How Garrett Stole My Heart Again – Eidos Montreal’s THIEF

Release: May 21st (US), May 25th (Int)
Systems: PC / Xbox One / PS4 / Xbox 360 / PS3
Genre: Stealth / Adventure

 

This game is for you, if you…

• …enjoy stealth. Very much.
• …agree free roaming makes everything better
• …can draw a sense of accomplishment from solving puzzles etc. more than defeating foes
• …are a the kind of veteran that did not see T3 as heresy

 

This game is not for you, if you…

• …consider stealth a fighting style, rather than protection
• …easily suffer from first person vertigo
• …rather skip documents and optional lore expansions
• …are prone to looking up guides and walkthroughs

 

As some people realized by my alias, this game was more than highly anticipated by me.  Thief: The Dark Project being the first game I bought with my own money and played from start to finish, it is safe to say I grew up with the franchise. That’s important, because it colors my review in a specific way. As you probably have heard plenty about the reboot so far, I will try less to tell you what the it is all about, and more to formulate why I think it is in fact great.

The first game is still today an industry classic which introduced the entire genre of stealth action-adventures to the third dimension. The second game (Thief 2: The Metal Age) was basically the first but bigger, and thus the one veterans generally cherish the most. It was the third game, Thief 3: Deadly Shadows however, which truly started dividing the fanbase – some said the open world is the thing the series always needed, some say the lockpicking minigame was a vast improvement, others say the 3rd person option was a game breaker; and of course almost everybody hated the loot glint.

The 4th installment is noticeable aware of this, and takes the easy way out:

It Doesn’t Make Decisions For You

Don’t like a feature? Turn it off. Don’t wanna kill? Never need to. Don’t care about the AAA-shotgun-blast to your face within most story missions? Don’t do them. Know what? Fine!

Here, just stay in The City, roam around freely, break into random apartments and steal things. You’re a thief, after all – it’s how I spend 80% of my, up until this point 25+ hours game time, anyways. There may be a strict story line, including missions that advance the state of The City itself – but only visually. Luckily with the exception of a few areas, the whole city is availible for your sneakiness from the start.

The first thing I noticed moving around, is that Thief takes the term “First Person” very seriously. No longer are you a floating camera with a weapon attached to the lens, but you in fact have a physical body. If there is a switch to be activated, a door to be opened, a pocket to be picked, or loot to be stolen, you always have to literally calculate your maneuver at arm’s length. This can make many things more difficult than one is used to, but it immerses me so well that I would never want to miss it again.

…All The Time.

The aforementioned story missions got the most flack from reviewers, and it is sadly not entirely uncalled for.

While in the first Thief missions were each basically one huge rectangular area that had first to be figured out and then operated in; Eidos Montreal connects a multitude of those areas with what I like to call “script-tunnels”. There are still plenty different ways to reach those, but when you do, you always feel taken by the hand and let loose at the next playground. It’s important to add at this point that I believe the reason many veterans will put the game down early, is that Eidos plays it far too safe at the very beginning of the game, to the point where it becomes downright off-putting: In short, the tutorial mission is one medium-length “script tunnel” and no playground. Not exactly a good omen for the rest of the game – especially if you come to it filled with the sole desire to point out how exactly they ruined the series.

If you suffer through it like I did however (and maybe even take the ever so subtle innuendo that Garrett’s newly found protegée Erin may in fact be a snotty teenager that doesn’t like to listen to her master) the game will eventually drop you off in The City and tell you to make it to your hideout – the top of the Stone Market clocktower. Garrett’s rather eccentric idea of an apartment, like the rest of the city, looks like you’re moving inside beautiful concept art. Some people may call the “black/blue/candlelight/more black” color scheme of the game bland, but I think it has an amazing artistic integrity to it that just caters to my taste very much. Moving around in this dark and candle-lit city is where the game started to shine for me, until it eventually found its way to the place in my heart where the previous games awaited it.

Surpressed Energy & Misguided Activism

Speaking of heart, there is one specific cardiac organ that needs special attention: The one resting in the chest of lead writer Stephen Gallagher.

I liked the guy from the start. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he seemed like a man who had an idea, and he was gonna go through with it. I saw the video he explained the plot in, acting it out, maybe a little goofy with with a hood on – but it showed he cared about his stuff. I like that, and even when an idea itself doesn’t really speak to me, this is something I value very much in any form of art.

When I first heard about the addition of a new female major character to the scarce few already present in the previous games, I was genuinely excited. Erin also happens to be Garrett’s protegée, thus not only including similiar skills and tools of trade, but also suggesting that Garrett has seriously evolved as a character. This got me excited even more, because it’s a high-risk thing to do at this point: It could either bring a fresh wind of change, or become the obligatory “This is the new players’ hero now”-annoyance. Curiously, she turned out to be even neither. In fact, she turned out to be nothing. She is but the perfect example for  this thing about Gallagher’s writing that I can’t quite fathom: He starts up with so many interesting premises, but he only ever nails close to half of them at best.

I like what he did to Garrett.

I always liked the new looks, but his character is also a vast improvement. Contrary to the swift sarcasm-dispenser, he now has intentions and an opinion. In fact, Erin served as a very good starting point for that, and while I did not like the overly blunt way her snottiness is portrayed, I do like Garrett’s side of those very dialogues. He’s still cyanically funny and very self-assured, but obviously rightfully so. He knows his limits, however few there may be, and that’s why he’s so damn good. Erin may have been his last shot at letting someone “get in the way with [his] money”, and despite that she becomes the reason Garrett does what he does in the story, I hardly ever get the feeling he genuinely cares about her. Or what’s it to him anyways.

