that come later in the game. Arrows disappear after they're fired and can no longer be reclaimed if you miss, and the different sounds your footsteps make on different surfaces seems to play a much less significant role in the stealth system.

With all of that stuff missing, what's been added in their place? There's the afore-mentioned climbing gloves, which aren't as fun or as creative as the rope arrows, while tending to have extremely limited uses. Lock-picking now involves a mini-game where you have to orient the lockpick along the four cardinal directions to unlock a series of tumblers, finding the right position for each tumbler. It's ok. There are a few new items, like oil flasks that you can throw to make guards slip on them (I never even bothered with these) and gas bombs that function like gas arrows, except thrown like a grenade. You can also press a button to press yourself against a wall, which is useful for getting out of guards' paths in narrow corridors or for finding that extra bit of shadow to conceal yourself in, but I forgot about it entirely because it seems like it only works in areas where it's specifically expected; almost any time I thought to use it, it didn't even work.

The biggest addition to Deadly Shadows is the semi-open hub that exists between missions. Instead of just going through a series of missions, starting at a menu screen and being dropped into separate maps, Deadly Shadows takes place in a persistent world that requires you to move through the city to get to each mission area. Additionally, there are merchants you can visit to sell your stolen goods or to buy extra thieving supplies, and there are optional side-missions you can complete for extra rewards if you explore the city sufficiently to find them. You can also pick the pockets of citizens as they walk through the streets or rob merchants and taverns as you see fit, all while keeping out of sight of the city guard, who will try to arrest you on sight as a known criminal.

Spotted by a guards in the city streets.

The fact that you get to stay in Garrett's perspective between missions enhances the immersion quite a bit, since you're in his shoes at every step of the game -- time rarely passes when you're not in control of Garrett, or watching him in a cutscene. It's also nice to get a stronger feel for Garrett's everyday life, in terms of seeing more of what the city is like and how his neighbors, fences, and suppliers talk to him. I also like all the extra freedom it offers for exploration, to find hidden areas and complete optional side-missions. The semi-open nature of the city hub even lets you choose the order you tackle missions in a few key areas, which makes you feel a little bit more in control of the game.

But while the city hub sounds like a nice addition conceptually, it doesn't work that well in practice. One could argue just as easily that it simply makes you do all the boring legwork between missions that the game used to cut out for you -- slowly trudging through the streets just to get to the next mission, and running back-and-forth across town to sell all of your junk to different merchants, since each one only buys certain types of items. The whole process is pointless, anyway, because there's never any reason to buy anything from the shops; everything you could possibly need is easily found within missions and sitting around the city streets, waiting to be picked up. The only thing you ever need to buy is the climbing gloves.

The option for somewhat non-linear exploration is nice, but the structured limitations get awfully annoying when areas are conveniently inaccessible until you need to go there. It was particularly bad when I overheard people on the street talking about robbing a museum by sneaking through an underground tunnel; I found the tunnel, and then was stopped by an invisible wall because I apparently wasn't meant to go there yet. Another section of the city is sealed off because it's supposedly under quarantine, but then the quarantine is inexplicably lowered later in the game, and once you're in there's no evidence of there having been a quarantine at all. And, in general, it's kind of difficult to feel like you're in a real city when everywhere is divided into tiny regions and separated by loading zones.

Selling goods to a fence. 

The presence of city guards in the streets is seemingly to maintain tension and stealth gameplay between missions, but their behavior is more annoying than anything else, particularly because of their occasional sixth sense for detecting you. How, for instance, can they differentiate the sound of my footsteps from those of the crowd around me when I'm walking behind them? You'd think I'd blend in with the sound of random citizens walking the streets, but they somehow know it's me and pull out their swords to apprehend me. In another situation I'm breaking into an apartment; I'm crouched, moving as silently as possible with the guards' back to me, and yet the moment I step into the apartment he draws his weapon and comes charging at me. In another situation I silently break into an armory and knock out the blacksmith; in the process of looting the place, a guard walks by outside and somehow knows I'm in there robbing the place, even though I closed the door.

It's equally ridiculous how, if you knock a guard out, another one spawns immediately to replace him, leaving you with five seconds or less to hide the body before the replacement resumes the post. I decided to test the limits at one point and gave up after knocking essentially the same guard out six times and dumping six unconscious bodies in an alley. It was kind of fun sneaking past guards in the streets at first, but it gets repetitive really quickly. After a while, you might realize it's faster and easier just to run past them, especially since they all get tired and give up chasing you so quickly. Then again, they seem to get frozen in time the moment you cross a loading zone. At one point I was in hot pursuit of guards and went through a loading zone. I then watched a cutscene in which an entire night passed, and then spent 20-30 minutes breaking out of the building, only to find the same guards in the same positions mid-pursuit when I stepped back outside.

