Day 6 - Thief II and Book of Legends

Thief II: The Metal Age 

The Thief series is an amazing series for those with patience. Unfortunately, that was never me, so my experience playing has always been limited. For the uninitiated, in this game you take on the role of a thief who accepts jobs which generally involve stealthing, breaking into and stealing from locations secured by guards. The game generally provides you with an several options on how to proceed, as well as plenty of option loot you can steal along the way.

You're provided a fair amount of tools and weapons to get the job done. The trusty Blackjack is an excellent tool for knocking guards out, if you can catch them unaware. Your water arrows can knock out torches, but not all lights, just as your lockpicks can open some locks, but not all.

In my 98 minutes playing, I completed the first two levels. The first being a relatively linear task which serves as a sort of tutorial. The second level opens up much more, and gives you a warehouse complex, packed with guards, to explore. Your primary goal is simple to steal 500 gold worth of valuables, and you are given plenty of opportunities to do so.

Stealth naturally plays a huge part of the game, and I found myself constantly seeking ways to get behind the guards without being seen. Knocking them out was easy enough, allowing me free reign to run around my secured areas. That's good, because the walking speed is slow, crouched or standing. Even the running speed isn't all that great. And there's a lot to do, and plenty of secrets to find. Even after 50 minutes on the second level, I only managed to collect 676 gold worth of loot of a possible 1811, and located only 1 of 13 secrets.

Thief: Deadly Shadows, the third installment of the series, is number 113 on my list, and Thief: Gold, the expanded original lies at number 156. I'm looking forward to trying both of those later on, as I definitely liked my experience playing today.

Book of Legends

Book of Legends is a find the hidden item type game with a Dan Brown style story, and slightly higher production values. The story starts out with a young man locating the secret "Book of Legends", but is being chased. Naturally he does what you'd expect any young man to do in his shoes: he mails the book to his sister. She doesn't take it seriously at all until some men in black come knocking on her door. Yeah, the story is pretty stupid, it's mostly an excuse to send you from location to location.

You'll start off in Washington, DC, where the book will lead you to your first clue and location. In each scene you have to use the clue from the Book of Legends linked to it to discover the secret, which will lead you to the next location. It seems like if you have a book with locations and clues you could do a lot better than starting at the beginning and hoping all around town, but what do I know?

After you complete a location you can do jobs there for money. These tasks are generally extremely simple and go by very fast. You'll have to do these, as you quickly finish up with Washington and have to pay a very expensive plane ticket to continue.

Overall, I'd say this game is probably the best "find the hidden item" game I've ever played, but in the end it's still a game in a genre that is more aimed towards young children. I see no reason I would continue to play this game beyond the 40 minutes I did to meet my goal.

Notes

I went back to Toki Tori this morning and almost immediately I beat the level that had me stumped yesterday. It's amazing what a fresh look will do in that sort of game. The solution wasn't even complex, and I was disappointed in myself for not seeing it earlier, but that's how it is sometimes.

Album: Steam Challenge: Day 006