![]() ![]() Compared to the greedy, murderous, and two-faced characters he meets, he’s practically a saint.Īs the setting and narrative worked to repulse me, nothing else stepped up to attract me. I mean, yes, he steals from people without regard for their security or wellbeing… but he has scruples! He prefers not to kill when he can help it and he isn’t big on grave robbing. It’s almost as though the creators felt that in order to make Thief work, everything else in the game had to be so filthy and awful that the protagonist Garett’s quiet, professional approach to theft wouldn’t make him seem like the bad guy. It can barely keep the plot coherent (and at times doesn’t even do that) much less offer perspective on the world beyond the game. Games like Silent Hill and Condemned: Criminal Origins have developed remarkably unpleasant settings and then leveraged them to illustrate truths about the characters or human nature or even society as a whole. This is not to say that an exploration of an ugly fantasy should be inherently written off, but if a game sets out on such a dedicated mission to make its places and faces so uniformly wretched, there ought to be a reason for it. Most every mission takes place at night, and most every location is grimy. An early quest leads you through a pornographer’s lair. Level one takes place at a corpse disposal site, and it is necessary to move through it by hanging from the carcass conveyor belt with the cadavers. This is perhaps the most oppressive and grim video game I’ve ever had the misfortune to play. This is because, in Eidos Montreal’s Thief, the gloom is everywhere. But that would be petty, and there’s a much more important truth to be drawn from the line “the Gloom is everwhere”. I could point out how “The Gloom” is about as unspecific a name for a plague as “The City” is as the name of the city the game takes place in (or “Thief” is for a new game in the Thief franchise for that matter). ![]() It would be easy to pick on this line because it’s repeated over and over during the game, or how easily guards revert to saying it after forgetting that there was a thief to worry about 30 seconds ago. “The Gloom is everywhere” is one of the lines repeated by unoccupied guards throughout Thief. ![]()
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January 2023
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