Have you ever played a game you wanted to love? A game whose peaks left you awe-inspired? A game whose lows left you frustrated? A game that makes a definitive artistic impression, but you wish was more successful at its own goals? I've played a few games like that, but none I wanted to like more than Thief: The Dark Project. Looking Glass Studios' next hugely influential title after their magnum-opus System Shock, Thief wasn't the first game where stealth played a prominent role, but it helped to codify many core tenants of the genre and would inspire an unbelievable amount of games to come. Thief is a game that is largely successful at presenting a highly oppressive, unsettling atmosphere and nuanced, innovative stealth mechanics but buckles somewhat under the weight of inconsistent level design and creativity.
Molding the rest of the stealth genre forever, Thief's game design deservedly gets praised relentlessly. Familiarizing concepts such as sound propagation, light and darkness mechanics, and NPCs reacting to unscripted events, Thief has no shortage of innovative design philosophies that make playing through its best levels engaging and tense. The game's best levels, such as The Sword and Assassins, give the player sprawling, huge levels that allow you to bob and weave between light and shadow, leap between carpet and loud tile, and clobber unsuspecting guards on the back of the head. Guards will react to small things being out of place, such as a door being open or a major object being out of place, and the game's best levels intelligently make great use of light and sound to make the stealth experience both immersive and stressful. The game does a great job of making you feel like a thief, sneaking around and shoving ungodly amounts of gold into your pockets. To say that few games are often as stressful and tense as Thief at its best is a massive compliment. You're given a veritable sandbox in terms of your toolset, with different arrows that do different things. Broadheads damage, water arrows take out torches, moss arrows soften your footsteps, rope arrows scale buildings, gas arrows are instant non-lethal takedowns, noisemaker arrows distract, and fire arrows essentially serve as the Thief equivalent of a rocket launcher. This toolset gives you a large amount of freedom in terms of how you want to approach levels and it makes the experience all the more fun. The combat and sword fighting, while typically discouraged, is more physics-based than most melee combat from this era and is surprisingly a lot of fun. The Sword has to be one of the best levels in any game I've ever played - its tricks and traps throughout an increasingly warped and surreal level while demanding the most out of the player is highly memorable and few games can claim to have an equivalent.
The problem is that only a good third of Thief's levels show off the game's complex systems and grand potential. Half of Thief's levels are sort of whatever, they're mostly remnants from the game's development when stealth wasn't a focus for the team or otherwise constrained by strange design decisions. A lot of Thief's levels aren't focused on stealth at all, and moreso resemble adventure gameplay you'd see in something like Tomb Raider (which was probably an inspiration, seeing as it's directly referenced in the game). This isn't inherently a bad thing, after all, variety is the spice of a pleasant gaming experience, but the game doesn't really replace the stealth with anything all that interesting. You're wandering around large levels collecting loot and bonking burricks for the most part, and while that's perfectly tolerable and not exactly unpleasant, it's a far cry in quality from the game's peaks. I'd say The Lost City is probably the most effective of these because it's more demanding of your observational skills and use of rope arrows, but it's still just an alright level. Only a couple of these levels are downright bad, though, so it's not a total loss. The Haunted Cathedral isn't a bad level in terms of design per se but the absurd gold requirements and placement made it thoroughly unfun to play after I had accomplished everything else. Return to the Cathedral is downright rotten, though, having to go through a series of boring fetch quests for a ghostly chud with massive amounts of backtracking, high-level enemies, and an ungodly amount of zombies with not nearly enough holy water to go around. These levels hardly spoil the experience but at their best, they're not even close to as imaginative as the game's best levels, and at worst are downright hair-pulling.
