vfig on 19/12/2018 at 17:39
So, back to Thief then. Eighteen years ago I played The Unwelcome Guest that was on the cover disc of a games magazine my older brother subscribed to. And then I played it again, and again. That half-finished version of the City's rooftops grabbed my imagination and never let go. A couple months later he bought The Metal Age and I played it and loved it too. I think it was only the following year that I got my hands on The Dark Project, and at the time I bounced off hard.
The zombies in Cragscleft scared the shit out of me, and with the Bonehoard being full of them I just noped. But then my first zombie encounter in Thief—the sudden and unexpected appearance of zombies in the Necromancer's Spire—had set me up well to stay terrified of them. I read some weird book, fine. Then a grotesque breathy moan from
behind me. And I turn around and there's these
things, grunting and lurching at me in that tiny room. I recoiled in horror, and heedless and desperate to get away from them, I stumbled backwards out the window and fell to my death on the streets below. But at least the things were gone. So yeah, Bonehoard was as far as I got for a long time (though I played the Assassins demo a whole lot before reaching that level in the game itself). (
http://backslashn.com/post/1663761098/zombophobe) Eight years ago my fear of Thief's zombies started to crack, and these days I find them rather adorable. (But let's not talk about Thief's spiders!)
So it's pretty natural that for years I'd have called The Metal Age my favourite—or no,
the best—of the two, then later three Thief games from LGS and the diaspora. The metal beasts and the Mechanist plans to take over the City, all while Karras himself intends to destroy the City, with all his followers, in one final stroke. And if I wanted to argue whether TDP or TMA was better, I only had to point to Life of the Party, right?
My opinions have changed over the years, as the things I value have changed. In terms of spatial relationships and player expression through exploration, these days I'll point to First City Bank & Trust as the best mission in TMA. And yet these days I'll also point to The Haunted Cathedral and The Lost City as equally great, or perhaps greater spaces to engage with. And alongside that reevaluation, I now also rank TDP above TMA. It's not just my changing architectural tastes and a greater appreciation for its relation to the design of Thief's player abilities. It's also that
weirdness that reverberated through TDP that I now love.
And I think (
https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/a-stairway-to-the-unconscious-thief-the-dark-project-20-years-later-6bd1f92783e9) Liz Ryerson's article captures that sense of weirdness, and the strangeness of its disappearance in TMA, really well:
Quote:
So what the fuck is going on with this game, then? Right after Lord Bafford we get the the second mission, Cragscleft Prison, which throws zombies and spiders at our hero Garrett right from the outset like some kind of broken down Half-Life level. ... And then the mission abruptly changes tone into an oddly expressionistic prison occupied by humans dressed in Hammerite garb and reciting religious phrases — a completely different character of person from the lowly grunt guards around Lord Bafford's manor. ... There is also an almost manic variety of settings, from realistic to fantastical, and the way one flows into another is impossible to predict. Over time, you get used to this and the lack of context helps to make a lot of the game's environments start to feel really memorable and singular. It always feels like the worlds you occupy in most of the missions are skittering on the edge of comprehensibility. You never quite know if you can trust your eyes about what you're seeing or not.
In the story, the totally ridiculous and comical regularly sit right alongside the gravely serious and spooky. Genuinely impactful moments will happen in the midst of dealing with the myriad of zombies, ghosts, magical fireballs, burricks, crayfish men, and other fantastical creatures that populate this game. And maybe that doesn't make a lot of sense for a series about being a mercenary thief and stealing money from the rich to pay your rent. How absurd that you'd be forced to take so many downright silly things at face value! How ridiculous that you would be fighting a bunch of crayfish men and worrying about evil magic fireballs in this game that's supposed to be about infiltrating buildings and stealing shit! What does this game even think that it is about?
...
At the end of the day, Thief 1 feels like a subversion of its more straightforward and comprehensible sequel that came after. And it's not for any one obvious reason, but for about a hundred less obvious and hard-to-express ones. Thief is absolutely, 100%, a game you should still play today. Granted, Thief 2 is still basically the same game about stealing from ruthless rich people. It still has the same core gameplay, and still covers many of the same kinds of themes. It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. But it feels like a much more obvious and surface-level implementation of everything it tries and far less of a dive into the unknown compared to what preceded it.
I mean, how does that even work? How does your past self challenge your future self without knowing what your future self has done? How can a game like Thief move beyond the immersive sim genre it helped establish and appear to try to salt the earth behind it in a way it really shouldn't be able to? How do even the designers not seem to quite understand the nature of what was going on with the game they made or know how to recreate it since?
Thief: The Dark Project's weirdness both in its fiction and in its intentional charting of new game design territory still stands out today, unique and different from all the other games I have on my material and virtual shelves. I can't think of any game where the player's role in the mechanics and in the setting fits so tightly. On the mechanics side, STALKER comes close perhaps, in the early game at any rate. And the only game whose fiction has had as strong an impact on me since is Pathologic.
Maybe there's some truth in what that murderous megalomaniac Constantine wrote after all:
Quote:
The world as I once knew it was a place of magic - full of mystery and inhabited by creatures of glamour and terror. The men who lived there lit their bonfires and wondered at what crept and lurked in the darkness outside their weak circles of light. All their dreams, their aspirations and dreads, come from that darkness.
Now, as the forces of "progress" cover the meadows in brick and cobblestone, as they replace the majestic loft of tree with the blocky ponderousness of building, they also light the world in their electric, actinic glare. With the lighting of the shadows, man loses his ability to fear, and to dream.
So Happy Birthday, Thief!