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Thief: The Dark Project - Mission 3 Playthrough - Way Down in the Hole
This is where it all starts. Yes, the first mission (which you can catch here) is a great primer on Thiefâs mechanics, and the second one ramps things up in terms of difficulty to give a better sense of what youâll be dealing with. But Mission 3, âDown in the Bonehoardâ brings in the fear. And the claustrophobia. And the scale. Watch below as we navigate the huge network of claustrophobic tunnels, tombs, and skulking horrors buried in the clammy earth.
Thief: Mission 3 Introduction
Another pitch-perfect introductory sequence lays out what Garrett will be doing. Having received a tip on more phat lootz, Garrett makes his way to the local cemetery to pilfer the Horn of Quintus.Â
The only problem is itâs down. Really far down. Under cold earth. And there may be⌠some things roaming around in there. Which means you get to watch me play like a panicked little girl for the next few. Deep breaths. Here we go.
The Noble Houses; The Upper Vaults (South)
It all starts so unassumingly: A very small, grass-covered graveyard at night. A tiny mausoleum which has obviously been broken into by grave robbers before, gate askew, squats ahead. One body on the ground.
Spoiler alert: itâs a zombie. Best not to disturb it.
Thereâs just not much there. Until we get below the surface.
Keep this quaint little graveyard in mind. Youâll be wondering how the fuck you got so far from it before long.
One of the things I donât see written enough about this classic is the sense of space and the massive, dramatic degree of progression in nearly every mission. Down in the Bonehoard takes you so very far beneath the ground that it seems almost impossible not to have a sense of colossal weight subtly in mind while descending.
From this unassuming little graveyard,Garrett moves down into a maze of crypts that are a minor maze unto themselves. But it goes further down, into narrow, mossy tunnels. Giant vaulted caverns stalked by prehistoric nightmares. And below that, even more crypts. And even more tunnels. None of it goes together. But it is all together.
If youâre at all like me, you get bowled over by the magnitude of how far down it goes every playthrough. By the time you reach the bottom, thinking back to that tiny little field with its single mausoleum prompts a reaction like âhow the fuck did we get here from there?â More on that later.
Thereâs also something to be said for verticality in game design. I see vertical level architecture praised occasionally in games. But, in truth, designers rarely create spaces that go up and up, or down and down. I wish Thief was part of some gilded era of gaming where this was a popular design, but it is not so. Verticality has really never been huge in game spaces, with only a few notable exceptions. Down in the Bonehoard nails this shit.
Now weâre getting somewhere. Except for panicking and falling down a shaft at only the slightest contact with a zombie, I think I handled this portion rather well. If it werenât me, Iâd be laughing about how I frantically that moron backpedaled, turned around, and jumped into the nearest hole. Tried to grab the rope on the way down, but⌠didnât.
This is the last portion of tomb youâll see for a bit. One thing that stands out here is how slowly Iâm creeping through. Not because Iâm such a pro. But because I canât remember most of the level and am terrified to disturb what might be around the corner.
Where I mentioned in the last post that Thief stood out (stands out still) as a disempowerment fantasy among power fantasies, here is that principle in action. The game encourages you to move very slowly â deliberately â because you donât know what might be around the next corner. And you probably wonât be able to handle it if it catches you off guard. This increases the tension, but itâs also a consequence of the tension. That compounding is why Thief is still one of the masters of generating player fear.
As we leave the first set of tombs and enter the caves, there are a couple things to note.
First, notice the sound. You can hear the air moving through the tunnels. Itâs ever-present, and the impact on the gameâs atmosphere cannot be understated. Almost every moment of Thief has some kind of ambient mood noise slithering around behind the playerâs awareness.
Iâm not talking about wind, or crickets, or running water. Games today have that. The tombs in the Bonehoard level have the constant noise of chilled still air in the playerâs ears. Other places run a faint ringing that sounds like tibetan singing bowls just under the sonic palette. You may hear the note of a faint gong, held a bit too long. Or or that omnipresent rumble one hears when underwater, even while on dry land.
The psychological effect is obvious. But it also creates a physical effect where the player feels constant pressure from these soft noises. It all contributes to the sense of bearing down on the player. Itâs magnificent, if never, ever pleasant. And itâs, sadly, not something you see in todayâs games. Subtlety won the day back in 1998, it would seem. Ambient noise is much more explicit today.
The other thing worth discussing is how abstract the rudimentary graphical capabilities required games to be back in 1998. Abstraction turned a lot of the game areas into twisted nightmare versions of what they would otherwise look like today. Thief was exceptional for this, whether Looking Glass, the developers, intended it or not.Â
Dropping into the caves in this segment, that limited graphical fidelity has a peculiar and critical impact. The very angular level geometry, which was not as noticeable back in the crypts because everything is supposed to be made of squarish bricks and hard angles, becomes quite striking here.
Itâs those caves! They arenât really caves, and they probably werenât, even back in â98. Theyâre approximations of caves at best. Hard angles abound and donât look quite right. They donât look like organic, realistic tunnels carves from millions of years of the earth digesting itself. The primitive lighting system paints the game in bright, primary colors here, even though we are surrounded by thousands of tons of⌠dirt. Get a load of the blood-red rocks.
Like most other components of the game, this just kicks the surreal quality up to 11. The caves are⌠wrong. And theyâre not somewhere you want to be at all.