Besides guards, there are also hammerites and pagans roaming parts of the city, who will attack you on sight unless you gain their favor through the game's faction system. From a thematic standpoint, it makes very little sense that Garrett would voluntarily seek to help either of these groups, considering he's been at odds with them at various times throughout both previous games, and there's little practical benefit to doing so. All it does it make them stop attacking you, which admittedly makes certain tasks in the city a bit easier, but it has no effect in missions; pagans and hammers you encounter in missions will be hostile regardless of your status with them. You can ally with both factions, so there are no consequences for choosing one over the other (no branching paths or extra opportunities), and getting on their good sides involves completely mundane MMO-style tasks. The whole thing feels kind of pointless, as if they wanted to do a lot more with it but just ran out of time. Or else, it was just a half-baked idea from the start.

This guy's really happy to be a hammerite. 

Deadly Shadows isn't all bad, however. Some subtle changes are worth praising and acknowledging, like how some guards now carry torches with them, adding a new layer of gameplay to the mix as you try to stay inside of their moving shadow, or slink away as your dark corner of safety is slowly revealed to the light. Guards are also more perceptive now; they notice when other guards or loot are missing from somewhere, and they'll start searching the area for trouble. They're more reactive to torches going out suddenly, and their idle banter with other guards, or the comments they direct to you, are generally more entertaining ("Anyone there? We're friendly and don't know how to fight. Bah, we're wasting our time."). Rats often scurry about the floor and squeal if you step on them, which can alert guards to your presence, so that's something else you have to be mindful of.

Where Deadly Shadows actually improves over its predecessors is atmosphere. A lot of this is simply because it was released years after the originals, and therefore looks and sounds a lot better, but there's a definite artistic stroke to the way Deadly Shadows' levels are constructed. The levels in Deadly Shadows may not be as open or as complex as those in Thief 2, but the hammer cathedral, seaside manor, Shalebridge cradle, and Wieldstrom museum are just about on par with the levels in Thief 2, and are actually some of the most memorable levels of the entire series.

The seaside manor may be my favorite level of any Thief game. The mansion itself is beautiful, but there was a rather tranquil feel to sneaking through it with the rain clapping against the roof and the occasional lightning cracks illuminating the rooms through the glass ceilings while thunder rolled in the distance. It was picturesque, and the soundtrack that plays in the level, with its melancholy piano, chimes, and strings. really brought out the emotive situation of the burglary. You're there stealing from a woman grieving over her deceased husband; she sits at the observatory balcony by herself 24 hours a day, surrounded by servants who come and go to take care of her, and yet feeling so very alone, while those very servants plot to rob her blind. After interacting with her directly, and hearing the voice message her husband had left for her, and hearing how her servants talked about her behind her back, I felt so empathetic for her that I actually felt bad stealing from her.

The opening shot of "Robbing the Cradle."

The Shalebridge Cradle, meanwhile, is alleged to be "the scariest level in any game, even putting Amnesia’s most frightening moments to shame." Others claim "it not only beats every other level in the game - nay, the series - it beats every other moment in every other FPS game I ever played. Sod that, every other game of any kind," and frequently tops the list in discussion boards for the scariest level anyone's ever played. Kieron Gillen wrote a 10-page article for PC Gamer that reviewed just that one level by itself, arguing that "it’s probably the scariest level ever made, an experiment in non-linear storytelling methods that pays off handsomely and is one of the towering gaming achievements of the past year." There has been immeasurable praise for the Shalebridge Cradle over the past 11 years, and its reputation is the primary reason I started playing the series; after feeling so disappointed with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, I wanted to play something truly scary, and turned my sights on "Robbing the Cradle."

And I was underwhelmed. Sure, it's one of the best levels of the game, but "scariest level ever"? Maybe it was at the time, but I felt more scared during moments of Doom 3, FEAR, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Obscure, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and Pathologic, all of which came out shortly after Deadly Shadows. For an even more direct comparison, I found the "Return to the Cathedral" mission from Thief 1, as well as moments from System Shock 2 and Silent Hill 2 -- all of which predate Deadly Shadows -- much more tense and frightening than the Cradle. Most of the "scary" stuff in the Cradle is just part of the ambient soundtrack, or are scripted noises, all of which are completely harmless. The enemies look far creepier than the usual guards, but they're no more threatening than the guards because they function virtually the same. Basically, you're playing a normal Thief level but with spooky visuals and music pasted on top. The only time I felt remotely scared was when a physics glitch sent me through a wall and knocked half my health away.

