Thief

Written by: Sam Henry Miller

Remember that adrenaline rush you used to get while playing hide-n-seek at your cousin’s place, where you’d find a nice elusive spot to hole-up and you kind of whizzed your pants a little? Thief is like that, but it won’t let you change your underwear.

In our post-modern world, pastiche is inexorable, because influence often derives from sources already once-removed from reality. “Reinventing the wheel” is a dangerous game, but this shouldn’t preclude the value of ‘tinkering with the spokes’. Unfortunately, the fundamental flaw of Thief lies in its creators’ reluctance to do just this. The result is a fantasy world so parched of vision that it needs rely on its pastiche, severing any immersion, and forcing the player to wonder, “Who’s really getting fleeced here: the NPCs behind the screen or the PC in front of it?”

What little narrative there is of Thief follows a protagonist named Garrett, a Batmanish rogue with the charm and personality of a bat, whose primary motivation for each accepted quest is greed. After suffering amnesia, the most common plot-device known to man, Garrett is forced to piece together the events of the previous year and the fate of his partner. There’s also something called “The Gloom”, a sexier-looking Bubonic plague, that settles where the sun don’t shine (literally). The Gloom prompts the bourgeoisie, of whom you’ll rob blind, to seek higher ground and plagues the poor, of whom you’ll completely ignore, into all but class-extinction. But as you trek through the revamped maps of Tomb Raider (2013), employing the deft parkour and make-shift gadgets of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider (2013), you’ll soon come to realize that Square Enix just dimmed the lights on Tomb Raider (2013) and tried to pass it off as a different game.

Perhaps to the game’s greatest credit, the dialogue, in written form, potentiates poignant moments; yet too often are these moments ransacked by porno-quality voice acting. In fact, at every turn Thief seems to make a habit of bursting its only beneficial bubbles: the looting is fun, but there’s too much to loot; you can spend the loot to upgrade or re-stock, but you usually don’t need the upgrades or the items; and the techniques to avoid AI detection are arguably the best-in-genre to date, yet the AI have the IQ and auditory perception of Lou Ferrigno.

You can pull some interesting stealth-tricks to divert guards such as launching coughing-gas-tipped arrows (?) to muck up sinuses or propelling water arrows (?) at sconces to dim the candle-lit environment. You can also toss empty liquor bottles at walls to make guards think you’re ‘over there’, when really you’re ‘over here’ (sneaky you!). Hiding in the shadows and “swooping” from shadow to shadow is mildy amusing at first, but honestly, you can progress the majority of Thief by bopping every guard on the head with a blackjack and dragging their bodies out of sight. All these ‘cans’ unfortunately result in a ‘won’t’, as you’ll itch for that “quit game” toggle at the bottom of the select menu. Sometimes, too much freedom of technique—this, “allowing you to play the game how you want to”, symptomatic of a casual gaming era/epidemic—can utterly asphyxiate quality under quantity. This all relates back to a lack of vision, but the true culprit in this case is a little more insidious…

Square Enix wants your money. And they’ll rush out an underdeveloped, feigned-revived-franchise to get it. They’ll coat it with just enough paint, roll back the odometer ever so discreetly and mass-market a sugar-coated lemon with the almighty power of brand. They did this at least once with Final Fantasy 14, which had the benefit of being online thus subject to revision (after you purchased it, of course); they’ve done it now with Thief, and you can be darn sure they’ll do it again. This is a dirty and desperate last-resort tactic that the big Eastern players (Square Enix, Sega, Nintendo, Konami, Capcom, Namco-Bandai) have been employing for some time now. Perhaps, foreseeing the death of their export-industry due to the fruition of Western companies raised by their very example, the East has taken to rash (some might say, unethical) habits, like stubborn old mentors resisting the indignity of an irrevocable fate.

It would seem hilariously ironic that Square Enix chose a franchise named Thief to dupe the world into sustaining their lucrative swan song, except for the fact that it’ll make your wallet $60.00 lighter. Instead, it’s just painfully ironic.