This is one of the first places you really begin to feel just how deep the Bonehoard goes. We should be near the bottom. Weâve jumped down through multiple floors of crypts and crawled further down through the tunnels beneath. Weâre almost done, right?
That would be a reasonable assumption until I run screaming from a Burrick (more on the Burricks later) and drop 100-some feet into a deep, underground pool. We had another 100 feet to drop?
This is the seen, but not stated, massiveness that resides at the heart of many of Thiefâs missions. And in this case, you can almost feel the millions of pounds of rock overheard crushing down upon you. Deeper, still, we go!
Mossy Tunnels â Claustrophobia Sets In
Ok, this is great. Take all the elements weâve gone through above and then add more claustrophobia by forcing Garrett to proceed through an oddly structured network of narrow, moss-covered caves. Weâd been moving steadily downward the whole time, but these mossy caves suddenly start climbing back up. And at odd angles. They are bizarre enough that, even moving upward, we still sense we are traveling deeper. Up or down, every step brings us closer to something secret and buried.
The rudimentary graphics I discussed above give a sense that, wherever you are, it probably shouldnât exist. Not right where you are, at least. How can these fucked up angles be here?Â
We saw Burricks briefly before, but this feels like the proper place to introduce them. The tiny passage opens into the roof of a massive, vaulted cluster of caverns. Another change of scenery and change of colors, from bright green to stony grey. Those lizard-looking little guys are the Burricks.
Burricks are, generally speaking, a pain in the ass. They arenât frightening in most places throughout the game. But their presence in the Bonehoard fits neatly onto the mouldering pile of unpleasantables that ticks away at my comfort level.
Give them a chance and theyâll try to kill you by vomiting acidic gas your way. Bloated, dinosaur heads extend from bodies that are both serpentine and porcine. And theyâre large enough that, if they give pursuit into the tiny passages behind you, you probably wonât be able to run past them. Youâd just better hope thereâs an opening at the other end.
Or maybe you have enough distance to just kill them. Try to harm Burricks, though, and things get unpleasant the other way. Burricks squeal like terrified pigs when injured. Hurt them enough, and theyâll panic and run away. Even though the AI is basic, Thief again gives players all they need to understand the nature of these beasts. Burricks are dangerous, but theyâre just animals defending their territory. Thereâs no evil here. Which makes it awfully upsetting when I have to run them down and commit murder. Necessity makes monsters of us all.
Watch out for the second embarrassing fall of the mission. I go to the trouble of shooting a rope arrow into the ceiling to climb down. Then, evidently, I say âfuck it!â and just jump right to the hard rock bottom. I make poor life choices.
Another cautious drop down a massive, jagged fissure and we are, finally, about as deep as we can go.
Again, Iâll point out that this chamber is another mostly empty space. It seems designed as such purely to induce vertigo, here at the bottom of all things. The same goes for the gigantic pond at the bottom. Thereâs no reason for it to be as deep as it is. Nothing in it at all. You can swim to the bottom if you want, but thereâs nothing to see down there. But you know itâs there. Designers today would cull all of that space to save storage and time. Worse, they would commit one of the most egregious sins in design â underestimating player intelligence. The area would be roped off to prevent players from getting âconfused.â But games today miss out on that intangible effect theses spaces provide.
The fact that there is nothing of note for the player to do in these spaces does not mean that they donât have an impact on the player. You feel it when you look down into the fissure after emerging from so many small, winding tunnels and after climbing to what feels like the bottom of the universe. That there is such a space underneath all this rock is yet another subconscious reminder of how massive a place we are dealing with. And itâs far from the last time the game does this.
The Halls of Echoing Repose
Underneath it all, we return to places which have been touched by the hand of man. More tombs. Tombs buried far enough down that they were, obviously, not meant to see much traffic, if any. Ever.
Again, we see the level carrying Garrett upwards, yet also deeper into the tombs. I, personally, always get another âwhere the fuck AM I?â moment right about here.
Check out around the 1:30 mark where I climb up a circular structure and look down. If you donât go all vertigooey, youâre more robot than mortal.
If every mission has a point where I run right off the rails (and every mission does), that happens here in this one. The Halls are positively loaded with the shambling, moaning undead. As the videos below reveal, navigating invisibly around their crusty zombie hugs takes a skill set I lack. So I had to just wing it.
Not shown are the four or five times I died trying to do this. If I seem like Iâm panicked for most of it⌠ I am. I can admit it.
A delightful little touch here that adds so much character to the level and makes me feel even worse about my Burrick genocide in the tunnels above. The singing of the Horn through the caverns charms the Burricks into pacification. They just sit there, listening blissfully. I can walk right by them. Iâm terrified to do so because I keep worrying theyâre going to snap out of it and get murdery all over my face. But there it is.
Almost there. Nice to know Garrett isnât afraid of heights. I wasnât before I came down here either.
And thatâs it! The Horn is mine! Another masterfully crafted Thief mission completed in the most clunky, amateurish manner possible. And, on the easy setting, no less.
Leave comments if youâre enjoying these segments and Iâll see if I can get around to doing more. Theyâll only get more pitiful as the missions get more difficult and elaborate. Maybe Iâll even play like a big boy and bump the difficulty up.