So I didn't find the Cradle very scary at all, but it definitely succeeds at being one of the most immersive levels of the series. The tense, droning soundtrack with its ominous sound effects, along with the grim burnt-up appearance of the building and the various notes you find, all combine to set a really good tone for the level that can easily put you in the mood to be scared if your imagination permits it. The storytelling of this level is particularly good, with the way it steadily reveals details about its history through notes, objects in the environment, and the placement of enemies, and then the way it creates a story around you that makes you a part of the cradle's history. I know I'm perhaps too jaded about things, especially when it comes to horror games, so it should be considered high praise that I was able to appreciate this level for all of its artistic merits without even being scared by it. I'm just disappointed that it didn't live up to the hype for me.

One of the undead inmates from the Cradle.

The main story that happens over the course of Deadly Shadows is fairly interesting, too, and might be my favorite of the three Thief games.Whereas Thief 1 & 2's stories could easily be boiled down to a matter of "stop the bad guys," Deadly Shadows prolongs its mystery much longer, and thus made it more engaging for me to follow. I was much more curious about interpreting the prophecies, figuring everyone's motives out, and tracking down a killer in Deadly Shadows for the pure sake of the story; I played through Thief 1 & 2 mainly for the gameplay and almost didn't even realize there was a story going on. And the ending is really good, too; it brings the trilogy full circle in a way that truly resonates at the very end.

I also really like how Deadly Shadows moves away from Thief 2's more contemporary steampunk atmosphere and goes back towards Thief 1's darker, more fantasy-horror roots. As I mentioned in my Thief 2 review, this is purely a matter of personal preference, and I just didn't care for Thief 2's security cameras, automated defense turrets, and combat bots. All of that stuff is gone in Deadly Shadows, with more of an emphasis on monster encounters like zombies, fishmen, ratmen, tree beasts, and ghosts (though not as much as in Thief 1). Likewise, the towering skyscrapers, banks, police stations, and industrial factories of Thief 2 are replaced with more gothic castles, ancient temples, ghost ships, and haunted asylums.

The zombie-infested ghost ship, played in third-person.

I've spent most of this article criticizing the hell out of Deadly Shadows because there's a lot that's blatantly, and objectively, wrong with it. And yet, a lot of my early complaints dissipated as I got used to the game. Movement in particular bothered me to death in the beginning, I got used to it and it stopped hurting my enjoyment of the game. I patched out or adjusted anything else that bothered me enough, like the head-bob, sparkling loot, the display that shows the percentage of loot you've collected, the mechanical eye overlay when you zoom in on things, the ridiculous neon blue item highlights, and most importantly, the fog wall loading zones during missions. If you're going to play Deadly Shadows in this day and age, then you absolutely need to download and run the sneaky mod, which compiles a bunch of things into one download, including better textures and "the minimalist project" which makes it look and feel a lot more like the original two games.

So the bottom line is this: Deadly Shadows is a definite step down from the brilliant sophistication of Thief 1 & 2, but the core gameplay elements of the Thief games are still present with this game. Even as a bad Thief game, it's still enjoyable, and it even improves on the original in some key areas. Its reputation made me expect to be disappointed, but I simply wasn't; I actually enjoyed it more than Thief 2 in some ways. And the Shalebridge Cradle is a really good level, but it's not nearly as good as the hype led me to believe.

Thief 1 vs Thief 2: Which is Better?

Thief II: The Metal Age is technically a sequel -- it's in the name, after all -- but it's so much like its predecessor, Thief: The Dark Project, that it doesn't really feel like a sequel. It's basically the same game, but with 15 new missions, a couple new items, and a few technical upgrades to the engine. I guess Looking Glass Studios realized they had a pretty good formula on their hands, and chose not to do anything too extravagant with the sequel. The two games are so fundamentally similar that people tend to lump them together as one collective entity, because if you like one, then you'll like other.

And yet, people definitely have their preferences, with some people liking Thief 1 more for its darker supernatural atmosphere, and others liking Thief 2 more for its more robust level design. Some people find the undead enemies in Thief 1 to be a turn off, while others think the same of the robotic enemies in Thief 2. Having played Thief 2 immediately after finishing Thief 1, there are certain things I like and dislike about it; it's a tough call trying to pick one over the other.

I'm not going to treat this article as a stand-alone review of Thief 2, because that would feel mostly redundant, since I've already covered all of the basics in my review of Thief: The Dark Project. Most of what I wrote in that article applies to Thief 2 as well, so I'd recommend you start there so you have an idea of my thoughts going into this review. I'm also not going to make this a direct side-by-side, in-depth comparison article, either, because the games are so similar I can't talk at much length about how they differ. Rather, this review will be a more simple look at Thief 2 and, in general, how it stacks up to its predecessor.

