Thief: The Dark Project

Looking Glass does it again with this amazingly fresh take on the first-person shooter.

For years now, long before everyone else realized that people were eventually going to get tired of running around and killing monsters over and over, Looking Glass has been looking for new ways to take the first person shooter genre forward. In Ultima Underworld, a game that foreshadowed titles like Trespasser, Arena and Everquest , the company took a remarkably smooth 3D fighting engine and added complex (for the time) elements of conversation trees and magic. In System Shock, the company once again created a first person engine designed to add an element of realism to the era's severely limited shooters. The end result was phenomenal and is widely recognized as one of the best games of its time. Now the company finally has the tools and the technology to realize one of its long-term development dreams. In Thief: The Dark Project, you get a glimpse of what the future of gaming is really all about ¿ the exploration and manipulation of a believable virtual world.

From the get go, Thief is unlike any game you've ever played. You are Garrett, a thief who has learned the tricks of motion invisible from a mysterious group of silent Watchers. After leaving the group to pursue your own interests (like stealing) you've managed to make a steady living by procuring special items from various nobles and selling them to Cutty, your fence. As the game begins, Cutty has let it be known that he would pay dearly for a certain scepter owned by a local nobleman. The price he's offering is right, so you gather your tools and head out to work.

Once you've taken control of the game, it seems to play like any other first person shooter. You basically move through levels, trying to avoid detection while you gather the objects that are crucial (or at least profitable) to your quest. With the completion of each mission, the story unfolds and you'll find yourself in more and more mysterious circumstances. While the first few missions can be a little confusing, by the end of the game, the story really starts coming together and will have you on the end of your seat hoping for success just so you can find out what happens next.

The main difference between Thief and other games of the genre is the fact that your character isn't built for combat, he's built for stealth. If you run straight ahead into a large group of guards and start swinging, you're going to get killed in about two seconds. This one small but all-encompassing shift is what makes Thief as challenging and as fun as it is. Unlike most titles where the standard operating procedure is to kill everything that moves and then try to figure out the way to get to the next level, in Thief you want to figure out where you're going as soon as possible and then get there without arousing any attention at all. The way to do this is by making sure you can't be seen or heard. Fortunately, The Dark Project gives you a few tools to make sure that doesn't happen.

Let's start with remaining unseen, in the end it's a lot more important. Every light source in Thief not only illuminates, but also leaves varying grades of shadow in the areas in doesn't cover. At the bottom of your main view screen there's a small bubble that varies in color at any given moment from bright yellow to black. This bubble is a meter of how well you can be seen where you're standing. When you're in deep shadow, standing still with your sword put away, the meter is black indicating that even if a guard looks directly at you, he won't see you. If you're running across a well-lit courtyard with your steel unsheathed, it's going to be bright yellow (and you're going to be dead soon). By learning to judge the variations between the two extremes, you'll be able to determine just how much you can get away with when trying to sneak past someone. If you're seen in a shadowy area, a guard will most likely chase you for a little while and then decide that he was just seeing things (presuming of course than you had enough sense to hide when he spotted you). If you're seen outright, the guard will probably single an alarm, scream for his friends, and do all sorts of other things that make thievery very difficult. Which brings us to the importance of sound in the game.

In addition to being able to see illuminated objects in a cone in front of them, guards can also hear sounds within a certain radius. If they hear a noise that's out of the ordinary, they'll immediately go on the alert and start trying to identify the source of the sound. After a while (if you stay quiet and hidden) they'll decide it was just the wind and go back to their post. Still, if you're trying to slip up behind someone or cross an area where you'll be seen if they turn around, it behooves you to be as quiet as possible. Different surfaces that you may walk across make different sounds as you traverse them. For example, walking across a grassy lawn or a carpet makes almost no noise (you are a thief after all). On the other hand, if you decide to run across a grate or a tile floor, your clattering will be heard by anyone even remotely close. A successful thief will quickly learn that walking is the best way to stay hidden and to run only in emergencies. You'll also learn that tile floors should only be crossed when there's no one around to hear you. A lot of Thief is spent waiting in the shadows while an opportunity to move presents itself. Fortunately, patrolling guards make quite a bit of noise (singing, whistling, clomping around and the like) and so it's usually pretty easy to figure out where they are at any given moment.

Even if you manage to stay hidden and quiet, you're still going to have moments of conflict. Since you're usually up against heavily armored guards who are quite skilled at combat, you'll need to make use of different tools to make sure that that conflict is in your favor when it comes. At the beginning of the game you'll have access to your sword, which is a loud, bright weapon that leaves a mess when you hit someone with it, a bow that can be used to shoot different types of arrows, and a blackjack which can be used to knock someone out if you can sneak up on them from behind. Each of these tools has its purpose and place and so you need to practice with all of them until you feel pretty secure. As the game wears on you'll get access to new tools, most of which are designed to keep you out of trouble, that you'll also need to master. Examples include the water arrow, which can be used to extinguish pesky torches and to throw holy water on undead foes, the moss arrow, which will scatter moss over a hard floor so that you can walk across it silently and the rope arrow which will allow you to shoot a rope into a wall so that you can scale to new heights. The game is full of all kinds of cool gadgets like these, and like any good James Bond film, half the fun of getting to new missions is discovering which gizmos you'll be able to play with next.

Other than some pretty serious video card compatibility problems (three out of the four machines we had in the office would never run the game no matter which patches we downloaded) Thief is nearly flawless in its execution. The game's AI, its brilliant look and feel, and its challenging levels all work together to make a play experience that every thinking gamer will enjoy. We were sad to see that no multiplayer option was included though. It would have really cool to have a group of thieves each entering an area at difference points trying to grab a treasure before all the others could. Still, as a single player game Thief is pretty hard to beat.

In the end, Thief is one of the most exciting first-person games to come out in years. Rather than seeking to out do the competition in what's been done before, Looking Glass has given us a chance to play a different type of character in a world that is very realistic indeed. We're already waiting with baited breath to see what this dynamite development team can put together in the sequel.

-- Trent C. Ward

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Thief: The Dark Project

Rated "M"
DeveloperLooking Glass
PublisherEidos Interactive
Release DateDecember 3, 1998
Thief: The Dark Project
Thief: The Dark Project