Developer: Looking Glass Studios
Publisher: SQUARE ENIX (Originally Eidos Interactive)
Rrp: £4.99 (Gog.com and Steam)
Released: 30th November 1998
Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam
Played Using: Keyboard and mouse
Approximate game length: 16 hours
The Thief franchise is the originator of the First Person Stealth genre. Many games try to include a stealth section, but this was the first game to make stealth the core mechanic. As far as I’m concerned no game has ever topped Thief in this regard. Dishonored, (a game that I called the spiritual successor to the Thief series until the latest game appeared) had a damned good try and even got close, but fell just short of the mark. The reason that Thief is unparalleled for stealth is actually quite simple, most other games use a licensed engine and try to shoehorn a stealth mechanic in. Thief’s engine (the Dark Engine) on the other hand, was created from scratch with stealth in mind.
Before each mission you get to choose the difficulty, which changes the missions parameters, harder difficulties usually include stealing ‘X amount of gold’ and avoiding killing people. Keep in mind that increasing the difficulty gives no reward other than having the knowledge that you are skilled.
I’ll be honest, the years have not been kind to this game. It looks extremely dated and the textures are of a very low resolution. I have been told there are mods that improve the overall look but for reviews I always play without mods. If you can get past the dated visuals though you are in for a treat.
Thief Gold is challenging. Garret (the character you play as) is not a very good fighter and the controls whether by accident or design reflect this. If you end up in a fight with more than one enemy you are pretty much guarantied to lose. But if you’re getting into fights a lot then you’ve missed the point, you are a thief, you stay in the dark places, watch the guards and take your opportunities when they arrive.
The very fact that before each mission you are given a shop screen, is to allow you to try and maximize your chances of success through planning and careful consideration. You think about the mission ahead and buy the equipment you think you need accordingly. How good of a thief you are (and how thorough you are) determines the money you’ll have to buy new equipment.
Of course, even ignoring the ageing graphics this game is not without flaws. Characters will occasionally partially clip through a door or wall, the hit detection is somewhat off and well… No Thief review would be complete without mentioning the zombies. Thief’s zombies are near universally hated because unlike in most games you can’t kill them, well, you can, but you have to have holy water and be willing to waste a water arrow (a precious commodity in Thief). You will also need to rebind the keys because this game came out when W, A, S, D wasn’t the standard configuration and just diving in without rebinding is confusing.
There were also two issues that I had from the Steam version of the game. The first being that occasionally when you pressed escape to go to the main menu the screen size would change. This was easily fixed by alt tabbing out and then back in to the game but still a strange and irritating bug. The second is that the video briefings between missions wouldn’t play. Thankfully this was fixed by playing the game in admin mode though, if it hadn’t have been fixed by this it would have greatly reduced my enjoyment of the title as the videos were one of the best parts.
Of the many notable features of Thief I must mention this, the map sizes. Once you get past the third mission the size of the maps and the complexity of the missions increases greatly. It isn’t unusual to find that you spend a good hour and a half on just one map, especially if you set the difficulty high.
As I said at the beginning of the review, many games ape the Thief series but none have quite managed to surpass it. Whenever I play the Elder Scrolls games I always feel annoyed that they don’t allow me to put out torches with a water arrow, or that the detection gauge in Deus Ex is lacklustre in comparison to its counterpart in Thief.
Despite all the flaws I mentioned I feel that the positives outweigh the negatives and that Thief Gold is a great game and one I think every budding games designer should play through. In fact I recommend anyone to play it, so long as you can be patient. This isn’t a game to be rushed, you savour it.