Like I mentioned above, Thief 2 is basically the same game as Thief 1, but with more of an emphasis on the human element -- breaking into structures like banks, warehouses, and mansions, and trying to avoid detection from human guards. Whereas Thief 1 was fairly evenly split between these types of human levels and supernatural levels -- ones where you break into crypts, haunted cathedrals, ancient cities, and fun-house mansions and fight zombies, skeletal warriors, fire elementals, etc -- Thief 2 consists almost entirely of human levels. There's exactly one supernatural level in the entire game, and only a few undead enemies that appear well off of the beaten track in a handful of other levels.

I can certainly understand why they made the change; after all, I mentioned in my own review of Thief 1 that the stealth system simply works better in those human-centric levels that challenged you to play like a, well, thief, as opposed to the supernatural levels which made you play more like an adventurer rogue. I kind of liked those supernatural levels, however, because they added a lot of variety to the game, both in terms of atmosphere and gameplay, since the types of places you visited were often radically different from one another, and fighting undead enemies offered a nice change of pace from time to time. As a horror fan, I also liked the scarier, creepier atmospheres those levels instilled.

The levels in Thief 2, on the other hand, feel relatively samey because they all take place in fortified human structures. Four missions have you break into regal mansions; three levels have you break into religious cult buildings; three missions have you break into public service buildings; two levels have you slink through the city streets. That means 12 of the game's 15 missions have a strong, similar feel to at least one other mission, though in reality even these categories feel somewhat similar to one another (a bank, a mansion, and a mechanist fortress all feel kind of similar to one another, in terms of both aesthetics and gameplay). Two of the maps are even reused for later missions, and one is recycled from Thief 1.

That leaves only a handful of truly memorable maps in the entire game. I finished Thief 1 almost two weeks ago and can still vividly remember the Bonehoard crypt, the mage's towers, the opera house, Constantine's mansion, the haunted cathedral, and the ancient city. I finished Thief 2 yesterday, and only three levels stand out in my mind (for good reasons, anyway): (1) the one where you follow someone through a portal and end up in a pagan village in the woods, only to go through another portal and end up in the Maw of Chaos, the game's only supernatural level; (2) the one that has you running along the city's rooftops on your way to a mechanist tower; and (3) the one that sends you to an abandoned light house, where you descend via a secret elevator to a submarine bay and board the submarine itself.

Part of the reason the levels feels so similar to one another is because you spend 90% of the game dealing with the same enemies: human guards and combat robots. You might fight a spider every now and then, and a handful of levels face you with a couple zombies, haunts, or ghosts, but these are all in hidden areas and have no real impact on the mission. The undead enemies in Thief 1 were more prominent, but also alternated with human enemies for variety, as opposed to the robots in Thief 2 that almost always appear alongside human enemies. Thief 1 also threw more overall variety at you, with fire elementals, human mages, burrick lizards, and craymen (not to mention, more spiders) that would pop up during various missions.

Apparently enough people complained about the undead enemies in Thief 1, feeling that they took away from the game's intended burglary angle, or that they were too annoying or immersion-breaking, and so Looking Glass removed that focus from the game entirely, replacing them with things that, I feel, are actually worse -- cameras, automated turrets, and robots. I, for one, really liked Thief 1's dark fantasy, light horror atmosphere; Thief 2 abandons this theme altogether and instead goes for a more steampunk vibe, which I would normally enjoy, but it makes Thief 2 feel just a little too modern, and therefore like so many other stealth games that have come out since. The bank level, for instance, doesn't look or feel like a medieval fantasy bank at all; it feels like any generic bank you'd find in any other game.

The steampunk stuff does change the gameplay up just a bit, however, which I suppose can be a good thing. Cameras and turrets need to be avoided entirely until you can find a control station to disable them, and robots can't be knocked out with the blackjack like human enemies; rather, you need to fire a water arrow on their backside, which is actually kind of similar to how you kill zombies in Thief 1. Some people thought the zombies in Thief 1 were annoying, but at least you could sneak past them fairly easily -- the patrolling combat bots in Thief 2 are so hyper-alert that they can detect you when ordinary humans wouldn't, and they're so hyper-aggressive that they can spin in place and kill you before you can do anything.

The robots are usually pretty manageable in most levels, but they were egregiously annoying in the final level when the game throws dozens of these hyper-alert, hyper-aggressive robots at you in very close quarters. And they're relentless, too. Human guards, at least, don't go into full alert when they catch a glimpse of you; the robots do. Human guards will give up searching after 30 seconds and go back to their routines; the robots will keep pacing at high alert right outside your hiding place indefinitely. It took me over three hours of constant trial-and-error save-scumming to get through the final level because of those damn robots.

