Rope arrows now only lodge into pre-determined points, making them ways of accessing pre-designed hidden routes rather than a means to create your own. The cost of this tactile traversal is that the freedom of movement provided by Garrett's gadgets has been strictly curtailed. These are issues, but eventually you learn to look before you leap. Sometimes you'll peek around a corner when you intended to steal something from the top of a table, and sometimes you'll jump to your death when you thought you were facing a gap you could easily cross. Many interactions are context sensitive – jumping and climbing in particular – and where problems emerge it's because Garrett doesn't do quite what you expect. When it all comes together Thief feels dextrous, physical and fluid to play. Its use is mitigated by stamina – also used for sprinting – and by caged birds and dogs who can be startled by sudden movement. It solves the same problem that Dishonored's teleportation power did, but does so in a way that feels less like cheating. It's used to get from shadow to shadow, from guard to guard, from room to room. A tap of the spacebar at any time results in a silent stealth dash that both speeds Garrett up and lowers his profile – it's half dive, half lunge. Whether you're rifling through drawers, dialing in a safe combination or snuffing out candles, Thief achieves a sense of physical presence that few first-person games can match. Items don't simply vanish when you collect them – you pick them up and pocket them. Your body and hands are always visible and interact seamlessly with the environment. In combat, your vision narrows when sprinting the world seems to contract around your point of focus, tilting as you bank around corners and attempt to break line of sight. Guards have multiple levels of awareness, and if someone catches sight of you the first you'll know of it is a stirring on the soundtrack that conveys the sense that you're being watched. This is matched with a spread of audio-visual tricks that fill in for Garrett's instincts. The entire game takes place at night, but colour is used carefully to distinguish areas and make it clear when you're concealed in shadow. The City is a handsome place in its modern iteration: while Thief might lack Dishonored's distinctive art style, it boasts a level of detail that gives it a real sense of place. On a moment-by-moment level, Thief delivers on the fantasy of being Garrett as well as – if not better than – its predecessors. The cook span around to look and I dashed behind him, scooping up the unconscious guard and slipping away to hide him elsewhere. Forced to improvise, I slipped out of the cabinet, picked up a wine glass, and threw it across the room where it smashed against the far wall. Later, while I was hiding in a cabinet in the kitchen of a mansion belonging to The City's foremost architect, a wandering cook threatened to discover the body of a guard I'd stashed in the corner of the room. I always played Thief games for these near-miss moments, and in that instant I felt like Garrett again. I darted behind it and waited until he went back to sleep, listening carefully to the sound of his breathing. The guard woke up, but remained in his armchair. Crack it at the right time and the action is silent: fail and the lock clicks loudly. This involves a simple minigame where each tumbler is unlocked by feeling for a particular sweet spot. I extinguished some candles and, in the dark, began to crack a safe embedded in the wall. I'd jimmied a rear window and slipped in undetected, swiping cups and inkpots off shelves before sliding into a side room where a guard lay dozing in an armchair. The first wave of relief hit me early, during an opportunistic jewelry shop heist that occurs mid-way through the opening chapter. That said, I recommend playing it through once on the hardest setting before you start tinkering.Īfter a linear but necessary tutorial on the rudiments of stealth, climbing, distracting guards and picking locks, Thief opens strong. If you feared that Eidos Montreal were going to dumb down your favourite game, lower your pitchforks: they have given you the power to smarten it back up. Using custom difficulties, you can play Thief with campaign-spanning permadeath, quicksaves disabled, or the stipulation that being detected at all constitutes mission failure. Beyond the standard spread of difficulty modes you have the option to play with customised settings, enabling purists to disable everything they feel intrudes on their game, from objective markers to entire features. The developers have listened to negative feedback and dialed back on quicktime events and slo-mo nonsense.
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