Thief

by Peter Olafson
January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST

Looking Glass Studios' Thief: The Dark Project is as original, vital, and coherent a computer game as I've had the pleasure to play this year.

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Looking Glass Studios' Thief: The Dark Project is as original, vital, and coherent a computer game as I've had the pleasure to play this year.

It's a first-person anti-shooter. Thief isn't driven by the next big weapon, power-up or gib. Rather, it deals in the art of not being seen-staying in the shadows, making as little noise as possible, and killing your enemies softly while stealing them blind.

And while it's not as visually spectacular as, say, Unreal, it's acquired a much bigger footprint in my memory. I don't feel I'm just another exterminator. I feel as though I've really been doing something.

Oh, naturally, you can fight. As master thief Garrett, you can exchange blows with your enemies (virtually everybody else in the game) using a sword and sting them with arrows (which also perform a range of other functions).

And, also naturally, you can die. Direct combat is fraught with peril. Direct combat with more than one person at a time is effectively a death sentence. The blackjack, applied to the base of the victim's skull, is the weapon of choice. Surprise is everything.

You'll learn this the hard way over 12 substantial, multiobjective missions-divided by shop-browsing and story sequences so utterly distinctive you won't mind that they're a bit overwrought. (Much of the game is set in and around a city called simply "The City," where the Middle Ages meets the Industrial Revolution.)

For your enemies are smart: They behave very like real people. They chat with each other. (Indeed, much of the fun is eavesdropping on what they say.) They are aware of their surroundings. They call for help. When badly hurt, they run for their lives. They peer into the darkness, follow up on strange sounds and moving shadows, and walk slowly when a threat is nearby. And they come after you without an ounce of fear in their textured faces.

No wonder I'm standing behind a door, blackjack at the ready, trying to catch my breath. The footsteps are getting closer and closer.

Not only is Thief an anti-shooter, it's also like an RPG without the trappings of levels, skills, and experience points. That's how it feels-again, as though I'm actually doing something. Real experience isn't defined by your character's combat or puzzle-solving; that's just a convenient hook. Rather, it's defined by your own knowledge, and it grows during Thief. As in Looking Glass' earlier System Shock, you get better, and Thief gets better, the more time you spend with it.

Now, it does stumble and drop its sword with an unthiefly clatter here and there. In the first mission, guards' heads and arms sometimes appeared through doors. (I'm really getting to hate this self-destructive oversight in games.) The zombies that first appear in the second mission are an odd fit. Thief is a DirectX 6.0 game and hence finicky about having the latest video drivers. And I had no luck at all installing it on a Win 98 system-with the same CD and on the same type of drive (a Panasonic 24x) on which it installed flawlessly on a Win 95 system.

So I played under Win 95, dug up new drivers, watched the guards act like ghosts, lived with the dead, and still loved it. I would've done a lot more to ensure I could play a game this good-I haven't had this much fun in a long, long time.