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Thief: The Dark Project Retrospective Playthrough
Since the new Thief (“Thi4f” for those of us keeping track of regrettable marketing decisions) came out, I’ve been wanting to celebrate my love of all things classic by dipping my toes back into the nightmare waters of the masterful classic original, Thief: The Dark Project. Catch my entire Twitch feed of the first mission below.
The first section of the mission tasks Garrett with sneaking into a nobleman’s manor and robbing him of some shiny kabob or some such thing. The cut-scene introducing the mission is perfect. And there are many more peppered throughout the game. The video segments are minimal, relying much more on sound and voicework than graphics to convey mood and story. The visual element is mostly 2d art with minimal animation. It’s almost static.
Garrett’s voice is another beloved relic of gaming history. Stephen Russell enjoys David Hayter-level renown for his work as Garrett and he deserves every ounce of it. The voice is consistently cool and detached, with the perfect amount of cynicism and menace. It’s a shame Square didn’t utilize his talents for the new game. Here we see Garrett manuevering through the city streets before accessing a poorly-guarded well to drop into the sewers below:
Dropping down the well into the sewers under the city is one of my favorite moments. The drop is gratuitously long. Games today always seem to employ an economy of design out of financial necessity. But you miss moments like this where the fucking well digs into the bowels of the earth and keeps going, going, gone.
The same is true of the lengthy swim through the sewers before entering the manor. It’s mostly just empty space, and that’s a sin in game design today. But allowing the game sections to feature such expanded areas gives a sense of the size of the environments. The intro mission is one of the smallest of the game, too. The sense of scale only increases to downright surreal levels in later missions.
Down in the Bonehoard, which, I think, is the game’s third mission, was excellent for this. That level starts on the ground in a cemetary, but quickly pushes Garrett to plumb the depths of the tombs below. And then caves. And more caves. And it keeps going. And fucking… going. Down. With unpleasant things walking and writhing and crawling through dark, unending claustrophobia. Almost every mission in the game makes me feel the crushing size of the environments above, below, and around me at all times. Today’s comparatively more tone-deaf games, in which every moment has to be an action movie, could never pull this shit off. They eschew character and atmosphere for those Call of Duty Moments. And that means a never-ending subterranean terror jam would end up feeling like boring filler. Same deal with this first mission. Modern design would eliminate all of the quiet moments and shrink the environment. There’s no trust in the player simply becoming engrossed in the silence. At least there would still be plenty of titties and F-bombs to make up for it.
Here we are in the manor’s basement where we get our first taste of evading guards in the shadows.
Thief was a disempowerment fantasy that made the player feel weak in order to amp up the tension. And it worked brilliantly. None of it was particularly sophisticated, but it didn’t need to be. All of the elements just worked. Hide in the shadows, turn out the lights, and keep fucking quiet.
Coming out of the basement, into the upper levels of the manor:
Ah, the manor proper. This is where things go very much off the rails and my shameful sense of direction kicks in.
Every time, this is the first place I become horribly lost. It’s those goddamned major thoroughfare hallways with all of their similar-looking side rooms set off to the side as side rooms typically are.
Thief came out in an era where mini-maps and GPS-style guidance were already things. But the game brilliantly gives you shitty, unreliable maps to deal with. Locations were routinely blanked out, glossed over, or just completely incorrect. And it was all you had to deal with. Getting lost was all part of the dis-empowerment nightmare that made the game so engrossing.
This is also where you see some of the ingenious game design that comes with the water arrows and how they give the player a bit more room to breathe. Every time I entered a room with a douseable torch was an opportunity to give myself a bit of a pause by putting out the lights.
The game makes this nonessential. Run out of water arrows or don’t buy enough in the beginning and you can still get through these sections. They just become a little more nerve wracking. Most of the times I use the water arrows, I don’t even need them per se. But, boy, do they sure ease some of the more panic attack lost in the light moments. That, of course, also raises the now trite commendation for how Thief makes lighted environments more frightening than the pitch black ones.
The AI wasn’t even a strong point for the game back in 1998. But I think people always enjoyed the enemy and monster AI more as abstract approximations of those elements. All you really need to sell immersion is the fact that there is a guard walking around who can take you out if you aren’t careful. It gives just enough incentive to watch your ass even as you’re already preoccupied with not getting lost or killed. The fact that it’s also generally hard to kill the guards means that they don’t need to be that realistic. Getting caught can be frightening no matter what.
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If you’ve not had the pleasure, I highly recommend getting Thief over at GOG.com. They also have both sequels, all DRM free and very cheap. It’s a great deal, seeing as how I keep coming back to the game every few years and it has yet to lose its magic.