I hated the “Thief-Taker General”.

Not only is his title ridiculously specific for someone who does what he actually does (what’s that again, by the way?), but his whole overblown character is more reminscient of the one same guy who gets beat up in all the Bud Spencer & Terrence Hill movies, than the worthy arch-nemesis he may have been intended to be. All of his interactions with Garrett are completely unrelying on him as a person, and more importantly, would take nothing from the game if not present – I thought it through. Nothing. The battle between the two warring factions within The City would have worked perfectly without him serving as an unfortunately unintentional comic annoyance.

Stephen Gallagher alternates between “Wow, cool idea!”” and “How could anyone have thought this is not terrible?” so frantically that he definitely did not do his better flashes any favours. The story isn’t unbearable, but an unnecessary amount of things within it sure are.

Get Busy Lurking

Another contradictory issue the game gives itself, is the very pacing of the story missions themselves. Too often does the ambiente and overall feel make you develop this surpressed desire to rush ahead, while in reality the game still is a very slow-paced one. Only this way I often got the feeling I was fooling around, when I was really just playing my usual game – slow and steady wins the race, even in 2014. This is another instance where the “script-tunnel”/playground scheme shoots itself in the foot atmospherically.

So as more or less enjoyable the main missions are, there is always this undeniable sigh of relief once you’ve finished a chapter and may return to your apartment, to resume your life as The City’s resident master thief.

The city has three levels: the streets, the rooftops (they don’t call it the Thieves’ Highway for nothing) and of course people’s apartments. While it’s fun for a while to parcours-vault from one tiled roof to another wooden balcony, the screen shakes and makes you fly with Garrett’s every move; you will just as often find yourself breaking into an apartment for a quicker way to the back alley or – well, just because.

The beauty about burglary in Thief is, that other than most similiar things in other games, it feels like stumbling into a scene which has long before started without you:  Sleeping/eating/conversing tenants; diaries, notebooks, newspapers and letters; secret switches in bookshelves or behind paintings – to downright weird stuff, like one innocently looking apartment in South Quarter, which was perfectly normally furnished except for a full bondage suit and various pieces of corresponding equipment- and no further explanation.

You really get the feeling you just invaded someone’s private space, but it’s also not all up in your face about it. They didn’t make a nice entrance for you, because nobody expects you to even be there. Safe for the story missions, you do not have to go anywhere. That’s what I love the most about it – it’s not surprising if priority levels are filled with nice fluff, but most players will probably never get to see even half of all the optional secrets there are to discover. I for one enjoy sheer exploration and barely found 45% of the documents so far. (If other reviewers claim it to be a town of “closed doors”, that may be because I hardly recall any instances where I entered somewhere through the door. Figures.)

That’s not to say it’s all random stumbling, though. Aside from the main missions, there are Client Missions given by certain NPCs, which involve more complicated break-ins and brings back the classic Thief-feeling the most.

To keep you busy in your spare time as well, your fence Basso always has tons of little side missions for you to do, which basically require you to locate the building the object of interest is located in, and then solve a unique little puzzle for each to obtain them. Sometimes it’s as easy as noticing the convenient wooden beam for your Rope Arrow; or sometimes you will have to somehow move a vase inside the apartment, so you can shoot the switch on the wall behind it from the barred outside window with a Blunt Arrow to find your way in. It’s all about being patient and the certanity that there is always a way – I have spent no less than two hours outside and inside one of those seemingly minor missions until I figured it out. Pretty embarassing for someone who completed the original trilogy on “Expert” difficulty.

 

This is the game’s strong suit, and paired with a post-game-mechanic, the reason why it’s one I will always come back to, just to take a walk on the rooftops when I had a rough day.

 

What I Played

• Total play time +25 hours up until this point
• Completed main story and about >50% of availible side missions
• Master difficulty, No Focus, No healing items, No murders, No civillian knockouts
• Turned off all HUD and Interactive Object Highlighting
• German localized version

 

What I Liked

• Most challenging game of the series so far
• Sense of accomplishment for solving puzzles, discovering secrets & hidden trinkets
• Pickpocketing drives you to insanely reckless behaviour for cheap thrills
• Lockpicking works without any visual help whatsoever, with next-gen gamepads
• Garrett’s eye shroud is more subtle and immersive than the classic light gem
• Freedom in The City, high replay value, post-game-mechanic
• Sascha Rotermund nails Stephen Russell’s performance exactly. Sorry Murica.
• Garrett noticeably developed as a character…

 

What I Didn’t Like

• …which also concludes the list of likeable major characters.
• Audio mix is terribly messy in certain situations, Garrett’s clue-monologues become downright inaudible
• “Script-Tunnels” in story missions
• “Squeeze-Through-Narrow-Passage-Loading-Screen-Cover-Up” getting employed way too often
• Loot gets turned into gold, no more selling your hard-earned goods at fences
• Uptown City is too deserted, even with the curfew excuse Thief 3 already couldn’t convince with
• Garrett wears bloody bandages around his hand from midway through the story on, even in post-game. The game keeps track of the days passed. That’s just gross.