Thief is a series that I’ve always I loved as an idea, but lack the patience to play properly. They’re the kind of game where if you’re spotted by just one guard you are in a bit of trouble, and will likely be reloading a save if there are more than that. It’s the kind of hardcore stealth experience that encourages ghost runs whilst also hoovering up every last valuable you can find on the way. Thief VR isn’t that, really, but it is still pretty good. And it’s also incredibly immersive.
Thief VR casts you as the wanted thief Magpie, completing jobs for your handler Cassandra. The voice acting for all the main parts is great, particularly Cassandra and returning classic Thief protagonist Garret, who quickly becomes a magical voice in your head. The story isn’t going to be the biggest draw here – it’s a touch predictable and some of the dialogue is poor – but it does its job well enough, giving you a variety of things to steal and a vague reason for doing it.
What this game nails is how you move through its levels. You grab a window and slide it open, grab the ledge and climb through, crouch and then walk over to a chest and pull out your lockpicks. It might not sound like much, but this sequence of actions can vary wildly between VR games. Thief VR just manages to make all of this feel slick and intuitive. The locomotion here is unobtrusive enough that just climbing through a window, peaking through a door, listening to a nearby pair of guards chatting feels incredibly immersive and natural.
The levels looks pretty good as well. They’re not the best visuals I’ve seen in VR, but certainly aren’t the worst either. I occasionally stopped to have a look at some of the views, which is a good sign. You will find some poor textures, especially if you stop and look at the foliage as I did exactly once, and the characters all look a bit odd. Even a main character like Cassandra feels a bit like a waxwork model come to life, though she specifically fares a little better than some characters in other games I could mention. Whilst it won’t blow your mind by any stretch of the imagination, the game looks good enough to be immersive.
But then there are the immersion breakers, and they’re everywhere. Locomotion is great, but opening drawers is a nightmare. Grabbing a drawer, you open it towards you, let go and… it slams shut again because your hand, which you didn’t move, caught it slightly. You open it again and the loot inside is jittering about and jerking side to side slightly. You collect the loot and try to close the drawer, but it bounces open again despite you being incredibly careful. In the worst case scenario, the loot is clipping through the bottom of the drawer, causing the drawer to either be stuck frozen in space or randomly opening and closing slightly, whilst also stopping you from collecting the loot because it’s stuck inside the wood. Each drawer is usually part of a cabinet that has one to three more drawers on it. It’s difficult to feel like a thief when it looks a lot like you’ve never encountered drawers before and are acting like my nan trying to work a computer.
This situation is a microcosm of Thief VR where smaller details break through the great work done elsewhere. Climbing up walls, you can actually grab empty space next to a handhold to keep climbing. If you use a horizontal rope to make your way over a gap, the angles that your in-game wrists stick out at are ridiculous. Sneak up behind a guard, bonk him on the head with your truncheon and he stops to draw his sword before falling to his knees. For everything Thief VR does right there is something else that dims your lantern of enjoyment, leaving you in moodily lit awkwardness.
If you can ignore the constant immersion breakers there is a pretty good thief game here, but that’s home brand thief, not Thief the series. The light gem on your hand is binary now, visible or practically invisible, where being lit just means “You are standing in the light, fool!”, which makes getting close to enemies without being spotted rather easy. You quickly get a bow with all the requisite arrows – water, fire, bludgeoning, rope, and those boring pointy ones that don’t do anything special – and your trusty truncheon hangs from your hip so you can sneak up on a guard and bonk them on the head once or twice, depending on whether they’re wearing a helmet.
The guard AI is, frankly, abysmal when it’s working, and then sometimes just breaks. A guard walked within a few feet of me while I was knocking out another guard and didn’t notice, but then another guard heard me doing the same one room over. You can hit guards in the legs to bring them down to their knees – handy to knock them out whilst crouching – but sometimes it doesn’t work and they still get their swords out before falling. You can turn the difficulty up, removing assists, but the AI is so poor it still isn’t the challenge it should be. Sometimes, when a guard spots you, he freezes in place, not approaching, attacking, or even speaking.
Upgrading your skills and gear doesn’t rely on the money you earn from stealing, but rather on rewards from Cassandra for stealing a certain amount and snagging a relic. These are upgrades like moving quicker whilst crouched (which is absolutely essential, obviously), making less noise when sprinting or landing, or starting a mission with two water arrows. That’s a big one, since you can’t buy more water arrows and have to instead find them lying around in levels, which is just three layers of silliness.
All that said, I have found that stealth in VR has made me far more patient than in non-VR games because I’m so much more immersed. I’m not staring at a screen waiting, I’m pressed up against the actual wall myself. The moments where you encounter a tolerable amount of quirks, meticulously sneak into a building, steal your prize, and get away without a sound are still very enjoyable. There are one or two good moments in the story as well, even if it isn’t overly impressive overall – I particularly enjoyed losing my equipment and having to reclaim it whilst escaping from a prison, which is an overused trope, but made it marginally more challenging and enjoyable.
