Thief™ Gold

I wasn't a PC gamer when this game came out, so aside from a previous playthrough that I dropped 3/4ths the way through a few years back, this is my first time with the game. You can tell why this is a classic. The graphics are drab and the cutscenes look like they were made with flash, but everything is super solid. The story is excellent and full of unexpected turns, the world itself is one-of-a-kind, the sound design is atmospheric and moody, the controls are tight once you get used to them, and the level design is some of the best I've ever seen in both realism (houses have kitchens, bathrooms, hallways that make sense, etc.) as well as how fun they are to play through. My gripes are few. One, the in-cutscene music is like knockoff Nine Inch Nails, or that one song from The Matrix everyone knows. It's supposed to make Garret sound badass, but it makes an already edgy game slightly comical. Next, although the engine is a marvel for the time, sometimes Garret has trouble walking up slopes. This forces you to run and make a ton of noise. Even worse, sometimes the game thinks you're trying to jump instead of scale a ledge. This glitch is like ringing the dinner bell for every guard in the level. Lastly, sometimes the game gives you bad directions. I get it: it's immersive that Joe Schmo who made your Crayon map heard from his mom's friend's cousin's ex-wife where the tresure is, but it's a pain in the ass to go through every guard for no reward with an added half hour of wandering around the same corridors you've aldready been through. Still, the game is stellar. I'd recommend it to literally everyone. There's a selection of difficulty options that even make this game easy enough for non-gamers in my opinion. That's rare for a game from this era. Plus lord knows it'll run on any computer out there these days.

For years I heard great things about the old Thief games, still I first got around to play Dishonored in 2012 and then a few years later the Thie reboot. (I still like Dishonoered a lot, the reboot was boring though) And now, finally, I got around to play Thief Gold and OH WOW WHAT A GREAT GAME! I love the atmosphere, the worldbuilding, the character was also really likeable and the plot interesting. But really, the mood is what makes this game so fantastic. So eventhough I only played it now, in 2025, for the first time, it became one of my favourite games.

The original Thief game remains one of the most immersive stealth action-adventure game, the father of the Sneak-em Up genre! After so many years, the game is still a challenge even to a seasoned gamer and everything in it is how it is supposed to be: the atmosphere is eerie and mystical, the enemies are vigilant and unforgiven, the beasts are tough and persistent every step could be lethal! How unfortunate the series has never continued as we've wanted despite the sequels that are good enough, but not so perfect!

Thief gold is a fantastic game. The level design is excellent and you would be challenged to find the same level of quality in today's games. Thief Gold has a variety of different levels, some you may find yourself breaking into a mansion to steal a valuable, others you will find yourself delving into long lost ruins or haunted tombs. The game has a thick atmosphere, and I found after a while of playing that I was looking past the aging and in some parts blurry textures and being sucked into the world. If you enjoy first person stealth games, or stealth games in general you will love this game. If you like more of the stealing from people elements you might prefer thief 2, as it has less tomb raiding and monsters than Thief Gold. Excellent game, highly recommended.

I'm generally a big fan of stealth games, but I don't see myself revisiting Thief. I appreciate what it was trying to do, the whole atmospheric first person dungeon crawl type thing, and when it could fully bring that aspect to bear, it was fantastic. However, I found that that glamor was usually (though not always) lost amid the experience of actually playing the game. Here's what it boils down to: at all but the lowest difficulty, Thief is essentially two conflicting games mashed together: a stealth game and, well, a Mario 64 type collectathon/platformer. This makes sense, as you'd expect a thief to engage in both sneaking and collecting things, but in practice what it leads to is tediously dispatching every enemy in the level so you can go around secret hunting unobstructed, making the stealth aspects go out the window. This could have been entirely mitigated if the level design was much more linear. I absolutely loved the first Sly Cooper, and that's essentially what that game was, a linear stealth collectathon game. But Thief's levels are absolutely massive with secrets hidden in obscure locations. You have to spend so much time wandering around looking for stuff that sneaking quickly becomes too much of a chore to deal with. It's a shame because the game's stealth mechanics are quite good. I appreciated how absolutely relentless and deadly the guards are compared to most other stealth games. And without the collectathon aspects, the nonlinearity would serve this gameplay well. But I feel like it's not something that should be engaged with unless the player knows the levels like the back of his hand and can beeline to where all the stuff is. That's probably the point at which the gameplay becomes fun, but for me, that's too much investment to get to that point. I still find the game quite interesting, and am willing to check out the sequel. To anyone buying this game, I'd also suggest the gold2dark mod. The new Gold Edition levels really are awful.