Thief has been one of those franchises that have been on the back burner of gamer’s minds for over a decade. Like Deus Ex, Duke Nukem, and various other decade-long franchises, Thief went through its own development hell. The end product isn’t exactly something that’s worth waiting ten years for, but it’s a fun game with fantastic visuals and some great stealth gameplay.

I will come right out and say this, the story is almost complete garbage. It’s a discombobulated mess of disjointed segments strewn together in 8 chapters of gameplay. You play as a master thief, Garret, who is trying to get his friend Erin back whom he let down during a big heist. You need to get a hold of some powerful people to answer some questions and a mysterious stone. There are some anarchy and revolution thrown in and some sort of plague called The Gloom. I honestly don’t know why any of this is happening or why Erin has a power called The Primal. It’s a huge mess and nothing is ever explained. That’s too bad for a game, as cinematic as it is, that can’t tell a decent story. At least the gameplay is fun and that’s why most people are here.

The stealth gameplay consists of sneaking and hiding in the shadows like previous Thief games. Garret isn’t really about killing enemies, so you just knock them out with your famous Blackjack. You can kill enemies by using arrows, but it takes away from your level score. Like past Thief games, arrows are your whole arsenal. Water arrows can put out fires giving off a light, rope arrows can help you swing to a new area to get around guards, poppy arrows can stun enemies, and blast arrows can take out a group of people or cause a distraction. Your arrows are a playground of anything you want them to be to your heart’s content.

Like previous Thief games, you can take multiple paths to get around guards completely undetected or by taken them out one at a time. Some of the paths are hard to find and some just lead to treasure. Picking locks and finding loot to gain gold is very important if you want to stay stocked up on arrows. Sometimes it’s not worth getting caught just for a piece that’s worth 10 gold. Sometimes animals are guarding a piece or there’s too many guards or lights to get around. Thankfully vertical play is quick thanks to your Claw that lets you climb taller areas.

An odd addition to the series is weird creepy horror segments straight out of Amnesia. You can’t kill these things but can only sneak around them. Sure they were creepy but why? It felt out of place. Also out of place are the awkward boss “fights” that just feel loose and sloppy; maybe even shoehorned in. The flow of the game is also off quite a bit with side missions taking to weird areas of town and not really being worth anything. I honestly felt the whole world was limited to just side missions when it could have been a whole larger open world.

Outside of all that there’s not much else to the game. It doesn’t feel like the ultimate revolutionary stealth game like the first two games felt. The AI is dumb as most times and the game can be beaten in less than 8 hours, even if you try to gather all the loot. With side missions, you may extend to 20 hours but just barely. The graphics are just fantastic with advanced DirectX 11 effects and a great art style that feels like Thief; there aren’t even any memorable characters in the game — Garret included. What we have is a fun weekend rental and nothing more.

A fun-to-play if shallow stealth action adventure:
+ smooth movement mechanics
+ atmospheric presentation most of the time
+ barely passable narrative
- simplistic and unvaried gameplay
- unrealistic and cramped environments harming both strategy and immersion

Thief was a game with a lot of potential that just didn't quite live up to the hype. I'm not good at stealth games so I didn't go into it expecting success. It was a relatively fun game but didn't have a great story, world, or character and was just missing a lot that could have made the game far better and more interesting. It still had moments of fun and Square could have probably improved it with a sequel but it wasn't to be. If you like stealth I recommend giving it a chance, but it's just okay.

Although this one is a replay, it was so long ago that I don't remember much.
After so much of solving some crimes (Obra Dinn and Golden Idol), I said, "hey, let's commit some crimes", and I opted for replaying Thief.

Now, just for starters, this game is slow: I don't actually know, tho, if it's because I only started trying to plat this game after Chapter 4, but the first half I found to be incredibly slow. Maybe I was too broke to buy better equipment to take out guards, maybe I was too reliant on the timing of the guards turning their back to you and sneak away.

And talking about taking out guards, Garrett firmly affirms in Chapter 0 that he is against killing people, that it feels kinda cheap when you reach the final of Chapter 7 and he reiterates this speech, if you do a particular thing there.

Mechanic-wise, its kinda ok, all sneaking, pickpocketing, stealing, and flat out murdering, but it was able to scratch that particular kleptomaniac feeling of taking everything that was on sight. So kudos, I guess?

That being said, navigation is an absolute nightmare: although the verticality of both levels and main world makes sense for the setting (again, you are a f**king thief), more often that not I was at lost, unable to find where I should go, even with a minimap. I think toogglable waypoints and better labelling, as being able to see in the world map the name of the places you can go (and not aimlessly wandering around trying to find wherever) (this may be a reason as for why I thought the game to be slow, and then speed up a little bit when I started learning the passages for the achievements).

tl;dr: kinda good, won't play again. Maybe.

Also, sorry if this doesn't make much sense, as I am sick, and plat-ing this game made me sick, and I wanna lay down and sleep forever. Bye.

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SPOILERS UNDER THE THING \/
READ AT YOUR OWN RISK
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So, remember Chapter 7? Yeah, there is a fucking combat-centric boss fight against a MOFO. AND IT PISSED ME OFF. 1) Combat in a stealth game, where the easiest thing to happen is finding you. 2) I tried that 750 points-difficult-thingy and out of nowhere I was dead. 3) The killing part.
I feel the game wasn't meant for a one-on-one show off, and it still feels weird that fight. And again, Garrett saying that he only kills when absolutely necessary, made me feel that I had played the game in the wrong way.
The 750 thing was expected, since it ramps ups the difficulty quite a lot, but I felt the AI of the thief-general, or whatever, to be quite erratic, and it was hard to gauge when it was safe to open the door. And then you have to pick a lock with five tumblers. Yeah, there's a reason why I don't try difficult-based challenges. But, apart from my nitpicks, it felt doable.

That being said, I think the Erin fight was what the game was about, an environment-centric boss fight, since Garrett ahs much more move abilities than combat ones.
She dyeing in the end was kinda LMAO, tho.

General discourse on this is both too harsh and unfortunately accurate. It's a bad Thief game, for sure, and the story is an absolute mess from front to back. The gameplay updates also feel generally clumsy throughout, as though they had some vague ideas they thought could work and then never took the time to properly groom them into something fun. Beneath all the fumbling, though, I do think there's a glimmer of an interesting take on Thief in here. Crystal Dynamics nail a pretty unique tone every once in a while (i.e. the asylum level), and I actually have some fondness for the hub world despite the janky map system. The world degrades slowly, and all you can do is sit by to watch it crumble while stealing just enough to make a living. The other games did it better, but I appreciate the effort regardless. Probably would have benefitted greatly from a sequel - as it stands, I completely understand why it didn't get one.