Narratively speaking Thief: The Dark Project isn't a game with layered characters or intricate plotting. For the most part, the scenario just serves as a background for why exactly you're doing what you are. You're introduced to a few characters and none of them other than Garrett, the protagonist, get much screentime at all. This is fine, Thief's narrative gets by on other aspects, and halfway through the game the seemingly disjointed and unconnected narrative does end up coalescing into something intriguing if still somewhat sparse. As far as the scenario-writing goes, the plot twist of Constantine, an eccentric and lonesome lord, actually being the ancient pagan deity known as The Trickster was a very cool surprise and I wish I didn't have that spoiled beforehand. Thanks, Thief Wiki (entirely my fault). It's foreshadowed incredibly subtly by NPC dialog and occasional memos you find throughout the game, and it is a great narrative reward for being so nosey as a thief should be. I love how Garrett goes from stealing prized items from crazy rich lords to accidentally stumbling into a horrifying and esoteric secret that could potentially ruin the whole planet. It's the type of "holy shit" plot scaling that actually works instead of being shocking for the sake of it, and ultimately I like how Garett saves the world by doing the one thing he's good at: stealing. The worldbuilding is fairly cool and each level has an opening text crawl that elaborates on the different philosophies of each faction, which is shown very ominiously I might add. Garrett himself is like if you took any 90s PC game protagonist and made him a reclusive, misanthropic loner instead of a badass action hero. He's quippy and consistently hilarious and while one could argue that might detract from the otherwise gloomy atmosphere it's not exactly uncommon for people to cope with extreme stress with humor, so it makes sense for his character. He's one of the more memorable late-90s game characters for sure. The game's memos give you a good sense of what's been going on in the world and lend it a realistic feeling, however, there's not exactly an "itchy tasty" equivalent in terms of memorability. They're very solid but aren't super memorable, and that's fine.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it - even for a late-90s PC game, Thief is exceptionally ugly. If you look at the release slate for 1998, there are plenty of games for both PCs and consoles that look vastly better graphically no contest. Thief is a game that might have large levels, necessitating some compromises, but asset quality is ridiculously poor across the board. Character models are made of few polygons and feature little points of articulation. Zombies, for example, have no animation for reanimating from the dead, they just simply revert to their idle pose in a jerky and unfinished-looking way. Texture quality is visibly extremely pixelated and often resembles a PSX game instead of bleeding edge PC visuals (and even then, there are better-looking PSX games from the same year). Beyond stuff like quality, texture application is often nonsensical. There's a particular texture that seemingly implies an entire balcony and set of windows, but almost every time it's used it's in areas where that would be impossible to be the case, especially when you can go behind them and see that for a fact. Considering how much thought Looking Glass put into the architecture representing the personalities and ideologies of the individual factions, the lack of care when it comes to texturework is disappointing. Environments are detailed well enough and smaller props are understandably low-poly. The only area Thief stands out is its lighting engine, which was entirely necessary for the gameplay to work, so it's good they got it down. Shadow and light are distinctly visually defined (maybe the light meter on the HUD could use some tweaking) and Thief's contrast-heavy look is often rather striking. This extends to the game's mixture of drawn and CGI cutscenes, which make great cinematic use of silhouette, lighting, and cinematography to hide the limitations of late-90s animation tech.
The graphics may be somewhat poor, but I can't fault the art direction, which features a unique mixture of low-tech and steampunk-esque visuals and environments. While buildings and cathedrals look straight out of the Middle Ages, the game is defined by its vague mixture of electricity, steam-based technology, and unclear magic. The world is seemingly in a strange transitionary phase; on the precipice of great technological revolution as seen by the limited amounts of electric technology yet still in some sense clinging to a past that no longer exists. It's cool that you have people walking around dressed as knights with swords, but you can also whip out an arrow designed to combust in a blaze of fire. The game's aesthetic and atmosphere are haunting, not a single place feels populated with friendly people and the game is often quite isolating and morose. Eric Brosius is often known for his similarly excellent work on System Shock 2, though his prior work for Thief is decidedly less "listenable". The music he composed for the game consists largely of ambiance, keyboard drones, and occasional bursts of electronic and drum and bass. It's difficult to tell where Brosius' score comes in and where his ambiance takes precedence, and to me, that's a hallmark of great ambient music composition. The Bonehoard's theme conveys a sense of extreme loneliness befitting of the maze of the undead it became. The Cragscleft Prison's thumping percussion and holy chanting echo the ongoing religious march of the Hammerites. Small electronic flourishes play when you make progress in Assassins. Some of the sounds in Return to the Cathedral wouldn't be out of place in Silent Hill. It's an incredibly disturbing canvas and while I personally would not call Thief a horror game, I can at least understand the argument for saying so.
Thief: The Dark Project is a game that deserves its status as one of the greatest video games of all time. Yet, simultaneously, it is proof that a game deserving that title does not mean it is without major flaws. The innovative stealth design, immersive game mechanics, unique art direction, interesting narrative, and haunting soundscape are laudable, but the wildly inconsistent level design, lack of creativity in the adventure levels, and poor graphics even for the time are noticeable enough to make me genuinely sit down and think about the rating I'd give the game. Ultimately, I think Thief holds up rather well and is a very good immersive sim despite these flaws, but these flaws are hard to ignore. It's not exactly what I'd use to introduce people to the genre but for pre-existing genre enthusiasts, it's an essential play not just for its importance but for its many qualities.