It was even more exasperating because the final level came right after the game wasted another four hours of my time by making me repeat an entire level all over again. In mission 13, you're tasked with infiltrating a mansion and mapping its interior; if you're playing on expert difficulty, then you have a bonus objective of finding seven secret locations. I spent two hours meticulously scouring every inch of the map for loot and switches to open hidden rooms, only for mission 14 to send me right back into the exact same level to do it all over again, with everything reset. That second-to-last mission feels like deliberate content padding, and was a major buzzkill going into the final mission.

The ending, though, is the ultimate buzzkill. It shows an animated scene of the villain being stopped, but then ends with no resolution whatsoever. There's just a brief dialogue between Garrett and a Keeper, in which Garrett asks if all of the game's events had been written in their prophecies; the Keeper says they were, and Garrett says "tell me more." The screen then cuts to black so abruptly that I almost thought the game had crashed. Thief 1's ending showed some peaceful resolution of what happened after stopping the Trickster, with nice, tranquil music, and a longer dialogue that actually explains what Garrett's going to do with himself while giving the player more of a setup for the next game. It made you feel accomplished, like a badass, and that after saving the world you were free, setting off to do your own thing. Thief 2's ending just says "alright, game's over, back to the menu with you."

Where Thief 2 gets most of its deserved praise is in the level design. The maps in Thief 2 are generally larger, more open, and more complex than those in Thief 1, offering you a lot more freedom to pick your own route to your objectives. Whereas Thief 1 might have only had, at most, three ways to get to an objective, Thief 2 is more apt to give you five or six options. Perhaps more importantly, the map is actually useful in Thief 2, showing you the exact layout of each level while still only generalizing your location within the map. It still requires you to use a combination of your eyes and the compass to figure out where you're going, but you can actually plan routes in Thief 2 and thus have a better sense of where you're actually going ahead of time. They also just make more logical sense, as compared to some of the maps in Thief 1 that felt like random, jumbled messes.

Unfortunately, the bigger, more complicated maps come with a few trade-offs. With more interconnected paths leading to vastly divergent routes through the level, and more patrolling guards moving throughout the larger number of rooms, there are a lot more moving parts that can lead to a lot more trial-and-error as you sometimes find yourself backed into a corner because of variables you didn't (and couldn't) know about. It also seems like there isn't as much meaningful loot to find, as if it's all been spread across bigger maps, leaving you with a lot of long, empty hallways and barren rooms. It can be a bit tedious trying to complete some of those high value "steal X amount of loot" objectives when Garrett, master thief, is reduced to scrounging through couches for loose change.

As for which game I like better, I think I have to give a slight edge to Thief 1. I personally prefer its darker fantasy/horror atmosphere, and I felt like it had more memorable levels and more overall variety. While Thief 2 is technically a better game, in terms of the upgrades to the engine and the greater focus on level design, I just didn't care for its steampunk drapings, and the cameras and security bots felt more annoying that any of the undead enemies in Thief 1. As I wrote at the top of the article, the two games are so similar that deciding which one is better mostly comes down to personal taste. In the future, I probably won't make distinctions between them, because they do kind of feel like one, singular entity.

Looking Back at Thief: The Dark Project

I remember playing Thief II: The Metal Age about 10 years ago and enjoying it quite a bit. Alas, I only played a few levels before something drew me away from it. I mostly remember breaking into mansions, warehouses, and slinking through the city streets on my noble quest to liberate as much gold as possible from the city's aristocratic elite. I thought I knew what I was getting into by jumping back into the series where it at all started, with Thief: The Dark Project; I was pretty surprised, then, when I went into the first game and found myself descending into giant crypts and haunted cathedrals to sneak past and, more often, fight off platoons of undead zombies and skeletons, among other sinister, twisted monstrosities.

Developed by Looking Glass Studios and released in 1998, Thief: The Dark Project was a pioneer of first-person stealth gaming. Its design was years ahead of its time, with the advanced lighting and three-dimensional sound effects offering an unprecedented level of immersive feedback for would-be thieves trying to hide in the shadows and avoid detection. It's impressive, really, how well it holds up after all this time; games have come a long way in the past 17 years, and yet modern stealth games really aren't that much more sophisticated than Thief. It would not be that ridiculous to claim that no other game has handled stealth as well as the original Thief, with the possible exception of Thief II, but that's a discussion for another article. For now, it's time to take a look at Thief: The Dark Project (the Gold Edition, specifically) to figure out what's good and what's not good with it.

