It’s not like I’m ever going to run out of things to do in the stealth games I already own, but still: I long for more stealth games. I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve had the kind of robust, immersive sim stealth I so love, full of shadows and vents to hide in and bad guys to choke out from behind. I was hoping that Thick as Thieves, the latest from Deus Ex and Thief developer Warren Spector, could give me what I need, and while in some ways it does, it still has a ways to go.
Thick as Thieves is a stealth heist game that can be played solo or with a partner. It takes place in a fantasy version of early 1900s Scotland, where magical barriers and ghost guards sit side-by-side with steampunk turrets and your classic living guards who walk around talking loudly to themselves. It currently has two levels, both absolutely gigantic multi-floor manors, and you visit them multiple times across missions as you grab everything that isn’t nailed down while pursuing bigger objectives.
The game originally set out to be a sort of competitive game between different teams of thieves, but that plan was scrapped in April because developer Otherside found that “we were having more fun with solo and co-op play.” After playing a few missions solo, I can see how PvPvE, as Otherside described it, might have been a struggle to make work. But this last-minute shift in focus also feels present in the game as it stands, which Otherside describes on its Steam page as an “introductory taste” that the studio plans to continue expanding. Some mechanics that feel like they were meant to stymie competitors–turning on turrets that are defaulted to off, relocking doors and item cases–are present with no purpose in solo and co-op play, and the way levels are populated can sometimes feel like they were designed to be more of a playground for a group than stealth levels in their own right. The game feels largely like a proof of concept, with some solid core ideas that still need some tweaking to fit the experience it’s becoming.
This feels especially true playing solo. While my instinct in any new stealth map is to methodically explore every corner and shadow, Thick as Thieves missions feature a timer of 30 or 45 minutes, after which you have eight minutes to find the magical door that leads back to your hideout. Oddly, this timer isn’t displayed anywhere; the first time it was mentioned in some intro text, I thought it was just the usual thing where a video game tells you to hurry up but doesn’t mean it, and I only realized it was real when I paused the game to handle something in work Slack and came back to find I’d failed the mission. I get the instinct behind the timer, especially to force action in co-op play and to make your exit from a mission more exciting, but when combined with the large levels, the game’s somewhat confusing paper map, and on-HUD mission icons that don’t always read like they’re in the right place, I found it mostly needlessly stressful when I was playing alone. Once I took the timer seriously I never felt like I was running out of time, but it did discourage me from lingering and exploring, one of stealth games’ great pleasures. Since you revisit the current maps so many times, the time pressure does work to keep you from burning out on them too soon, but it caused me to play a bit more recklessly than I generally want to in a stealth game. Without a teammate to keep the mission progressing, respawning when I was killed felt more like a frustrating setback than a challenge I wanted to rise to.
Beyond that, a lot of the moment-to-moment solo play is the standard stuff, in a good way. Lots of things are charmingly tactile: a simple lock-picking minigame, the way your visibility indicator reacts to light, how a grappling hook needs to be cranked after each use. Choking out guards takes a long time in that classic “can I take this guy down before someone else sees me” way, though you’re not able to hide their bodies. There are traps to disarm or avoid, and even though the game gives you a tool that highlights them a la Dishonored’s heart, it was still a thrill when I’d accidentally hit a pressure plate and a once-quiet room would explode into a cage of magic vines and panicking turrets. It was always exciting to unlock the door to a new room and push it open, holding my breath to see whether I was about to blow the whole thing or find a quiet room full of loot to steal. There’s plenty of the stealth stuff I love, all the hiding and sneaking and just barely getting away with things, and the game has its own unique spin on things in the form of the ability to send some of your loot back to your base during a mission and the presence of the ghostly guards who break the rules of stealth game guards in a challenging, if not annoying (complimentary) way. But it’s all a little bare bones at present, particularly in solo play.
Putting aside how pathetic it makes me sound to say “I watched some people play this game co-op because I didn’t have friends to play it with,” I watched the Kinda Funny folks play together on a livestream, where the game seemed a bit more feasible. Finding multiple pieces of an objective seems a bit less tedious with more hands, and dealing with the consequences of each other’s actions seems more fun than accidentally alerting guards and then hiding until they chill out, all while worrying that the clock is ticking.
I try not to talk about games’ prices, but it feels worth mentioning here that Thick as Thieves costs about $5 US. That’s affordable enough to convince a friend to pick it up with you (*cough* my friends reading this), and also more than reasonable for what’s here, which even if it might feel a little undercooked at present is still full of areas to explore and missions to undertake. Even if it’s not quite what I was hoping for, five bucks for a stealth game with so many of my favorite hallmarks, designed by stealth game experts, and with plans to continue growing feels totally fair. There’s no indication yet when new stuff might come or if it might cost, but I’m hopeful Otherside can turn what they’ve got here into something that feeds my insatiable hunger for stealth.
