Steal all the things!
We’ve already covered Thief and the latest demo we saw was largely the same: go in someone’s house and steal their most precious item. Steven Hansen broke down a lot of the mechanics already, so I just wanted to touch on how the actual game feels playing it. Which is that it feels great — exhilarating, in fact.
The atmosphere that developer Eidos-Montreal has created really is thrilling. You quickly find yourself so engrossed into thinking you’re the world’s greatest thief, and because of that I tried my hardest to be as sneaky as possible. Any time I would get caught I felt defeated, to the point I wanted to restart all over again.
Granted, you don’t have to start over, and the actual combat is really cool. It’s more that I wanted to try all over again to prove I can be the greatest thief there ever was.
Thief (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)
Developer: Eidos-Montreal
Publisher: Square Enix
Release: 2014
This demo had us towards the middle of the story. Garrett needed to enter a house and steal the Baron’s precious heirloom. You first start outside in a courtyard, and you’ll have to get past guards and dogs to enter the residence. There’s a number of ways to enter the place; I choose to climb up the building to enter via the attic.
I didn’t have much time during my demo, so I abused the game’s focus ability to avoid the number of traps placed all over the house and to help me along in general. You don’t ever have to use focus of course, but it’s there if you need it. Plus, focus will be limited and have a cost associated with its use in the final game so it can’t be easily abused.
Once you’ve stolen the heirloom you’ll have to make a mad dash out of the city due to the massive riot going on. The citizens are fed up with the Baron and you’re escaping in the middle of their revolt. Everything is on fire, buildings are crumbling, and one little mistake as you flee will end your life. This section has some quick-time events going on, which was kind of a bummer given just how engrossing the stealth aspect was beforehand. Hopefully there aren’t too many of these sequences.
Thief does a marvelous job of making players feel like a real thief. I found myself pushing my luck from pick-pocketing loot right off of guards, and sneaking around in the shadows right next to enemies like a badass ninja. I’m going to steal everything once Thief is released next year.
