It might sound a bit lofty to compare Thick as Thieves to the likes of Dishonored and Thief. It's a small, indie game priced at just £5, so what can we expect, really? That said, it does have the father of Deus Ex, Warren Spector attached, so you'd hope for something special. Unfortunately, Thick as Thieves falls way, way short of the standards set by the best of stealth action and immersive sims, tumbling below what we'd wished for from developer OtherSide Entertainment's latest release.
From the trailers, Thick as Thieves looks cool. It really does. The world of Kilcairn is alluring, mixing an alternative urban layout with mystical elements, much like Valve's Cursed Apple in Deadlock. While that city is uniquely American, Kilcairn has quite a Scottish vibe to it, complete with a lot of the guards having a bit of a twang to their accents. It's a bit Dunwall, but isn't nearly as fleshed-out nor as diverse in its environments and people. We get two maps in Thick as Thieves, the Elway Manor, and the Constables Guildhall (basically police HQ).
You go back and forth between these two maps over the course of the short campaign, completing missions in the "story," which consists almost entirely of text pop-ups thrown at you in your hideout between missions and at the start of your escapades. Thick as Thieves doesn't hide anything about its length. It's a short game, letting you beat the campaign in around 4 hours, but you really feel those hours. The loop is simple: find a way into your target location from one of a few spawn points, track down the thing you need, then find the exit, which randomly spawns at various points in the map as well. Turrets, pressure plates, wandering mystical eyes, guards and ghostly versions of them all block your path, to varying degrees of frustration.
It seems to me from playing Thick as Thieves that the game wants to avoid directly being compared to Dishonored so badly that it decides to make its gameplay worse to dodge accusations of copied mechanics or enjoyment. This is entirely to the game's detriment. Some of the level design is solid, but you feel like you can't experience a map to its fullest potential as you lack a lot of fun mobility. Your character moves at a glacial pace, especially when crouching, which is what you'll be doing most of the time in a stealth game. The mobility tool you have, the grappling hook, has such a short range and little momentum that it's baffling you'd even think to include it. Seriously, you can't even go from the bottom to the top of a staircase with the thing. It definitely makes you feel slow when you get spotted by a guard and try to sprint away, only to see them activate turbo and slam their truncheon into the back of your head, catching up almost instantly.
The slowness to Thick as Thieves might make you think it requires more strategical planning around your gameplay, and to the game's credit there are moments where you feel like you're on your way to becoming a master thief. Then a guard stands back up after you took them down. It's an interesting idea, but to have enemies spring back up and then act like nothing happened after you choked them out just feels like half the job was done in exploring this idea to its fullest. Also, there's no other way to fight back against the guards, or take them out permanently, so if one gets up at the wrong time (which you can't monitor), you can be screwed walking out of a vault you just looted, as I was.
Thick as Thieves made a pivot fairly recently from being a PvPvE game to just co-op and PvE. You can really tell. There's no quick save function in single-player, so if you mess up thanks to buggy enemy AI or just feel like you want to maximise your stealth potential, you're forced to sprint away, ridding yourself of any progress as you dive back to a safe spot in the shadows. The guards reviving is another thing where it may have worked if you were dealing with other players as well as your own mini thieving squad. However, as the game is now it's a lot of ideas left largely unpolished. Co-op feels like a waste, too. It's bad enough trying to see anything in the game without the handy gem you pick up in the tutorial (you have to bring that out to use it), but when testing co-op with a friend I had to send them away in a map so I could spot them through a wall, rather than have them by my side.
The most pointless grapple hook in all of gaming?
This game is ridiculously dark. I'm not talking edgy; I mean literally dark. Flick out the lights in a room and you're lunging towards the screen, trying to see where you have to step next. It's even more annoying because there's an entire mechanic about how you're more likely to be seen if you're in the light. Again, interesting concept, but wasted execution that serves to detract from a player's overall enjoyment. The fact there's not a brightness slider in the visual options, nor a motion blur filter for that matter shows Thick as Thieves could have done with nailing the basics before worrying about adding things like gramophones being able to counter the ghost enemies.
What we have left from the old PvPvE game is an experience that feels muddled and has mechanics that are juxtaposed to the idea of a player enjoying the game. The contracts, AKA your main missions, are quite interesting, giving insights into the world I wish we'd have seen more of, but you can't leave an area without completing the arbitrary secondary missions like looting a vault or just grabbing £4,000 of loot. It ruins the idea of this being a focused mission, part of a wider story that actually has payoffs and meaning. Instead, you get the impression what we're playing is what Otherside Entertainment could jumble together after abandoning the PvPvE element.
There are parts of Thick as Thieves I enjoyed. The world has a strong stylistic core and some of the background elements in the story piqued my interest, too. It's also quite hard to bomb on a game that does just cost £5. However, it is a drastically disappointing project, too. When we're a decade removed from Dishonored 2 this year, I would have loved for a game, any game, to try and take its place. Good level design is appreciated in Thick as Thieves, but it's hard to really praise when you've only got two levels. But hey, I could just be a grump about this, and for the price Thick as Thieves is at, it may be worth trying, just to see if you enjoy it more.