First things first: the stealth mechanics. Stealth in Thief works like you'd expect from any stealth game at this point; crouch low to the ground, walk instead of run, and stay out of patrolling guards' line of sight. Hide behind obstacles if need be, and lean around the corner to check if the coast is clear before you move. Toss objects in the other direction to distract guards. Sneak up behind an enemy and plunk him in the back for a non-lethal knockout. Carry his unconscious body to a corner somewhere so that other guards won't stumble on it and go into high alert.

Where things get a bit different in Thief is the lighting. Avoiding line of sight is important, but even more important is staying in the shadows; a guard can be looking right at you, but won't actually notice you if you're concealed by complete darkness. That's usually pretty easy to do, because the whole game takes place at night, with only scattered torches and electric lamps breaking up the darkness. Those lights create gradient shadows of their own; the closer you get to a light source, the more visible you become. From far away, a guard might not notice if you're in that grey area between light and darkness, but at closer distances, he'll be able to spot you. The game's iconic "light gem," displayed in the bottom center of the screen, progressively fills up with light as you move into the light, thus giving you constant, perfect feedback on your visibility.

Thief's other major twist on the now tried-and-true stealth formula is in monitoring the sounds your footsteps make on different surfaces. Soft surfaces like grass and carpet mute your footsteps enough that you can run up behind enemies without them noticing, while harder surfaces like tile or metal make your footsteps click and clank loud enough for guards to hear. You'd think that Garrett -- the game's protagonist, a skilled, professional thief -- would wear soft-soled shoes that would allow him to sneak around more effectively, but this is a case where gameplay mechanics take priority over logical sense, and the footsteps add so much extra depth to the gameplay that just isn't there in other stealth games, because it matters how you approach guards and avoid patrol routes in different situations, and it forces you to adapt your strategies to your environment.

One of the levels, for instance, has marble floors almost everywhere, with thin slivers of runway carpet running down the center of the hallways, broken up at corners and intersections. Guards patrol up and down the hallways, and it takes so much more timing and precision to take them out because there's so little soft ground for you to move upon. In one particular situation, I was sneaking up behind a guard in a grassy exterior planning to knock him out, and stepped onto a metal plate; the guard heard the noise, turned around, and caught me. The game punished me for not paying enough attention to my surroundings, which is just a wonderful feeling to know that the game expects you to be mindful of these things and make intelligent decisions about what you do.

As with most stealth games, Thief gives you several tools to assist with your sneakery. The most prominent of these tools are water arrows, which you can fire to douse torches or to wash away puddles of blood. Moss arrows can be fired onto the floor to create soft patches of moss that mute your footsteps. Noisemaker arrows create a loud, constant ringing noise that draws all guards from a wide radius to inspect the noise. Regular broadhead arrows are used primarily as a weapon for killing distant enemies, but can also be used to distract local guards by firing the arrow away from the guard's patrol route. Gas arrows knock guards unconscious on contact. Rope arrows can be fired into wooden structures to lower a rope you can climb to higher ledges. Additionally, you have things like flashbombs, gas mines, and speed potions in your potential arsenal, all of which should be self-explanatory.

With all these great tools, what challenge would the game be without a little resource management? In most cases, you don't have access to all of these items in a single level, and the ones you do have are usually in limited supply. There might, for instance, be 40 or more light sources in a level, but you'll have only six water arrows at your disposal. Getting through the level successfully, then, requires you to be diligent with how you spend your limited supplies. Each room offers a personal challenge that makes you think and evaluate your options: can I get through this without using my arrows? And when a guard suddenly walks into the room and you find yourself sitting in plain view of a fireplace, it creates quite the adrenaline rush as you try to figure out if you have time to move into the shadows, or if you should bite the bullet and spend a water arrow dousing the fireplace.

When it comes to stealth games, enemy AI needs to have a pretty specific balance of stupidity and intelligence. On the one hand, they need to be observant enough that they can detect you in a realistic, believable way, and to ensure that there's some element of tension and challenge in avoiding detection; on the other hand, they need to be lenient enough that you can make minor mistakes without blowing the entire mission or resorting to constant save-scumming. The guards in Thief strike that balance pretty well. They're smart enough that they'll take note if they see a body, or an open door or suspicious bloodstain, or if they hear you running, or if they catch a short glimpse of you, but they won't immediately go into full alert; rather, they'll start searching for you and give up after a short while. This gives you enough of a window to correct your mistakes, and also allows for a lot of tension as they try to sniff you out while you slink away in the shadows, mere feet away.

