I began my gaming career as a hardcore pure adventurist. The first
games I played were Riven, Myst, The Blackstone Chronicles, and Amber:
Journeys Beyond. I quickly became a fanatic for the genre, and with the zeal
of a new convert I pored over internet sites to learn more about these fascinating
and almost painfully addictive games.

During this exploration I generally
shut out any information about games in other genres. I just considered such information
noise. I even became an adventure snob. For a while.

Luckily I came to my
senses about eighteen months ago and began gingerly exploring the best of other
genres. I played the original System Shock and was terrified and enthralled.
I played Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos and was enchanted.

Then I
picked up Thief Gold and was utterly, completely, irrevocably blown away.

Thief
Gold is the expanded and tweaked version of 1998’s Thief: The Dark Project,
which won many awards in a year otherwise dominated by the action milestone
Half-Life. What the brilliant gamebuilders at the (late lamented) Looking
Glass Studios did was nothing less than completely reinvent the action genre.
And in doing so they created a game that appealed to action gamers and adventure
players alike.

Their stunning central idea was simple but powerful: turn
the action game on its head by placing the emphasis on stealth rather than
confrontation. In a flash they eliminated the central problem many gamers
have with action games–they’re not interested in running around shooting stuff.

With
this simple change in focus, all of the other traditional mechanics of the first-person
shooter suddenly translate into thrilling gameplay: smooth real-time-rendered
graphics engine, first-person perspective, and 3D sound.

In other words,
Looking Glass built an action game even the most die-hard adventure player could
not only like, but love.

The story and setting of Thief Gold is compelling
and mysterious. You play Garrett, a master thief who lives in an unnamed city
that’s part medieval, part primitive mechanical. Through the game you learn much
about the city’s complex social and religious structure, and it’s heady stuff
indeed. Even details such as the prayers you overhear guards of the Hammer sect
mutter to themselves sound authentic.

After loading up the game, there’s
a truly helpful and enjoyable tutorial that teaches you the mechanics of the game.
After Thief and System Shock 2, I have to say (the late lamented)
Looking Glass had it going on when it comes to training missions.

After
the training, it’s time to infiltrate Lord Bafford’s mansion. The first moment
I successfully snuck up behind an unsuspecting guard and quietly knocked him out
with my trusty blackjack, a stupid grin spread over my face and I was hooked.
The whole notion of sneaking into the mansions of the wealthy, absconding with
their valuables, and leaving without ever being detected is just insanely fun.

Darkness
is your best friend in Thief. In shadow you become virtually invisible,
and you can quietly sneak up behind guards or slink past them. Knowing how visible
you are is all-important, and to this end there is a handy “visibility jewel”
on the screen. The brighter it is, the more visible you are; the darker, the more
hidden.

The sound design is absolutely incredible. In fact, this is a game
you play with your ears. Standing breathlessly in shadow, leaning against a wall,
listening to a guard’s footsteps approaching you, or receding away from you, is
quite a thrill. Eavesdropping is a major activity in the game, and it’s through
listening in on conversations that you learn much of the game’s story.

The
sounds you make are also of paramount importance, since as good a thief
as Garrett is, is evidently never occurs to him to wear soft shoes. Every surface
you walk over has its own signature footstep, and some are so loud they can give
you away in a hurry.

Helping you in your quest is a bow that uses a variety
of very clever arrows: water arrows with which to put out torches, moss arrows
to soften the sounds of your footsteps when necessary, rope arrows to help you
climb, and many others.

Since all of these resources are strictly limited,
you have to choose your tools (and confrontations) very wisely. This makes it
necessary to use careful strategy during the loadout at the beginning of each
mission, when you spend your ill-gotten gains on appropriate tools for the next
mission.

Most action games have difficulty levels, but Thief has
the most effective use of this device I’ve ever seen. There are three difficulty
levels at which you can play each mission. Generally, since I’m uninterested in
how good a shot I am, I always dial the difficulty setting down to Easy on an
action or action/adventure game. Not so with Thief, because playing on
higher difficulty simply adds mission objectives and more challenging (and interesting)
restrictions. The most important of these restrictions is that on Expert you generally
can’t kill anyone. These added mission objectives add length and complexity to
the game, and the “no killing” directive is so in keeping with the spirit
of the game that I found I wasn’t interested in playing any other way. I would
say that playing the game on Expert adds at least 75% more game time.

I
know the Thief engine has received criticism for its limitations, but I
found the graphics to be excellent. The real-time 3D environments are quite vivid,
and as I swam, climbed, and snuck through the city, investigating mansions, temples,
and crypts, I felt a strong sense of reality.

In fact, I would say that
the experience of playing Thief was the most intense vicarious game experience
I’ve yet had. When I finished a mission, I truly felt like I had physically been
through the experience.

Unfortunately, in the midst of all this fantastic
news is one big fat turd in the punchbowl. It seems that the daring designers
at Looking Glass didn’t quite have the nerve to make the entire game so revolutionary,
and so they included several missions in which your opponents aren’t human guards
and civilians, but all manner of ghosts, zombies, and monsters. To me the enjoyment
level between the “human” missions and “monster” missions
was night and day.

Happily, it seems the designers really listened to the
players when designing Thief II, and it reportedly relies far less on these
much more mundane foes.

Thief Gold has three more missions than the
original Thief: The Dark Project, and they haven’t just been tacked onto
the end of the game; they’re spliced into various places in the game. The original
missions have been tweaked and edited as well, so that the entire sweep of fifteen
missions has great continuity. It’s also telling that all three of the new missions
are of the “human” variety, and what’ s more, they were my three favorite
missions in the game. The first deals with infiltrating the Thieves’ Guild and
setting up two rival factions to blame each other for your deeds; the next deals
with the Mage Towers, a vast mission with a dizzying variety of challenges. My
absolute favorite mission of the game, however, was the third new mission, “The
Song of the Cavern,” in which you have to infiltrate a huge opera house.

Almost all of the missions in the game are huge, and they are worth the
long loading times for this reason: the entire mission loads. No more pace-breaking,
finger drumming pauses for the game to load as you enter a new area. This is a
big plus.

I could go on an on about this splendid game, but I’ll shut up
now. Time to load Thief II.

Here’s the bottom line: Thief took
me places I’ve never been in my gaming experience; it redefines the possibilities
of computer gaming, and has forever raised the bar on game excellence. So there.

Final
Grade: A+ (despite the monster missions)

If you liked Thief Gold:
Play:
System Shock 2 or Deus Ex
Read: Shibumi by
Trevanian
Watch: Topkapi or Rififi

System
Requirements:
Pentium 166 or equivalent
32 MB RAM
4X CD-ROM
SVGA
4
MB VRAM
42 MB free disk space
Mouse
DirectX v6.0