I didn't expect to play Deadly Shadows, but I also didn't expect to play hours of Thief mods and fan missions, so here we are. I want to start, for clarity, by saying I really like this game. I really enjoyed playing it. I liked the tone of this game, which rests somewhere between Thief 1 and 2. I liked the ideas to mix up the formula that went into this game.

So with that all abundantly clear, let me also say that Thief: Deadly Shadows is such a piece of shit. It's a huge piece of shit! Not as a game, though this does affect the game, but as a collection of code -- as an object you possess on your computer machine. Thief: Deadly Shadows is shit, and thanks to a loving community of modders, you can install the extremely important Sneaky Upgrade and have shined shit.

Running Thief 3 fucking sucks. Visual options won't kick in til you restart the game. That's okay, because everything will restart the game. Load a save? Restart the game. Move to a new mission? Restart the game. Move within some areas of a mission? also restart the game. Nothing feels cheaper than getting flashbanged by your desktop between areas. Somehow, mantling is worse than the previous two games. Not only is it less reliable, but 20% of the time you get stuck in a strange floating state, skating across the ground, unable to jump until you do something to snap out of it. Fortunately, while the Sneaky Upgrade can't fix this but it can give you a hot-key combo to at least break out of it. There are like three difference Thief executables to launch the game and only one of them allows alt-tabbing. The game is based around a third person view and animations, even though people almost universally play in first person. This leads to weird first person artifacts, as the camera is directly tied to Garrett's head. In a weird way I do like how immersive this feels -- I like being able to see your body in first person -- but like everything there is a level of jank that kinda runs it. Stuff like sliding off of banisters and railings because of your leg animations just feel awful.

... Also the game crashes all the time. Pick up and item? Crash. Walk down a alleyway? Crash. Saving just in case the game crashes? Believe it or not, also crash(Also this corrupts your save, so make sure to just make new saves)!

Made in the cursed, broken, and partially unfinished Flesh Engine (an offshoot of Unreal Engine 2), both Thief 3 and Deus Ex: Invisible War were cursed to try and squeeze themselves onto the XBox, a console with exactly zero lasting legacy and cultural importance beyond Halo. The original XBox is basically the Street Fighter 1 of consoles. "Oh the original xbox? Yeah I loved my 360!"

Mixed with other edicts from Eidos like 'FPSs don't sell' (lol), these games compromised themselves for a market that didn't care about them, at the expense of the market that did. The engine was so broken due to the lead programmer leaving that they couldn't even get underwater visuals to work. As such, both games simply removed swimming. Levels had to be trimmed down and split into parts just to fit into 64mb of system ram on a system that sold awfully. Consoles messed up a lot of gaming in the early 2000s, but Thief and Deus Ex 2 seem to get the worst of it.

... Yet somehow the game is still cool. The enhanced, real time shadows of the Flesh Engine give the game an incredible vibe. Even with it's ugly ass Xbox ass UI and graphical style(tbf Shadow Tower Abyss looks like this too and I love that game... and it wasn't even an xbox game!), it still feels like Thief.

The Sneaky Upgrade can fix some problems too, or restore some old classic Thief behavior, but I skipped that, disabling as many editorial changes as I could, with a few exception. Some were simple, like better high-res fonts, but the biggest exception was "Thief 3 Gold", a mod that merged split up missions into a single map. This greatly helps the flow of the game. Things like the city are still cut up into districts (Though merging those has also been an on-going project), and the amount of load screens can still get annoying, but at least you can get immersed in the missions.

The game is simplified for console, but in a lot of ways that don't matter. Sword fighting is simplified, but was already heavily discouraged. Swimming is gone, but that's no great loss. Changes to blackjacking make dealing with guards more annoying. The fun, flying attacks that Thief 1 and 2 reward you for are gone, requiring straight-to-the-back blows behind standing enemies. No knocking out the sitting or sleeping. Also the ability to easily KO civilians is gone, which I also don't like. I liked that there was a different weight to dealing with a guard. "Oh I can charge in, sap the guard from behind, then just chase down the nobles". Here, you have to perfectly sneak up on everyone.

