So, for this month's theme, I need to complete a stealth game. I didn't actually have a lot of options for this, but I had picked up Thief (2014) a while back and had been intrigued by the gritty Victorian setting and general vibe of the game.
Narratively, Thief actually ended up being a lot more supernatural than expected. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I definitely don't remember this being advertised. Truthfully though, the concept wasn't that bad even if the nature of Primal wasn't well-explained. The base plotline was simple and nothing special, but it wasn't exactly bad either and had a few neat moments. That being said though, it wasn't great either. The twists were mostly predictable and the characters were pretty flat.
Mechanically... I won't lie to you, it fell flat. Conceptually, while the stealth mechanic are pretty standard, they are still cool. I like the different options you can take towards how you play, the variety of tools at your disposal and the lockpicking mechanic. I'm less fond of how the game doesn't tell you which tools are essential to certain parts of the game, how some mechanics were almost never worthwhile or just the general jankiness of things. This is especially true playing on keyboard and mouse since there's about a million different inputs to keep track of. I wouldn't want to play with small hands. This wouldn't be an issue if you played with controller but despite claiming to have controller compatibility, the game did not actually recognise having a controller plugged in and forced me to stick to keyboard and mouse anyway. Apparently, this has been a problem with the game since launch and the devs just never fixed it.
Visually, guards and other enemies often glitched out and the characters themselves didn't have particularly inspired designs or quality models. It wasn't enough to make anyone's eyes bleed but even factoring in that the game is ten years old they don't look great. To its credit though, the games environments do look pretty good. The atmosphere was definitely there and the general design of locations wasn't original by any means, but enjoyable.
Audio-wise the music was barely there mostly until things got dramatic at which point it was decent. The sound design was hit-and-miss with some dubious volume levels in laces but some highlights too like with the vocalisations made by the freaks, as they're called. The voice acting was also bad to middling with no real standouts other than maybe Basso's VA. He wasn't exactly world-shatteringly good either, but stood out by comparison.
So, Thief. Do I recommend it? Ehhhhhhh. It's an okay game if you can get past its issues. I wouldn't suggest paying full price for it, but if you want to play a stealth game and it's on sale, it's hardly the worst game in existence either. However, for basically the same price you can also get Aragami which has similar design but looks better, has better sound design and voice acting and none of the jank. So... you know.
Writing: 4/10
Gameplay: 2/10
Visuals: 5/10
Sound: 4/10
Total: 15/40