Molding the rest of the stealth genre forever, Thief's game design deservedly gets praised relentlessly. Familiarizing concepts such as sound propagation, light and darkness mechanics, and NPCs reacting to unscripted events, Thief has no shortage of innovative design philosophies that make playing through its best levels engaging and tense. The game's best levels, such as The Sword and Assassins, give the player sprawling, huge levels that allow you to bob and weave between light and shadow, leap between carpet and loud tile, and clobber unsuspecting guards on the back of the head. Guards will react to small things being out of place, such as a door being open or a major object being out of place, and the game's best levels intelligently make great use of light and sound to make the stealth experience both immersive and stressful. The game does a great job of making you feel like a thief, sneaking around and shoving ungodly amounts of gold into your pockets. To say that few games are often as stressful and tense as Thief at its best is a massive compliment. You're given a veritable sandbox in terms of your toolset, with different arrows that do different things. Broadheads damage, water arrows take out torches, moss arrows soften your footsteps, rope arrows scale buildings, gas arrows are instant non-lethal takedowns, noisemaker arrows distract, and fire arrows essentially serve as the Thief equivalent of a rocket launcher. This toolset gives you a large amount of freedom in terms of how you want to approach levels and it makes the experience all the more fun. The combat and sword fighting, while typically discouraged, is more physics-based than most melee combat from this era and is surprisingly a lot of fun. The Sword has to be one of the best levels in any game I've ever played - its tricks and traps throughout an increasingly warped and surreal level while demanding the most out of the player is highly memorable and few games can claim to have an equivalent.
The problem is that only a good third of Thief's levels show off the game's complex systems and grand potential. Half of Thief's levels are sort of whatever, they're mostly remnants from the game's development when stealth wasn't a focus for the team or otherwise constrained by strange design decisions. A lot of Thief's levels aren't focused on stealth at all, and moreso resemble adventure gameplay you'd see in something like Tomb Raider (which was probably an inspiration, seeing as it's directly referenced in the game). This isn't inherently a bad thing, after all, variety is the spice of a pleasant gaming experience, but the game doesn't really replace the stealth with anything all that interesting. You're wandering around large levels collecting loot and bonking burricks for the most part, and while that's perfectly tolerable and not exactly unpleasant, it's a far cry in quality from the game's peaks. I'd say The Lost City is probably the most effective of these because it's more demanding of your observational skills and use of rope arrows, but it's still just an alright level. Only a couple of these levels are downright bad, though, so it's not a total loss. The Haunted Cathedral isn't a bad level in terms of design per se but the absurd gold requirements and placement made it thoroughly unfun to play after I had accomplished everything else. Return to the Cathedral is downright rotten, though, having to go through a series of boring fetch quests for a ghostly chud with massive amounts of backtracking, high-level enemies, and an ungodly amount of zombies with not nearly enough holy water to go around. These levels hardly spoil the experience but at their best, they're not even close to as imaginative as the game's best levels, and at worst are downright hair-pulling.
