This game is best understood as a dress rehearsal for Thief II.
A mechanically rich stealth game with some unfortunately dull levels, even when you exclude the extra levels added with the Gold edition.
Deliberately painted spots of light and shadow as cover combined with an all-encompassing soundscape make this perhaps the closest a simulated world has ever gotten to transcending toy status, as opposed to the same year's Pac-Man with extra steps. This is why 天照大神 had to smite their vision by only making them realize this by the time they had already made half of the game some dogshit survival horror dungeon waddler. Fuck this. I am confined to the bounds of the emergent systemic design sandbox forever. This is why I only fuck with Blue Archive.