The immersive sim is a genre that doesn’t get enough love, so every time a new one comes around, I’m interested in it simply on the basis of it existing. Of course, beyond that, only the good ones keep me for long. I’ve put about four hours into Thick As Thieves, the new single-player and co-op stablemate to games like Thief and Dishonored, and while it doesn’t yet stand (tip)toe-to-toe with those titans of the genre, it’s definitely doing enough right that I’m invested in seeing how it progresses through early access.
Thick As Thieves recently made headlines when it was announced that it would no longer be PvPvE, and instead is meant to be played solo or in two-player co-op, cutting out the competitive side of it entirely just weeks before launch. It felt like a late swerve, but I can’t say it’s created obvious issues. It’s a lot of fun in solo, and though I haven’t had a chance to play co-op yet, I can see that, assuming it’s no technical hurdle, it could be even better in that case.
Thick as Thieves plays very much like the games that inspired it, albeit with some early-access touches, for better or worse. At launch, there are two maps, with more to come later, and you’ll drop into each one from a randomized point on its outskirts. You’ll need to stick to the shadows, dodge patrolling guards–including ghosts who can phase through walls–evade security cameras, pickpocket keys, and escape with quest items and other loot. It’s the sort of game where you’ll spend most of your time crouching, and even on the game’s base difficulty, there’s a strong emphasis on needing to stay quiet and blanketed in darkness. It’s a true im-sim so, naturally, you can also flush the toilets.
It didn’t take long before I started getting flashbacks to Dishonored, one of my favorite games in the genre, and a game whose art style seems to have inspired Thick As Thieves, as seen in its exaggerated character models and painterly, dystopian, early-1900s setting.
The objectives change with each session, tying your randomly generated Mission–the randomized main loot item(s) you’ll need to snatch–to an Objective, which is the thing you’ll need to do to continue the linear story. You can exit a map having done both, either, or even neither. The lattermost happens if you decide to drop into a round only to grab a bunch more loot to escape with, sort of like how an extraction shooter lets you decide you’ve amassed enough goodies and have had enough. But, at most, you have 45 minutes to do what you want and get out before the magical portal that lets you exit closes and traps you there.
Though this setup feels more like a multiplayer game, and you can see outlines of where the PvPvE would’ve fit into it, I still admire it for its replayability even in solo. Each map mostly remains the same between rounds, though some minor pathways differ from round to round, which creates some welcome surprises at times. The game’s Thief-like darkness meter, which uses a purposely vague indicator of how well-hidden you are rather than more obvious metrics, makes sneaking around a lot of fun, because it’s harder to be certain you’re in enough shadow when a nearby guard looks your way with his flashlight.
The best part of Thick As Thieves, as is often the case with games like it, is the flipping of the proverbial switch that can occur: when your best-laid plan falls apart, and suddenly you’ve got to improvise on the fly. When a magical orb that behaves as a security camera spots you, it throws up temporary walls locking you in the room, activates turrets to assail you, and alerts guards if they’re nearby. It’s in those moments when you’ll need to think on your feet, deploying your toolkit of things like smoke bombs, a grappling hook, and magical fireflies that can activate switches from a distance to quickly get out of harm’s way and back into the shadows.
Presumably, playing in co-op lets you revive a downed teammate. Thankfully, solo play doesn’t leave you in a failed state upon dying. Instead, you’ll respawn from some place on the outskirts again, and you can retrieve your dropped loot. In my most exciting round, I was killed literally in front of the escape portal with under two minutes to go. I respawned and had to run, jump, slide-dash, and smoke-bomb my way back to my stuff like I was speedrunning my earlier, much more careful attempt. I did barely escape in the end, though I forgot to take the quest item with me. Oops.
If you’re like me, and you get as much joy from a perfect, clean-hands run of the joint as you do with a chaotically improvised narrow escape, Thick As Thieves is checking those boxes. But it does have some setbacks, at least right now. I don’t like that those security orbs don’t care about spotting knocked-out guards. Maybe this changes on higher difficulties I’ve yet to unlock, but it felt like that broke the immersion a game like this tends to offer. Some of the furniture, like big coffee tables, seems tall enough to crawl under, and games of this sort often let you transition into a contextual crawl for exactly those moments, but Thick As Thieves doesn’t.
Each of the two playable characters also has their own signature item. However, for one of them, that’s the crucial grappling hook, and for the other, it’s a spell that tricks guards into thinking you’re one of them. The grappling hook feels so essential that I don’t like starting a round without it, which means I have no reason to play as the character without it. I also wish there were more variety in where the enemies patrol. It seems this isn’t an aspect affected by the game’s randomization, like when some pathways are instead blocked by boxes on occasion. As I played more, I was able to master the levels because I memorized the threats in each area, which is its own kind of reward, but surely not what I’d prefer. For a game that’s going for “Thief, but highly replayable,” I feel like these enemy spawns need to keep me on my toes.
Most annoying of all–though this may be fixed by the time it’s released to the public–is that I never saw my time tracked anywhere in the game. Rounds are set for 45 minutes, but it only started telling me how much time I had left when the clock wound down to the last five minutes. I couldn’t tell if that was an intentional design decision or something that will be addressed in early access. Maybe it’ll be both in the end, if others agree that it should be there.
Thick As Thieves is launching with 16 missions across two maps, amounting to a roughly four-hour campaign to start. More content is coming later, though players who get in early can do so for $5. It’s not clear to me if that price will go up later, like it does for some early-access games, or if that’ll remain the base price, with paid DLC to come for those who want it. In either case, it seems like a small price to pay for a game that definitely does enough of the cool im-sim things that I’m looking for. I’ll always welcome another crack at games of this sort, and Thick As Thieves feels like it has room to grow, but also enough there on day one to merit a sneaky go at things.