The game's use of three-dimensional sound is also a tremendous aid in helping you keep track of where guards are, even if you can't see them. When a guard walks down a hallway, you can hear his footsteps echoing through the building, and thanks to the sound design, you can tell where he is, how far away he is, and which direction he's going. Even without using headphones or a full surround sound system, and just running the game with basic stereo speakers, I was easily able to pinpoint left or right, up or down. The surface of the floor affects the sound of the guards' footsteps just as much as it affects your own, so that creates an equal an opposite reaction: soft surfaces help you stay quiet, but it also makes it a bit harder to hear guards moving about, and hard surfaces make it harder for you to stay quiet, but make it easy to tell where guards are. You can also hear them coughing, whistling, or muttering to themselves, or eavesdrop on entire conversations.

The game is broken into 15 missions, each of which places you in a unique map with a different set of objectives. Higher difficulties, in true old school fashion, concern themselves less with simply making the game harder, but rather add more objectives and change the level composition to instill a more dynamic, natural challenge while adding a ton of replay value. Before each mission, you're given a chance to buy extra supplies, like more arrows or healing potions, with the money you earned in the previous mission. Specific objectives vary from mission to mission, but one of your goals is almost always "steal as much stuff as possible." The fact that everything you steal turns into real money that you can spend to improve your thievery in the next mission gives you a lot of incentive to actually explore the maps as much as possible.

Even though the game is broken up as a series of completely separate missions, it does a pretty good job of conveying a persistent world and story. It helps that your earnings carry over to the next mission when you're buying more gear, but it also helps that the game has you revisit a handful of familiar locations over the course of its 15 missions. Walking about the city streets in certain missions, it's obvious that you're only ever playing in a closed-off section that only exists for the purpose of that mission, but it does give you at least a sense that you're part of a bigger scene. The story, meanwhile, takes a while to get going, but after the sixth mission, your objectives start to reflect an on-going, over-arching goal. And it's pretty neat how the game implements dynamic mission objectives that change mid-mission, throwing you for a loop on occasion and leading you in unexpected directions.

Most mission maps are somewhat open-ended, allowing you to choose how you'll approach your objectives and explore the map. Missions like the Bonehoard Crypt, the Thieves' Guild, the Haunted Cathedral, and the Lost City have huge, sprawling maps with a ton of places to explore; they're so big and complicated that it's a challenge simply figuring out how you get from one area to another. You get an in-game map for each mission, but these are always mere approximations of the level's layout; in order to navigate successfully (and not get lost, in the case of the larger maps), you have to use your compass to figure out how areas are positioned relative to one another, and pay really close attention to your surroundings so that you can actually learn the map's layout by committing what you see to memory.

Completing each of the "steal as much stuff as possible" objectives requires you to explore every inch of the maps, particularly on higher difficulties where you're expected to steal a higher value of stuff. It's here where the level design impresses most, because there are a ton of hidden nuances to discover, from secret rooms that can only be accessed if you notice that a section of a wall looks slightly different, or if you do something completely unexpected like crawling inside of a fireplace. In most cases, these secrets feel pretty natural; they don't stand out or call attention to themselves like in other games that want you to realize "hey, this is a secret area." If you're exploring a dilapidated ruin and see a crack in the wall, you might think nothing of it, but if you peer closer, you might just realize you can stick your arm through and grab a couple extra water arrows. Exploration rewards curiosity and tempts you to poke your nose everywhere you can. Being able to jump and climb freely offers you so much freedom to explore off the beaten path, and the inclusion of rope arrows gets you thinking even further outside the box.

Although many of the maps are impressively large and complex, some of them feel needlessly massive and convoluted. The sixth mission, when you infiltrate the local thieves' guild, takes place largely underground and has you navigating dozens of similar-looking, cramped tunnels and sewer systems that all lead to different areas and never let you see more than a few yards ahead of yourself at any given moment. It felt almost impossible to keep track of where I was; I spent over two hours doing what probably could be accomplished in 30 minutes, if you know what you're doing, because I was so lost that I was literally walking in circles. A lot of maps are apt to give you three-to-five branching paths, but you have no idea how far each one goes until you explore it in its fullest; you might arbitrarily pick one of them and eventually find yourself on the complete opposite side of the level needing an item you presumably would've found in one of the other paths if you'd gone that way first, instead, which can lead to a lot of backtracking and niggling doubt about what you may have missed. It can can get awfully tedious at times.

But man, some of the levels are just plain cool. The Bonehoard crypt with its dark, spooky atmosphere, the traps that keep you on your guard, and the cavernous chambers that overwhelm you with their sheer volume; Constantine's mansion, where you're tasked with stealing a prized sword, but as you climb higher into the mansion's upper floors you find yourself in a disturbing haunted house, with hallways that are literally twisted, rooms that are sideways or upside, optical illusions, false doors, doors that lead nowhere, and all other kinds of weird things; the Mage's Tower, where you first have to infiltrate the central complex and then ascend the four elemental-themed towers, swimming underwater, navigating underground tunnels, riding platforms through the air, and dodging volcanic lava plates; and the return to the Cathedral, with its terrifying undead enemies and unsettling sound effects, and the mission sequence in the second half where you're performing a ritual to put a ghost to rest.

