In real life, I don't shoplift or steal from people, but in your typical open world RPG, I'm a kleptomanic that pockets everything and gets addicted to trying to steal from that locked chest in the restricted area with 12 guards, so I was excited to play Thief Simulator, since it's a game that's only that.

I had this on my wishlist like five years ago, but I guess I removed it because it looks cheap and lame, and it kind of is cheap and lame. It's very obvious that this game was in the first wave of the modern and more popular work sim (not to be confused with the classic and very boring german work sims) and that it was made with stock Unity functionality. It has the same control feel and feature set as all of these games from the same genre and era. You can interact with objects in the world, in this case by stealing them, and you have access to a fake internet you can do things with, as well travel between a few locations. Standard Unity work sim stuff where nothing stands out and nothing feels technically (or artistically) impressive, but it works anyway because stealing digital stuff with no actual victims is just so much fun.

The game offers a hideout, a pawn shop and a few neighborhoods for you to loot. The first one is low and middle class and have little to no security and no guards. In those areas, you can either install a camera or manually spy on the family that lives there until you've fully tracked their routines and know when you can go in without witnesses. You usually get inside via a hole in the fence, or vines that you can climb. On very rare occasion, you have to park your van next to the fence so you can jump over. Inside, you dodge cameras and residents (if you need to go in while people are still at home) and lift small things to put in your backpack, while larger things have to manually carried to your getaway vehicle. This is the fun part, and creeping around people's houses does have a satisfying sense of tension, especially in houses that are never truly empty and where you have to perform yoru thievery with at least one resident still at home. What I would do is scout the place, plan my route in and out and try to make sure it's an empty path where residents/guards don't go and where I can haul as much as I can fit in my car out without being spotted. Thankfully, the other people don't care about opened car gates or garage doors for some reason (though they do care about open doors and windows), so that helped in planning a lot of escape routes. Fill my bag, try to grab both the TV and some art and then go home and fence it.

You fence by either going to the computer to fill special orders, like how someone wants four PC monitors and so you can either steal all four at once or you can stash them in your storage until you have the correct amount. If there are no special orders, you go to the pawn shop and sell it off. You can even steal a few cars, and there are even mechanics for taking it apart and selling for example the full wheel set. That part was surprisingly ambitious. You use the cash you gain to purchase upgrades to your equipment as the story and security progresses and asks more and more of you.

The other neighborhoods are the classy area with tons of security but few guards, and then the industrial/fancy area which has both tons of security and tons of guards. Difference between guards and tenants is that guards never leave and never take breaks, so there's always people in the industrial area. There's also the bonus, "free DLC", farming area that comes with its own (very barebones) subplot and a reputation mechanic, which I wish was in the whole game and not just one DLC area. The first two and the bonus area are all fine and enjoyable, but the final area is such a pain to get through, because this is where the problems start to crop up. In the previous areas, it was fine that other humans are frustratingly observant and that you go down immediately if a guard or cop (or even some residents) catch up with you and tase you, and they can tase you from pretty far and often through objects and such, so if you get seen and there's no closet to hide in nearby, you'll probably get tased and respawn at your car, having to do the whole heist over again. This is fine in the early, and easier, areas, but the latter areas are a painful trial and error party where you have to start over like a million times, and that's when you really start feeling the kind of brutal load times for what a small game it is running on a PS5. Like so many Unity games, this one also struggles with saving and saving freezes the game for longer and longer the more your save grows, and ultimately, I had to quit the game because the game somehow destroyed my save to the point where it would ONLY remember a save I had from monday evening, and any progress I made would still be done if I had the game still open, but if I shut down or the game crashed, the save would revert to the same point. The third time that happened, I quit out and uninstalled because I wasn't about to the final 5-10 hours of the game in one go since my save apparently decided to stop working.

In short, this is a cheap and basic Unity work sim with a fun theme and mechanics that are engaging, addictive and entertaining in the early areas, but the whole game becomes a pretty major drag in the late game for both game design and technical reasons. I enjoyed and can recommend the first half of the game, and will as such give it a decent score, but I don't think anyone will have fun with the final area and final third of the story campaign. It does help that I paid €3 for this on sale and I would probably have been less enthused if I had paid like €20+.

One of the worst games that I ever played but still somehow manages to be good.

It’s a buggy mess that looks and plays horribly, but it is still fun?

An enigma of a game.

There's a lot to be said about Paradox's development and support strategy that I'm just not getting into. I will say that this is a stellar example of a Space Opera themed 4x, and, critically, it delivers the player expression that Paradox is uniquely able to bring to strategy games. The options for generating your own empire are robust, and the development options in game provide a lot of replay value for a variety of playstyles. Some options do feel strictly superior, which isn't ideal balance-wise (hive minds feel like straight up stronger because they can ignore parts of the economy and focus on expansion), but these are hardly the worst examples of that in the genre.