When it was announced a few years back, Thick as Thieves was pitched as a big multiplayer experience: a PvPvE game where you sneak into an area to steal a valuable object while also trying to stop other player-controlled thieves from doing the same. Coming from some of the people behind the original Thief series, including Warren Spector, this was going to be the standout feature in a sea of games that were all focused on stealing and stealth and inspired by the Looking Glass Studios classic. Fast-forward to today, and the focus for Thick as Thieves has changed somewhat. PvPvE has been ditched in favor of solo and online co-op play, but stealth and thievery are still the main elements, and despite the pivot, the game is good if you keep its limitations in mind.

Thick as Thieves takes place in an alternate version of Kilcairn, Scotland in the 1910s. However, the setting seems to have technology from the 1930s, with touches of robotics and magic thrown in. You play as a thief who has been invited to join the local guild, provided you can pass their initiation. The test is to steal a valuable diamond from a prominent jewelry shop, and you manage to pass the test and get invited to the guild. Along the way, you discover that the diamond has some special powers, and this leads to some unexpected revelations.

Presented from a first-person perspective, the game employs the art of stealth in a very simplified manner. Silent walking via crouching is present, and while you will make noise when walking normally or running, don't expect the noise volume or the sounds to change if you're walking on different surfaces, like wood and stone and water puddles. You can turn off light sources via switches or blowing out candles, but you can't snuff out fireplaces or deactivate laser tripwires or pressure-sensitive pads. You can distract and knock out guards, but you can't drag their bodies to hide them in bushes or dispose of them otherwise. Should you get caught, you won't immediately initiate a "game over" scenario, but you will cause guards and turrets to attack you. Even when you lose all of your health, you will respawn in a safe room and can return to where you died to retrieve everything you've stolen up to that point. You can find stash points where you can bank all of the treasure you've gained (minus the mission critical items), so you won't lose everything when you die.

The stealth mechanics may lean toward being simple, but the game still has some fun with the art of stealth. Your arsenal of tools ranges from smoke bombs to balls of goo to fairies that can grab things and hit switches from afar. Depending on the character you choose, you can either disguise yourself as a guard or use a grappling hook to reach higher ground. Ghosts can also get distracted if you play bagpipe music, and you can lock doors behind you provided you have the key to ensure that anyone chasing you down has a hard time reaching you.

With the stealth mechanics feeling so basic compared to the genre contemporaries, the enemy behaviors seem to have been adjusted in a way that keeps things easy for everyone except for genre novices. Enemies won't notice anything wrong if a place suddenly goes dark or if display cases are open. A guard who finds another knocked-out guard will wake them up, but they won't enter a high alert state. It takes a while before an enemy gets into an alert state to chase you down, but unless you're dealing with a ghost, those guards won't chase for very long before giving up. Disabling turrets only takes a flick of a switch, and there are no alarms that cause guards to swarm your location. You can't play sloppily, but you have a good amount of leeway before things go badly — at least on the default difficulty level.

The game may seem very easy at first, but progressing through the campaign means the ability to unlock new difficulty levels, which amps up things in some basic ways. Enemies hit harder, so it takes less hits to knock you out. Level goals either get increased or have their locations changed up, while the enemy presence increases in numbers. It's enough to give players some challenge, and the increased cash payout is a good incentive for completing levels at a higher difficulty.

The main hook is the use of co-op play. None of the missions or the location layouts are specifically made with co-op in mind, so you can tackle the game solo if you wish and not run into any complications. The benefits of playing with a friend are obvious, though. You can finish missions faster, since you can split up to cover more ground effectively. You can also team up to distract and take down guards faster. This is more of a "nice to have" feature than something necessary for playing the game, but the option isn't always present in games like this, so it's always welcome to see it.

The campaign has two objectives per level run. Your first objective can vary between scoring a specific loot value to grabbing specific gems, urns, or idols. The second objective is tied to story progression. You may need to find specific objects, but you're usually asked to find notes to procure more information for the guild you're working for. Completing the first objective is the only way to unlock your extraction point, so you can find yourself in a situation where your second objective needs to be abandoned for another run if you complete the first objective beforehand. It is a fascinating mission structure, since it tries to have story progression while salvaging some elements of the original PvPvE design.

The one thing to understand right away is that Thick as Thieves is being billed as an introduction to the overall game world. The developers have said this experience will take four hours on average to finish. That is counting the completion time for the story-based contracts, as the game is expecting the replayability to come from the ability to go into a level with a randomly selected main objective. Replaying levels puts you in a cycle of getting more cash to unlock the game's various tools and cosmetics, so completionists will really get a good amount of game for the initial $5 asking price.

This is all well and good, but it would've been nicer if the game had felt like it had more up its sleeve. Both locations tend to share the same types of main quests, and it doesn't take very long before they get repeated, even if you complete each of the assigned contracts the first time out. The items for each quest almost always end up being in the same locations per chosen difficulty level, so being given an assignment like finding the urns in the police station means that you immediately know what to do since randomization doesn't come into play. Again, the game's status as an introduction rather than a full title means that these kinds of things can be forgiven, but don't expect near-infinite replayability with the current setup.

While the two games are different in most ways, the graphics are reminiscent of Dishonored. The setting evokes those feelings, but the guards look like the stereotypical rotund cops of the region, with red lens glowing glasses that give you the feeling of an oppressive atmosphere that Arkane Studios did so well. Lighting is well done, but the shadows for your character appear to be very low-resolution, with a lack of anti-aliasing resulting in blocky outlines. Animations and textures are good, and the game runs at a solid high frame rate all around.

Like any good stealth game, the main focus of the sound is on the essentials. The game does a good job of accentuating things like footsteps and the noises made by the turrets and the guards, but it would've been nice to get more details, like different sounds made by footsteps over different surfaces. The voices are good, but you won't hear too many different voices, and you'll only hear a small handful of phrases. While there isn't much music, what is present does a good job of getting you in the stealth mood by sounding menacing without going overboard.

Thick as Thieves works perfectly fine on Linux machines with no modifications. On the Steam Deck, the game runs at 1280x720 with a Low graphical preset. The result actually doesn't look half-bad, but it means that anything with fine details against the light tends to fizzle noticeably, and fast movements do the same. The game runs at nearly 60fps, with only occasional brief hitches when the scenery changes, but you pay the price in battery life, as you'll get roughly 90 minutes of playtime on a full charge on the LCD version of the Deck.

As stated before, Thick as Thieves is a good game if you are OK with a more simplified stealth experience. It is a title that's easy to get into for stealth novices but provides some challenge for genre veterans if you do some real grinding to unlock higher difficulty levels. It would be nice to see a timetable for when new scenarios and levels would arrive, but what's available is good enough for those who want a quick stealth experience before moving on to bigger titles and returning once a big update drops.

Score: 7.5/10