Thief Longplay
Qiana Thieklin
Play Keef the Thief, a promising young thief who finds himself on the outskirts of the Mercon the Merchant City. Considering the penalty of thievery is the removal of certain body parts, our young hero must be careful in his profession and ultimately (among others) train himself to access and steal from the city treasury.
Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick is a first-person perspective role-playing game. It has elements of parody, clearly identifiable from various descriptions in the game and enemy names during combat. One of the goals in the game is to steal everything in sight - at least in the city. The game map itself includes, beside the city, various dungeons, jungles, and an arena, among others.
The game introduces four vital elements of game play: Thievery, Adventuring, Combat, and Alchemy:
After powering through Nightdive's superb System Shock Remake, former Looking Glass developer Marc LeBlanc has returned to Twitch and YouTube to stream The Black Parade, a lauded mod that presents an interquel between the classic Looking Glass stealth games, Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age.
Thief modding is one of those little universes all its own, comparable to other retro treasure troves like the Doom and Quake scenes. Even still, the recent 10-level campaign The Black Parade is in a league of its own, boasting utterly huge levels, new voice acting and gadgets, as well as fresh systemic interactions like house servants who will clean up your sound-dampening moss arrow surfaces or relight torches you've extinguished. YouTube reviewer MandaloreGaming argues it might even represent a new peak for the series all these years later.
LeBlanc is an industry veteran who worked on Looking Glass' essential games like Thief and System Shock. His streamed longplay of the System Shock Remake features his thoughts on Nightdive's changes (he mostly dug them) as well as some '90s development war stories.
From the jump in his first, abortive attempt at The Black Parade's massive first level, LeBlanc was impressed by the mod's custom UI, noting that it would require some concerted digging and work: "As the author of the original user interface code, I apologize for how hard that is."
Otherwise, I gotta say I found it comforting that LeBlanc plays Thief like I do, which is to say he got caught a few times, saved his game before experimenting with knocking a civilian unconscious (I've never felt more represented by someone streaming a game), and flubbed a few tricky jumping maneuvers while trying to avoid loud surfaces.
At the time of writing, LeBlanc's YouTube VODs of his playthrough are well into mission 3 of The Black Parade, and you can follow along yourself via his Twitch and YouTube channels. If you want to play the mod, it's available on ModDB, while a copy of Thief's definitive Gold edition is only a buck on GOG right now.
Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.
This party can dish out in combat, has both kinds of magic available (very important) and can get loads of gold quickly. Once the character creation is done, you should right away use the little gold you have to get basic equipment from the nearest town and equip it.
This party can heal extremely quickly, because every character can cast the Sanctu spell since the game start. This greatly increases their chances if they meet multiple groups of strong enemies. The paladin and the ranger are strong attackers who can equip bows. The illusionist replaces the thief. In the dungeons, an illusionist with high dexterity will dodge most traps, a paladin with high wisdom will cast durable Sominae light spells (saving gold on torches), leaving the cleric with the sole duty of casting Vieda mapping spells (saving gold on gems).
Your first problem is that your party are weak like kittens and badly equipped. Thankfully, higher level enemies only appear after you level up yourself, so you have time to train properly. Start hunting down overworld enemies (or go to Dawn to buy torches and venture into the dungeons) to get experience and gold, while you constantly load up on food and equipment as well as slightly better weapons and armour. Equipped ranged weapons, as they give a tactical advantage against the enemies.
Before you visit Ambrosia, you need your coffers full with gold, since the shrines are the only way to raise your attributes, but demand gold for the job. That means you need to get the maximum gold for every character. There are several ways to do so. One is tirelessly fight enemies on the surface. A very efficient method is to repeatedly loot the first level of the Dungeon of the Snake, where there are 18 chests, but enemies are still weak. In the NES-port, you can also give blood to the healers in Britain Castle and Moon, then heal and repeat; you get 30 G per 100 HP donated.
Besides looting dungeons, one attractive solution is to visit the city of Death Gulch, bribe away the guards and then loot the chests in the city, then leave the city and re-enter it to repeat. Still, this method is less efficient than looting the Dungeon of the Snake: because of the bribes, it grants less gold, and because of the strong guards, it can be done safely only by an advanced party.
Ambrosia is a quite dangerous place, since enemies like balrons and devils are quite plentiful on it, but they are usually locked behind doors. You also need a map of the place, as the layout is confusing and can easily mislead the unwary one. Your main goal in Ambrosia is to find the four shrines, as searching the shrines gives your the Four Cards, which are very important for the final battle. Offering gold at the shrines raises the attribute the shrine stands for. The more gold, the higher the gain, so donate huge sums (just be sure you won't be completely bankrupt) to quickly raise your attributes.
You will need more visits to Ambrosia in order to max out at least two attributes per character. Simply gather more gold in the Dungeon of the Snake and then repeat the journey for more shrine donations.
Once each character has two attributes maxed out, the party is strong enough to explore the dungeons down to the bottom. Start from the Mines of Morinia, where you can easily get to the 8th level and obtain the following two Marks:
As soon as you find the Mark of Fire, you can talk to the Jester in Lava (Castle Britannia). He reveals the location of the town of Dawn. In the magic town, you can get the final clues to locate the Exotic Arms. In the NES-port, a character adds a further clue: "Search the island!"
In the NES-port, the command is replaced by two tools: the Gold Pick and the Silver Pick. The golden one is in one chest in the Guild Shop in Dawn; the silver one is at the bottom of the Cave of Death (Dardin's Pit).
After visiting Dawn, sail to the islands with the Exotic Armour and Exotic Weapons and dig them up. The Exotic Armour is the best in the game and also has no class restrictions, so wear them right away. The weapons are a bit different, since they are melee. Equip only your magic users with them for now and let your fighters use missile weapons, which are more effective against the monsters.
Pray in the Circle of Light in Yew in order to get the password "Evocare". Equip everyone with the Exotics, then sail to the Isle of Fire and the Great Earth Serpent. Yell the password to access the Isle of Fire.
Now, quickly enter the castle, or you'll be attacked by hostile greenery. Once inside, you have no time to lose, as random explosions happen inside the castle, that hurt quite a bit. The northern way is a decoy, instead take either the western or eastern way. Regardless which one, you'll get confronted by one horde of balrons and no less than four waves of dragons, which also can shoot you outside of combat, so better confront them right away. Making your way north and then through the force fields, you sooner or later should see water, meaning you are almost there.
There however is one last obstacle: living floor! Yes, you can't see them and they can hurt a lot. And there are four waves of them. Your best bet is to line up your men at the bottom of the screen and let the floor come to you in order to destroy it. You should hope you have enough health left for this fight. Should you prevail, you can finally get your hands onto Exodus' main frame and need to sabotage it in order to stop the monster once and for all.
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