As I mentioned at the top of the article, I wasn't expecting anything like this at all, which absolutely blew my mind as I went through the game and kept discovering all of these weird, crazy things. I mean, Thief II, from what I played, was all about fairly ordinary stealth scenarios, trying to sneak past and steal stuff from ordinary human patrols. There was none of this dark, supernatural stuff going on -- and yet, Thief: The Dark Project has you dealing with zombies and flying skulls as early as the second mission, when you're trying to infiltrate the Cragscleft prison through the abandoned mines. The very next mission has you descending into a haunted crypt. Later on, you're dealing with giant bipedal lizard monsters, humanoid crab-men, fire elementals, ghostly apparitions, and armor-clad skeletal warriors, The enemies get even more bizarre as even more outlandish things get introduced in the final levels.

The game is split roughly in half between missions that involve the typical "break into a guarded location and steal something" scenarios, where you're dealing exclusively with human patrols, and the more exotic scenarios that lean almost more towards survival-horror, where you're sneaking past and often fighting undead monsters on your quest to steal something from a more ominous, haunted location. Personally, I enjoyed the change of pace that came with alternating these types of scenarios, and the horror fan in me certainly appreciated the increased tension that came with the creepier atmospheres and more sinister enemies. The stealth gameplay works a lot better, however, when you're going up against innocent guards in a mansion; you feel more like a burglar breaking into someplace you shouldn't be, trying to leave no trace you were there, whereas the supernatural levels make you feel like a generic rogue in a fantasy action-adventure game.

I'm more inclined, for instance, to buy into the stealth gameplay and play peacefully, avoiding guards as much as I can and only knocking people out when I have to, when I'm going up against human opponents, because I'm not actually fond of murdering people in these types of games. In the supernatural levels, I have no qualms with killing zombies, or skeleton warriors, or acid-spewing bipedal lizard monsters -- it's my natural instinct, in fact. In the last few levels, when the game starts going off the rails towards its crazy demonic climax, I gave up on stealth entirely and just started killing everything in sight, because it was faster and easier than trying to sneak past everything -- in some cases, it was nearly impossible because of how damn many there were. And again, it felt like the more natural, appropriate thing to do, considering they're monsters spawned by a demon for the sole purpose of spreading destruction throughout the human world.

Whereas all of the stealth controls and gameplay feel incredibly smooth and responsive, Thief's combat really shows its age, and it hasn't aged well. There are some good ideas at work, here, like manually aiming your crosshair on either side of an enemy to do a left or right horizontal slash, or holding a button to hold your sword out in a parry stance and having to manually aim to block attacks, or how if an enemy attacks at the same time as you and your swords collide, then both attacks clang and miss. But the whole thing is sluggishly imprecise, and comes off feeling almost unbearably clunky. The delay between when you click to attack and when the attack actually goes through is enough that you have to fall into the classic routine of moving in and out of the enemy's melee range as if you're in a synchronized dance instead of a fight, and if you decide to click and hold the attack to charge up for a stronger hit, then the delay feels even clunkier.

Other elements of the controls feel equally dated and clunky. Cycling through inventory items is a chore, and I hate how the game "equips" items to your active use slot when you pick them up because of how often I would accidentally drink a health potion or fire a flashbomb when I was trying to open a door or pick something else up. Moving around the levels is, on occasion, troublesome; it's a little too easy to get caught on terrain, and you'll sometimes bounce off of structures you should easily be able to grab onto and mantle. Sometimes when you try to sneak up stairs, the game treats them like you're walking into a wall, and you likewise get caught all too frequently on enemy corpses, unable to walk over them. If you're sneaking up to an enemy planning to knock them out, every time you charge the attack will force you to stand up, and then you have to hit the crouch button immediately.

So, does Thief: The Dark Project still hold up nearly 20 years later? I played it for the first time ever and really enjoyed it -- most of its mechanics are solid, and it offers a genuinely exciting experience for anyone who's a fan of stealth games. I particularly enjoyed how much it made me think, and how it rewarded my ingenuity and penalized my recklessness. As a fan of exploration and horror games, Thief: The Dark Project scratched a few extra itches I wasn't even expecting. There's a reason this game (and its sequel) consistently appear near the top of modern "best stealth games of all time" lists; sure, it shows its age in a few areas, but the overall experience is timeless, and definitely worth playing if you fancy smart games.