Published 13/3/2024

Thief Gold

I’ve said it before, but I think my favorite thing about having a decent laptop in the last few years is getting the chance to play all the old titles I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews for, but never got the chance to touch. Of course, this just further increases my ever-expanding backlog, but what can one do, really, when such classics pop for a dollar or two on sale? Either way, Thief Gold, an expanded version of Thief: The Dark Project, is the perfect representative of this feeling. It’s an absolute classic, and in its best moments, it’s genuinely one of the best, if not the best, stealth game I’ve played. But on the other hand, this is a wildly uneven experience, ranging from hardcore stealth gameplay, to fairly bizarre cave-diving, grave-robbing, zombie-slaying that, whilst not necessarily awful, do not feel like they belong in the same game.

I’ll be honest, I’m not great at stealth games. I’m an impatient, perpetually antsy kind of fellow, never content with waiting for the perfect moment to strike, rather taking the fast road. And so when I booted up Thief, I really expected to bounce off this game. And for a few minutes, I almost did. Stumbling into enemy sightlines; dropping items loudly on the floor; failing to find enough gold to complete the objective. Thief takes a sec’ to sink into your brain, as it’s an experience far removed from the more convenient, easy-going (comparatively) stealth games of contemporary times. Whilst only truly brutal if you wish to push yourself all the way in Expert Mode, Thief is a game that asks a lot of you, but thankfully almost always gives you the skills and tools you need to achieve what it asks… plus, a good ‘ol quick save and load system can always help out.

Unless you save, with next to no health, as an enemy is swinging their blade down upon you.

Don’t be like me.

The early stages of Thief are nothing short of fantastic; it begins with perhaps one of the greatest introductory stages ever. Your task, simple - infiltrate the mansion of some random noble, steal everything you can get your grubby little paws on, seize his greatest treasure, and get out again. Beyond this tutorial, which does a great job of showcasing your basic, mechanical toolset, this initial heist teaches you everything you need to know in regards to how to case a place, get in, avoid detection, and get out again. It’s essentially perfect, a perfect distillation of what the game is… in a sense. Hiding, sneaking, making a plan - it teaches everything fairly naturally, and with the ability to quick save and load whenever you want, mistakes are pretty easy to clean up after (I don’t judge save scummers - as a known save scummer). A game that can be rather relaxing and refreshing in its straight-forwardness, but then you’ll find yourself huddled in an empty room, hearing guards stomping beyond, hunting you down…

This initial simplicity is reflected in the game’s narrative, and it’s lead; our ‘hero’, Garett, starts as just a simple, yet accomplished thief, stealing to earn his bread, but his life - and the locales he’s robbing - grow in complexity as he’s roped into a job too grand in scale for him to truly understand. Seriously, whilst the initial mansion feels massive for an introduction, some of the places you’ll be heading to, like the one featured in The Sword, or The Opera House make it look like a shack in comparison. Thief’s plot isn’t anything special, but it’s held together well by Garrett’s stellar voice acting, basking everything in a sort of grungy, street-level vibe that I really appreciated. Garrett might be dealing with things out of control, but he is, at heart, just another guy on the street. There are hints of a greater purpose for Garrett, setting up further adventures, but for the most part… Garrett is just a guy, and I love that. The voice acting is perfectly serviceable, but it existed in that time period where video game voice acting isn’t bad, but there’s no real direction, making a lot of the cutscenes and dialogue kind of unintentionally hilarious.

Despite it’s insistence on stealth, combat is a factor in this game, especially in the more action-adventure fueled levels… but when you’re stealthing about, eliminating guards and witnesses as a last resort, combat is far and away the final option. Garrett’s combat repertoire is limited, equipped with a blade, a blackjack, and a bow and arrow, the latter of which is generally used for far more practical, thievery-related hijinks then slaying fools. The blackjack will rapidly become your best friend from the jump - simply striking most foes from behind, whilst hidden, will knock them out, allowing you to freely carry them into a hiding spot to remain undetected. Trust me, unless it’s an emergency, you don’t want to be killing guards. Beyond combat, Garrett’s impressive repertoire of tools can include visual stun grenades, ropes, or potions that increase your speed or allow you to breathe underwater.

Notably, you ability to purchase all of these items are based on the amount of gold you’d pilfered in the previous levels, so if you have a set loadout you like to take in, gotta make sure you’re sweeping through the joint, stealing everything you can get ‘ya grubby little paws on! But in all seriousness, this mixed loadout perfectly complements the free-form design of much of Thief; playing the way *you* want to play. Seriously, thinking about a plan of attack, and utilizing everything you have to nail that plan, such as my experience in the level ‘The Sword’, is thrilling in a way that’s hard to describe. Hell, one level, I completely fumbled the thievery itself, leading to me charging through the corridors, nearly a dozen hostels on my heels, and it was *incredible*.

Combat is given greater emphasis in the more supernatural sections of the games, where you’ll be battling zombies and other more ethereal foes, and thus a bit more strategy comes into play - for an example, holy water, applied to your water arrows, will cause zombies to essentially explode, and prevent them from reviving. It’s interesting - combat is both a massive, and miniscule part of Thief, depending on your approach and mode of gameplay, but overall, I think it works. With the more action-oriented levels, I do wish the combat was a little more well-tuned, as the dance of combat isn’t precise enough to avoid every blow from the endless hordes of zombies, but it works well enough to be overly frustrated and try and avoid finding yourself in the situation from the jump. Either way, it’s better to utilize your extended toolset to take them out.

