It all feels so egregious! And I stress again, in both 2014 and in 2020, I was determined to give this game a fair shake. And then My Chemical Garrett climbs to the top of the not-fallen-over clock tower to noncommittally brood about, presumably, the sheer extent Square Enix went to to annoy absolutely every previous Thief player on the planet. Next: swearing! Effing and jeffing all over, because swearing's cool! Remember before how the Thief games felt so trivial and immature because none of the NPC's kept saying "fuck"? Phew, that's put right straight away. After an opening tutorial that involves Garrett's berating of a young female thief, you're forced to deliberately endanger her by stealing her climbing tool, then fail pathetically to rescue her in a cutscene as she falls through a skylight, not to her death but to her super-villain-conversion. Russell's gravelly growl would have made far more sense for that! Especially given the justification for the change (beyond the completely barmy claim they needed the same person to do the voice that did the mocap stunts.) was that the voice no longer matched their super-moody goth-Garrett character design. A sort of Nowhere, US voice that could be anyone. While I wasn't ever one of the people demanding that Stephen Russell be the only possible casting, it was just so utterly peculiar to replace him with such a nothing-voiced everyman. And partly because I wondered if Dishonored had been called Thief: Dishonored, would it too have been so harshly judged? Maybe in 2020 Thief could be, if not amazing, a decent game in its own rights? Maybe? So why this desire to defend it? Well, it's partly because I remember reviewing it six years back, and finding qualified enjoyment - trying to recognise it for the game it is, rather than measuring it against the games it foolishly tried to link itself to. ![]() My reality: before the game even started I was bombarded by a barrage of pop-up windows informing me which new heists and levels were available to me as DLC, and I started to hate it a bit already. My agenda: I really wanted to return to 2014's hated Thief and prove that it never deserved the vitriol it received. Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today.
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