Narratively speaking Thief: The Dark Project isn't a game with layered characters or intricate plotting. For the most part, the scenario just serves as a background for why exactly you're doing what you are. You're introduced to a few characters and none of them other than Garrett, the protagonist, get much screentime at all. This is fine, Thief's narrative gets by on other aspects, and halfway through the game the seemingly disjointed and unconnected narrative does end up coalescing into something intriguing if still somewhat sparse. As far as the scenario-writing goes, the plot twist of Constantine, an eccentric and lonesome lord, actually being the ancient pagan deity known as The Trickster was a very cool surprise and I wish I didn't have that spoiled beforehand. Thanks, Thief Wiki (entirely my fault). It's foreshadowed incredibly subtly by NPC dialog and occasional memos you find throughout the game, and it is a great narrative reward for being so nosey as a thief should be. I love how Garrett goes from stealing prized items from crazy rich lords to accidentally stumbling into a horrifying and esoteric secret that could potentially ruin the whole planet. It's the type of "holy shit" plot scaling that actually works instead of being shocking for the sake of it, and ultimately I like how Garett saves the world by doing the one thing he's good at: stealing. The worldbuilding is fairly cool and each level has an opening text crawl that elaborates on the different philosophies of each faction, which is shown very ominiously I might add. Garrett himself is like if you took any 90s PC game protagonist and made him a reclusive, misanthropic loner instead of a badass action hero. He's quippy and consistently hilarious and while one could argue that might detract from the otherwise gloomy atmosphere it's not exactly uncommon for people to cope with extreme stress with humor, so it makes sense for his character. He's one of the more memorable late-90s game characters for sure. The game's memos give you a good sense of what's been going on in the world and lend it a realistic feeling, however, there's not exactly an "itchy tasty" equivalent in terms of memorability. They're very solid but aren't super memorable, and that's fine.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it - even for a late-90s PC game, Thief is exceptionally ugly. If you look at the release slate for 1998, there are plenty of games for both PCs and consoles that look vastly better graphically no contest. Thief is a game that might have large levels, necessitating some compromises, but asset quality is ridiculously poor across the board. Character models are made of few polygons and feature little points of articulation. Zombies, for example, have no animation for reanimating from the dead, they just simply revert to their idle pose in a jerky and unfinished-looking way. Texture quality is visibly extremely pixelated and often resembles a PSX game instead of bleeding edge PC visuals (and even then, there are better-looking PSX games from the same year). Beyond stuff like quality, texture application is often nonsensical. There's a particular texture that seemingly implies an entire balcony and set of windows, but almost every time it's used it's in areas where that would be impossible to be the case, especially when you can go behind them and see that for a fact. Considering how much thought Looking Glass put into the architecture representing the personalities and ideologies of the individual factions, the lack of care when it comes to texturework is disappointing. Environments are detailed well enough and smaller props are understandably low-poly. The only area Thief stands out is its lighting engine, which was entirely necessary for the gameplay to work, so it's good they got it down. Shadow and light are distinctly visually defined (maybe the light meter on the HUD could use some tweaking) and Thief's contrast-heavy look is often rather striking. This extends to the game's mixture of drawn and CGI cutscenes, which make great cinematic use of silhouette, lighting, and cinematography to hide the limitations of late-90s animation tech.
The graphics may be somewhat poor, but I can't fault the art direction, which features a unique mixture of low-tech and steampunk-esque visuals and environments. While buildings and cathedrals look straight out of the Middle Ages, the game is defined by its vague mixture of electricity, steam-based technology, and unclear magic. The world is seemingly in a strange transitionary phase; on the precipice of great technological revolution as seen by the limited amounts of electric technology yet still in some sense clinging to a past that no longer exists. It's cool that you have people walking around dressed as knights with swords, but you can also whip out an arrow designed to combust in a blaze of fire. The game's aesthetic and atmosphere are haunting, not a single place feels populated with friendly people and the game is often quite isolating and morose. Eric Brosius is often known for his similarly excellent work on System Shock 2, though his prior work for Thief is decidedly less "listenable". The music he composed for the game consists largely of ambiance, keyboard drones, and occasional bursts of electronic and drum and bass. It's difficult to tell where Brosius' score comes in and where his ambiance takes precedence, and to me, that's a hallmark of great ambient music composition. The Bonehoard's theme conveys a sense of extreme loneliness befitting of the maze of the undead it became. The Cragscleft Prison's thumping percussion and holy chanting echo the ongoing religious march of the Hammerites. Small electronic flourishes play when you make progress in Assassins. Some of the sounds in Return to the Cathedral wouldn't be out of place in Silent Hill. It's an incredibly disturbing canvas and while I personally would not call Thief a horror game, I can at least understand the argument for saying so.
Thief: The Dark Project is a game that deserves its status as one of the greatest video games of all time. Yet, simultaneously, it is proof that a game deserving that title does not mean it is without major flaws. The innovative stealth design, immersive game mechanics, unique art direction, interesting narrative, and haunting soundscape are laudable, but the wildly inconsistent level design, lack of creativity in the adventure levels, and poor graphics even for the time are noticeable enough to make me genuinely sit down and think about the rating I'd give the game. Ultimately, I think Thief holds up rather well and is a very good immersive sim despite these flaws, but these flaws are hard to ignore. It's not exactly what I'd use to introduce people to the genre but for pre-existing genre enthusiasts, it's an essential play not just for its importance but for its many qualities.