But that’s combat, and that’s not (or at least, I hope not) what you’re here for. Everything you do in Thief requires planning, finesse, and no shortage of good luck. From peeking around corners, to stepping quietly on only the softest surfaces, the slightest slip up will alert every guard within earshot to your position. It was thrilling to find myself in the middle of a hallway, with a guard about to approach from both ends, forcing me to hide in a (hopefully) unoccupied side room and pray they move on.Sometimes, this went swimmingly, and I managed to to rob a locale without a single guard releasing my presence… and then there were cases like The Thief Guild, or the Mage Towers, where I had one or two rooms that I had to dump half a dozen unconscious bodies into because everytime I knocked someone out, someone *else* just happened to stroll by. *Generally*, your objectives are pretty clear, and with some trial and error you’ll be able to make your way there, but several major objectives - especially the ones added in Hard and Expert modes - can be mind boggling on how to hunt down and achieve. I used a guide to get around some areas, and I’m not remotely ashamed.

But the game’s complexity it’s not a bad thing, not remotely - it’s just more about thinking on your feet, adapting to the ever-changing situation. Hell, I had one or two missions where I alerted just about everyone as I found the main objective, forcing myself to remember the path back out of the locale whilst a small army of guards swells behind me. Moments like this were just as euphoric as those of perfect stealth, and that’s the range I wish Thief stayed within for its entire fifteen hour playtime.

Whilst the actual results can vary, the difficulty settings Thief utilizes are amongst my favorite in all of gaming. Used similarly in titles like 007:GoldenEye, playing on the Hard or Expert settings doesn’t affect damage dealt or taken, but changes the very objectives you must carry out. These vary heavily - sometimes, it’s as simple as finding a bit more loot, or an additional unique treasure. In others, you’ll have to additionally escape once you’ve found your key item, refrain from killing innocents (or sometimes, anyone at all), or escape in a certain manner. It inherently changes the way you’ll be approaching these levels in a vast variety of ways, and I cannot praise the game enough on this front. Personally, I played on Hard, which I think provided a decent balance of finding my own way to tackle each mission whilst being bound to certain criteria, though I do feel the ever-present ‘find X amount of value of loot’ frequently frustrating, as you’ll really have to dig into the nooks and crannies of each of the locales you’re robbing. I’d much prefer if they’d place better value on how you can use the gold earned from loot, thus encouraging me to scrounge for a more practical reason. Either way, though, this form of difficulty scaling is far and away the very best, rather than just making foes damage sponges.

Thief is strongest in its more ‘pure’ levels - robbing mansions, infiltrating ballrooms or priesthoods, these are far and away the game at its best. Environments that are, generally but not always, fairly intuitive in layout, guiding you towards your goal, but constantly offering you trinkets here and there for those that. There are exceptions - The Thieves Guild, whilst an interesting level in its structure, is a maze of similar-looking stone tunnels that’ll send you losing your way within moments, but for the most part, it was rare I got lost in the more ‘normal’ environments of the game. But, more or less, these make up a little more than half of Thief’s playtime, as the game suffers from a notable split personality. As opposed to the more ‘urban’ locales you’ll be pilfering, the game places equal weight on environments more… untamed.

The caves, the ruins, the goddamn haunted cathedral are generally far less interesting to explore, having a general samey aesthetic throughout that makes judging your position in relation to your hand-drawn map and the rest of the locale a near nightmare.And plus, with the enemies of these zones being prominently ghosts, zombies, and other creatures of a more supernatural nature, it gives the game a far more generic ‘action-adventure’ nature that, whilst never atrocious, is far less engaging, and generally just less interesting then the hardcore thieving action this game initially promised. Downgrade of the century goes to going from robbing an entire magic secret society, to just bumming around in some boring caves. Delightful. Sure, they’re paced a little faster then some of the weaker core thieving levels, but that’s not the point of this game! Sometimes I wonder if it was an attempt to make the initial Thief game a sort of crossroads, depending on what people preferred; the hardcore, in-depth thievery, or the more adventuring, tomb-raiding, zombie slaying romps? I’m yet to play the rest of the Thief trilogy, but I’m willing to put money down on the answer being the former.

It’s only the last quarter or so of the game where issues, including the greater focus on moro occult environments, become more apparent and begin to bleed into more elements of the game. Less engaging, with almost no focus on stealth or, y’know, thievery, become more and more common, and it culminates in the last three or so levels falling so far away from the core tenets the game established in it’s early hours that I was truly ready to be done with the game. If I don’t see another zombie in the franchise, it’ll be too soon.

While I do complain about the more fantastical, supernatural focussed levels of the game, I’ll give props where they’re due; due to the game’s pitch perfect sense of ambiance and atmosphere, pretty much every mission is some form of tension-drenched nightmare. In the more fantastical levels, the groan of zombies, the whispers of ghosts, the soft crackle of torches… these give you pause, preparing you for a fight. Conversely, as you burgle operas, mansions, and entire magical establishments, the constant whisper of guards and innocents alike, spilling secrets and gossip as they stride closer and closer to your hiding space. Due to the game releasing a good two decades ago, the game in its normal state barely functions on a modern Windows 11 OS, so I played a fan mod that fixes the game for current hardware, whilst touching up the resolution of the visual without altering the eerie, fantasy-victorian aesthetics of the game. Suffice to say, especially with the touch-ups, Thief holds up really, really well, with utterly immersive areas that are a joy to, uh, pilfer.

Despite teething issues, and a somewhat frustrating dual identity, at its best Thief is genuinely fantastic. The thrill of thievery never grows old, and the amount of different scenarios and locales you need to pilfer keeps that thrill from waning. Even if they're not quite as strong, I don’t hate the more action-oriented levels, but I just wish the thieving took up a larger percentage of the levels. Visually, and audibly, holding up more than twenty years on, Thief is something special, and stood amongst its peers, the likes of Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid, in bringing the stealth genre to the wider community. It’s not perfect, but if you have any love for stealth, Thief should be at the top of your list - as long as your heart can take the stress!