This game just oozes cool, from the concept of a stealth infiltration game focused on pilfering everything you can get your hands on, to the bizarre but incredible droning score, to the moody and engaging cutscenes. So it's a damn shame that playing it feels so consistently like a slog. The level design tries to combine complex maze-y architecture with ahead-of-its-time light- and sound-based stealth, and while each half of this is fantastic in and of itself, they intersect in a really unfortunate way.

The experience of actually navigating a level in Thief is typically one of scrambling wildly through twisty little passages all alike, trying desperately to find your goal and collect enough treasure as the maps you're given become increasingly more vague. At the same time, these areas are peppered with enemies who outmatch you in combat and will hear you coming from meters away. Many is the time you'll turn a corner and find yourself face to face with an angry guard, forced to reload again and again as you try to get your bearings and find a way to get behind him with your blackjack.

The game is also studded with levels that aren't really about stealth at all, where the primary enemies are zombie who'll attack you when you get close no matter how quiet you are, devolving into a kind of straightforward dungeon crawler that doesn't play to the strengths of the engine. If I wanted to play King's Field, I'd just play it! All of which is to say: after making my way through the first seven missions (one of which took an hour and a half not counting reloads), I found that my reticence to slog through a bunch of zombies in The Haunted Cathedral outweighed my desire to see all the cool stuff left in the game.