Thief: The Dark Project
Thief was published in 1998, and developed by Looking Glass Games for Microsoft Windows. Its influence can be felt across the stealth genre to this day having inspired, most notably, the Dishonored series. Despite its age, I believe it remains a viable experience to this day, and likely presents a far more unique experience than some of the stealth games nowadays.
Some have called Thief an immersive sim, where the objective is to become the epitome of a thieving rogue: Garrett. I tend to agree towards this statement, more on this later. Our avatar and protagonist of the game is a master thief who works independently. He’s a loner, trained by the Keepers, but has long since abandoned them to pursue his own interests.
The most attractive thing about the protagonist is his simplicity. Garrett steals valuables to pay rent, nothing more and nothing less. Nevertheless, he becomes a magnet for trouble due to his special skill set; the story goes from a grounded heist for a jewelled scepter, to supernatural cults looking to dominate Garrett’s home city without ever losing sight of its key core fantasy.
An essential part of Thief with regards to our purposes, is the immersive sim facet of the game. The game doesn’t try to be anything else but what’s on the tin. As a player, your job is to sneak through various locales, looking to pilfer from them a key artifact as well as amassing as much gold as possible to pay for your tools in the next job.
In this respect, these tools are limited, costly, and usually help you getting out of sticky situations, sneak around guards, or trap enemies rather than actively fight them face to face. Garrett is not a skilled swordsman, neither is he a resilient fellow, its best advised to run away rather than confront enemies head on as he will die rather quickly.
The difficulty of the game, and its brilliance, resides in its capacity to create an immersive experience. As a player, your best ally are shadows to hide in, and your worse enemy are tiled flooring and bright lights. Every movement and interaction with game objects has the potential creates noise. Walking on soft carpets will make no noise, whilst walking on tiling will attract attention. Drawing a sword, even in darkness, while close to guards will turn them hostile immediately.
Thief’s soundscape and lighting design are what makes the game particularly unique and an integral part of gameplay as well. You can hear the guards approaching, or leaving. You can almost map out their movements as you listen closely and in return they can hear your motions. In context of its time period, Thief was revolutionary when compared to contemporary first person action-adventure games, like Doom, System Shock and Half-Life.