The only big loss is the rope arrows. They were replaced by climbing gloves, which are cooler in a every way but practice. The ability to climb any brick surface seems gamebreaking, but the buckled down nature of the game's maps limits their use. There are few rooftops to explore or windows to break into. It's the type of false freedom you expect from back-of-the-box features that over promise what they can't deliver, but there are worse things than sticking to the ground. The maps, even merged, are substantially smaller... but honestly, I sometimes feel like the maps in Thief 1 and 2 were too big for their own good. Less time is spent being lost and more time is spent sneaking and thieving.

Where the game is expanded is The City. Each day you move through it and explore new parts of it. You sell off your goods to different fences and buy equipment from different stores. It's busy work, but the right type of busy work to get immersed in the world. Starting missions involves going to their location, and the city includes little mini missions that can happen within it. There are also numerous little shops and houses to plunder and elemental crystals to find. Hell, the guards can even through you in jail. This added level of the game makes up for the smaller missions and allows the missions to focus on being only what they need to be.

The missions for their part are probably the most consistent in the series. The lows never go as low as the previous two games. Killing Time or The Sunken Citadel are probably the worst missions, but neither are that bad. The highs on the other hand are quite high. Robbing the Cradle is a legendary mission and easily the best horror mission in the series. It feels like it invented the genre of 'your viewport is a VHS camcorder' horror games we're flooded with now, which is maybe the worst part about it, but as it's own original work it's incredible. 90% just incredible sound design done by real mother fuckers. My favorite mission is probably The House of the Widow Moira, a mansion raid on a stormy night with incredible ambience. It's one of the few missions that give you a chance to show compassion, and that compassion gets rewarded later in the game. If you bring her wine and choose to leave the Widow her inheritance, she sends you a thank you letter and a bottle of wine a few days later. The wine is less valuable than the inheritance, but that's not the point.

Still Life with Blackjack is probably the best final mission of the game. Simply just robbing a museum, grabbing everything that isn't bolted down. It manages to be with Masks in Thief 2 couldn't really pull off well. The layer atop this mission is also recovering The Eye from Thief 1, which talks to you throughout the mission. It's your eye it's made out of, after all...

This isn't truly the climax though. The climax involves running through city, as a monster and her stone statues smash their way around. This is like your classic true Thief final level, only... it's better. It's better because you already know where you are and all the chaos feels real because you've stalked these streets peacefully in the shadows.

Events that happen in the city like that are really impactful. An earlier bit has psychic assassins stalking you and brutally murdering anyone who gets in their way. It's off-putting, especially if you play Garrett as death adverse. My few kills in this game came from them. I felt vindictive. I spend so much effort keeping these guards who hate me alive, only for you to kill them? For you to kill innocent civilians?

The game doesn't care if you kill. There are no achievements, there are no "pacifist run" bonuses or story changes. Those would only influence you. There is nothing stopping you from deciding that now is the time that someone deserves to die.

The story itself is good, probably the most coherent in the series. It's not as cool as Thief, nothing is, but it's way more cool than Thief 2. I saw some people complain that the game made the Keepers suck and look like idiots and... Man I don't know, playing Thief 1 and 2 that was already my assumption. It's like the people who watched Star Wars and didn't catch on to the fact that the Jedi Order sucked. Here you get to experience it, and the dull bureaucracy that would turn someone like Garrett to return to thievery.

It was also fun seeing The Black Parade paid homage to this game. The Keeper facility in both games are stylistically similar and I got to realize the horrifying little girl and horrible, screeching statues are a direct reference to the point of this game. Which is good, because there is a lot to like. The core of this game is very good and very well made. Sure there are some lame "elemental arrow color" puzzles, or a situation where you need to try and enter a window that should not be architecturally openable. There is a faction system that might as well not exist, which involves... killing 'rust mites' and dumping arrows into weird Pagan gates? They had an idea that they could not come remotely near executing. These other little details would all be papercuts if not for the fact that the whole package is just awful. It's not the compromises the game makes that's the problem, it's the damage those compromises left. It's like tearing down a non-load bearing wall in the house, but not knowing how to clean up the mess you made. The development of the game left gaping sheetrock holes that no one knew how to fix.

The game is good enough to look past these flaws. I can't say it's better than Thief 1 or 2, but I also can't say it's worse. The three form a triangle of great games, with different strengths and weaknesses(Okay Thief beats Thief 2, and Thief 2 beats Thief 3, but Thief 3 beats Thief 1... wait no, that doesn't seem right) and that's great.

This ends Thief for me, as I have no interest in Thief 4, but maybe next I'll play Ultima Underworld or System Shock!