THIEF GOLD
• still adore how this looks. if it were up to me we'd have stayed here forever and anytime someone said some indefensibly weirdo shit like "Yeah But Do The Testicles Shrink In 4K" we'd toss them in a bottomless pit where they can no longer harm society. I wouldn't change anything here, and all this time later I still get giddy when I see cragscleft's opening view with the desktop wallpaper skybox and all that beautifully crude geometry
• for how much care is put in making everything feel plausible, every once in a while you get a map like haunted cathedral where they gotta give you a Gather X Gold objective so the derelict walled off quarter of the city's inexplicably loaded with cash and burricks are roaming the most iced out tunnels you ever seen. it's kind of charming to see those dark camelot-isms come thru during these stages where the classical dungeon crawler thrust takes full prominence, but it says a lot that in spite of these ostensible incongruencies you're never put in a position where you can't apply the same approach as you would in the more mundane locales. robbing mansions and robbing tombs are two points on the same narrow gradient, one simply operates in a heightened space that brooks the surreal more readily. one of thief's finest strengths is the interplay between grounded sensibility and the rapidly unfurling abstraction that threatens to drown it out: the horror of being known and seen by that which you can understand rapidly being overtaken by the horror of being known and seen by that which you can't. that it's not Conventionally Thief Enough isn't only deliberate, it's the entire crux of the narrative arc. the ground falls out beneath you and you bother to ask why you're so uncomfortable
• expert's gotta be one of the most flattering difficulty options out there. adding new objectives while pushing a more consonant non-lethal playstyle where you're expected to do a substantial amount of Actual Thievery and exfiltrate the premises after is perfect. hard to imagine cragscleft without having to break out That Shitty Homie Basso
• I'm convinced that with its most accomplished successor buried in a shallow grave somewhere in french canada (mes condoléances) thief's most sizable longterm impact was setting all the groundwork for first person horror to thrive. don't think we get penumbra overture without the dark project, and from there you can make the obvious leaps to amnesia, outlast, and RE7 if you're feelin nasty. there's a case to be made that frictional's entire ludography is one step removed from being corny thief fanmaps with toothchatter.wav turned up to a billion decibels and a bunch of dumb ass woozy filters and valve physics puzzles thrown on top. stealth is almost innately a subgenre of horror and everything here exists to enunciate that so it's not terribly surprising for things to've turned out this way, but there's something unfortunate about how of all possible outcomes we ended up with the one where this may've been indirectly responsible for Slender: The Eight Pages
• stephen russell deserves a better career and between his work here and in TMA/SS2 it's really sad he never got his dues. I'd say I can't believe arkane squandered him as corvo, but I absolutely can cos arkane couldn't write a compelling character or line of dialogue to save their lives. I'm glad bethesda keep throwing him bones, but in a better world he would be widely acknowledged as one of our finest voice acting treasures. the droopy dog ass voice he uses for karras puts the hugest smile on my face every single time. this is a man of impeccable, unassailable vision
• probably worth mentioning the divisive gold maps. I usually avoid them but this time I thought I'd give em another go. yeah, don't do that. beyond how interminable thieves' guild is, shoving it in between Assassins and The Sword is just such rotten pacing. I'm not saying don't ever try it, just keep this in mind: CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + END
• I keep thinking of the formal community ghosting rules and how insane they are. the game wasn't built with them in mind so people came up with the most deranged solutions to get around not being able to KO, make sounds, break objects, or anything else that would leave a trace. somehow it's Too Fucked Up to draw a guard's attention deliberately, but not Too Fucked Up to leave the game running idle for 10 hours straight while an NPC moves imperceptibly slowly across the room due to behavioral quirks. there's a lot of value in inhabiting the role as much as possible, but I'm not sure that's what's happening here
• one of my favourite details about the sneaking is how in blackest black lighting you can hide so well people don't even notice when they bump into you. balancing the reward of a perfect hiding spot with the vulnerability of too-close-for-comfort proximity is real good. I don't mind when FMs like the black parade remove the feature, but I do think there's something really unnerving about being paralyzed on the spot while bodies encroach further and further. the success of your interloping being contingent on your willingness to allow yourself to be subject to the same invasiveness you're perpetuating is a particularly clever kind of nausea
• there's a lot of whimsy for something with such a consistently doomy, odious atmosphere. when you get spotted and some fruity servant starts losing it cos you Have A Bow I can't help but think of the giant pointless sword, 32 chalices, 17 candlesticks, 8 plates, 11 chunks of ore, and 3 diadems I'm lugging around while doing the dainty traipsey tip toe maneuvers all over town. dialogue's consistently funny, animations are lively and coloured with a playfully exaggerated theatrical quality, and LGS were keenly aware that the inherent absurdity running just below the surface is something worth leaning into rather than away from
• playing black parade's homage to the sword followed so closely by a replay of The Actual Sword really cemented my preexisting feeling that it's a waste of time trying to outdo the original. it's raw and errant and unseemly in a way that no amount of virtuosic mapping or newdark bells and whistles can really compete with. even beyond the fact that recreating something shocking by xeroxing exactly what made it shocking has obvious diminishing returns, this is one of the cases where the skillset brought on by a quarter century of fandom is about the worst possible fit for the job at hand. it's a bit like when works derived from lovecraft iterate slavishly on unknowns until they're known. at some point you lose the ephemeral, otherworldly quality under the rigors of familiarity and defeat the entire purpose of something intended to defy that familiarity in the first place. a true successor to the sword could never be one that knows what it is
• trying a run where I don't KO or alert any humans (sorry ghostcels, there's no in-world logic to making sure a fucking spider doesn't see me) has made me appreciate the sound design even more than I already did. having such a high volume of actors in perpetual motion brings out the full heft of the sonic palette that much further; the weight of footfalls and the clink of lockpicks all bending and stretching out into the darkness; the stillness of rare silence and the way it's broken by a lone, distant murmur or unexpected transition from carpet to marble. as a technical accomplishment it's flawless, and as an artistic accomplishment it's somehow even more impressive