The utility shaft, however, provided ample cover and the ability to break line of sight. Climbing onto the roof while being chased by three guards would lead to my being shot in the back, as would hopping down into the open, coverless room below. This secured me an escape route for when things would, almost inevitably, go wrong. On my next attempt, I broke the wooden boards separating the chains from the building’s ground floor and climbed into the office. Those guards had to be protecting something important. The sound of the window alerted three guards, who ran to the locked door, which they then beat down with an axe before shooting me with a shotgun. I wanted easy access to the roof, so I decided to break a window and climb out onto the balcony. For example, I got into the office by stacking boxes and quickly looted the room. The room is connected to every other part of the building, and gaining access through one route doesn’t guarantee being able to use the others. Gloomwood deftly evades this fate by making your approach to the office tactically interesting. This would be novel, for a while, until the artifice of the level design set in. “You can tackle this problem in any way,” the game would remind you, before presenting you with identical outcomes for each approach. In a lesser game, this would be empty player expression for player expression’s sake. The office is connected to the rest of the facility by a locked door connected to the building’s central stairway, a closed window onto the roof, a chain which runs from the ground floor to the office through a boarded up entrance, and a wall which can be climbed by stacking boxes from the other side of the room. In an early part of the first level there is a loft office with a safe, some lore, and a handful of resources. Routes you become intimately familiar with if you, like me, didn’t manage to find a revolver for three hours. The levels are relatively large, with half-a-dozen routes through just about every part of the map. It even uses a similar early 3D aesthetic to the original Thief, which has become something of a signature for New Blood Interactive. Gloomwood’s Thief DNA is obvious guards are hearty and hit hard, you move slowly by default and slower when you mask your footsteps, and the game begins with you finding a ring that indicates how well lit (and vulnerable) you are. One that other developers have been chasing for years. Its clear, light based sneaking mechanics, excellent level design, and distinctive, terrible combat have cemented it in the minds of many as the quintessential stealth game. The game, which just entered early access, has been pitched by developers, influencers, and journalists alike as “ Thief with guns.” Since its release in 1997, Thief has been a gold-standard for first-person stealth.
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