At the time of writing, Summer is threatening to appear throughout the heavens. The sky is blue, the trees are green, the mood in this place is lifting, and I'm sat here trying desperately to play the darkest game on the planet, Thief II: The Metal Age.
Sequel to The Dark Project, The Metal Age brings us more first-person stealth action in the role of a master thief, Garrett, armed with his fantasy steampunky tricks of the trade that players of the first game will be familiar with.
Not that you'll be able to see any of that...
Fun Times
In the years since the original Thief, gaming has settled on WASD controls, and Thief II does by default what Thief didn't: make sense.
That's a bit of a dig on Thief, and not entirely warranted, but being able to more or less plop into the control scheme of Thief II without needing to consult the options menu immediately makes for a better time of things. I can now focus on my actions in the game, and not on my keyboard out of it.
So what is the game?
Frustrations
No, really, what's going on? Do I need to have finished Thief II for this to make sense? Am I just going to go along with this? I've got to break into a place to help someone break out of it? That's fine, I suppose, but it's being presented in a manner that seems to say 'you ought to know who these people are', and I don't.
But nor do I need to know, should the core mechanics be capable of holding themselves up. Something tells me that with a couple of years of revision and refinement, Thief II probably can stand on its own, plot be damned, so let's check our objectives for the first mission and see how we go.
It looks like a simple mission - get in and get out and don't worry about anything else - but as we load in, I'm greeted with quite the problem. I can't see shit. There's a person in front of me, I think, but lord knows who he is if he doesn't introduce himself.
Thankfully, tooltips point me to the map, and the plan of this building is blindingly bright in comparison. I know the route now, but I've got to work out where in the world I am in relation to any of this. The map is actually coloured as you progress through it, with purple denoting places you've been and yellow showing the location you're currently in. It looks like the entrance isn't too far away.
Further Fun Times
Interactables are highlighted, should you get close enough to them, and this door does stick out like a sore thumb. It's opened, and it's our entry into this place, and all these hints give me the impression this is a tutorial level, which is precisely what I need having read absolutely nothing beforehand, like usual.
As I say, though, the controls feel so much better for having adopted the default movement. I don't know where all my equipment is, but sprint and crouch options are more or less where I expect them to be, and crouch is on a toggle to make it even easier to move around in silence.
I seem to have so much health as to be practically invincible, and a light meter glows and dims with my surroundings, alerting me to how poorly I'm doing as a master thief.
Through a locked door (who leaves the key nearby, eh?) and around a corner or two, we are told to stop and investigate the lighting situation. This will be familiar to Thief players and hopefully obvious to everyone else: you don't want to be seen in the light, and if you can control the lights, you control the sightlines of the enemy guards in the area.
To solve this problem, we're prompted to use water arrows, one of Garrett's magic arrow types that alter the environment in logical ways. Water puts out fire, so water arrows should extinguish a torch. Lo and behold, it does, and I learn that two guards are being this grate, and are now moaning that the light has just gone out.
See? Two guards. I'd have never known. I think they were silent until I put their light out. Anyway, on we move, up to another guard. This guy has his backed turned to us, though I couldn't tell until I was explicitly told that he had his back turned to us. Did I mention it was dark here?
Switching over to a club, we're able to knock him out in one swift click of the mouse button. He won't be causing any trouble for us, and we get to pick his pockets for valuables while we're at it. Why not, eh? What's he going to do about it?
Further Frustrations
After checking the map, I shuffle down the corridor and through the kitchens, but opening a door alerts a guard to there being something afoot. I must have been too loud. No worries: I'm a master thief, I know what to do here. It's dark, there are boxes... crouch behind the boxes.
I'm sorry, what? Can you say that again? Hitting someone once from behind is a knockout, but multiple times from the front is a kill? Great. Thanks for telling me that.
Final Word
Thief II plays better than Thief. It improves on it in every way. So I'm told. So I read. So I see through YouTube because there ain't no way I'm playing Thief II to find out myself.
I know that my time with, and therefore my impression of, Thief II would be much better had the gamma been altered, but if your game is this damn dark, should that not be the first thing you serve up to players? "Hey, this game is dark, it's about staying in the dark, it won't be, like, permanently dark, but do you want to check your gamma settings now, or bitch about it later?"
I'm the kind who bitches about it, like an entitled little baby. I really shouldn't. I should try to get into the state of mind where this game was the pinnacle of sneaky stealthy first-person gaming, where there was nothing else like it, apart from Thief.
If I put myself into that frame of mind, Thief II is a technological masterpiece of systems working with mechanics working with yet more systems. Thief II is a sandbox that you play in your own way (preferably quietly, of course), using your own logic. Need to calm things down? Move slowly, in the darkness. Need a distraction? Use your surroundings - change the lighting, make some noise. This is a living world, to some extent. Enemies are smarter than you might think, but not so sharp as to be impossible to thwart.
But, like Thief, I don't think I'll ever get to experience that first hand, because I'm just not confident inside the worlds that Thief and Thief II present. The controls here are better, but I'm still stopping and starting and fumbling my way through them. If spotted, everything seems to break down. You're not a fighter, you shouldn't get into fights. I understand that, but I need a back up for when I inevitably get spotted, and if hitting a guard across the head fifteen times isn't allowed, I'm stuffed.
Like Thief before it, Thief II looks to be a phenomenal game, albeit more of the same, but still a game that feels beyond my grasp. It's too much for me, despite how slow and step-by-step that first level was laid out. It's still too rigid, despite how open and 'tackle levels in any way you like' the gameplay is. Above all, it's just too damn dark.
In time, those problems will disappear, like the winter gloom, the April showers, and the early summer 'isn't it supposed to be summer already?', but I don't know if I've the time to give Thief to see it happen. It's not going to steal it from me, however good it may be.
Fun Facts
To mix up the gameplay because 'stealing something in every mission would get boring', the plot would see Garrett turn into a private eye and James Bond-like character, through kidnapping, eavesdropping and blackmailing.
Thief II: The Metal Age, developed by Looking Glass Studios, first released in 2000.
Version played: PC, 2000.