For a game about breaking the law, Thief sure imposes a whole lot of them on the player.
It's weird — in the instances where the game gets out of its own way, dropping you into a heavily guarded treasure pit, and tasking you with robbing the place blind, most of its mechanics just click. Even when those stages are linear, the stealing, the outwitting and the outmaneuvering feel great. It's when the game purports to give Garrett the most freedom that he actually feels the most imprisoned; behind auto-slamming windows, in front of unscalable walls, entwined in a map created by the devil.
In today's Overview, Arthur and I tackle Thief's highs and lows, sampling a bit of its open-world offerings as well as a snippet of one of its more straightforward missions. In the process, we kick over every single urn in the world. Sorry, urns! Maybe place those on a table or something, urn-owners.
(NSFW warning: This video includes a level set in a brothel, so there may be some nudity in the latter half, despite how hard I tried to avoid it.)
