Those Deadly Shadows Are Still Fun

BOREDOM drove me away from online first person shooters to revisit the king of first person sneakers in the form of Thief: Deadly Shadows but is it still worthy of the crown?

My current gaming habits have been restricted since I moved to a new ISP service due to some network issues resulting in a distinct lack of any possibility of me playing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars online these days, which is shame. It really is a shame because ETQW is an amazing game, but not to be outdone I searched through some old DVDs and found Thief: Deadly Shadows.

This was the third instalment in the Thief series and unfortunately the last (unless rumours I’m picking up on the Web lately are to be believed). This was also the first dual-platform development effort (developing both console and PC versions at the same time) which accounted for the small levels and clunky transitions due to memory constraints.

Still, setting the limitations aside and playing it again from start to finish was a very enjoyable experience. I’d forgotten just how much fun it is to sneak around in the shadows, thieving and causing mayhem, having to think your way out of situations rather then shooting a way out. The array of weapons also makes for hugely diverse ways of solving puzzles or achieving objectives – water arrows to douse flames and torches, moss arrows to dampen footsteps, explosive mines to trap your unsuspecting foes, holy water flasks for those pesky undead or even oil lamps combined with fire arrows for really explosive results. The list goes on and on but the combinations never get old.

I’d also forgotten just how amazing the audio is in these ‘sneaker’ games. Instead of depending on what you can see it’s more important to listen carefully to the environment, to overheard conversations and tfootsteps, even doors and creaking stairs etc. These are the clues that tell you whether it’s safe to proceed or not. These noises and sounds become your guide through the ever-dark world of Thief: Deadly Shadows.

The sheer inventiveness of the concept – a sneaker rather than a shooter – is enough to earn this series a permanent place in my heart, even if the third instalment is not a patch on the open levels and freshness of the first two in the series.

However playing through Thief: Deadly Shadows again after all these years has only reinforced in me the desire see more creativity in PC games because of late it’s all gone a bit heavy on the graphics and deformable terrain and light on inventiveness. Apart from Stalker (which made great strides towards an A-Life persistence in an offline game), ETQW (Which was the first series to use tactical squad based asymetric warfare as far as I’m aware) and Portal (which made great and unique use of physics) I can’t think of any really inventive games that made it on to the PC lately.

Can you?

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