Th1ef, Thi2f, Thi3f

Finished Thief II. I loved it like family, but I can’t say it’s my new favorite game — I hated the last level so much that I asked my partner to finish it for me; this may be a sign that I’m not going to blow the dust off Thief II and lovingly place it in the shadowbox beside Portal and Half-Life 2. I mean, that’s how you’re going to top ten hours of staggering, if not always fully realized, ambition? Two hours of factory work?

Well, fine. I admit it is very ambitious factory work.

But like I said, it’s still a brilliant game, one from which I would like to learn. Even nothing else about it were good, I’d be impressed that Thief II can leave so much of the drama to the player’s imagination (the game’s all about what you think about in the agonizing pauses, while you wait in a closet for the guards to calm down) while still relying on cutscenes to get the player from mission to mission, having Garrett chat to you every time he has an idea or needs to pee, and bugging the player with a shopping list of “objectives”:

Garrett will die if he doesn’t drink some milk soon. Find some milk in the fridge.

The guards here are very fast. Try to move slowly to defeat them better.

Failure is the mark of an amateur. Don’t fail or your mom will know.

The game gets away with this constant interference because it prioritizes so well; it leaves reasonable tasks -such as, oh Jesus, reading the map- to the player, and lets the character do the rest. Essentially, instead of playing a character where the required disbelief-suspension is “this violent man can get shot every day,” you play one where the required disbelief-suspension is “this sneaky man can hide effectively by standing against a dark surface; he can also figure out the plot, which is a good thing, since I’m busy maneuvering him clumsily through the doors upon which he continually gets stuck.”

(I am happy to report that, by 2004’s Thief III, the developers had successfully transformed Garrett from an invisible block to a grotesque marionette, and therefore you can now get through doors 100% of the time.)

Anyway, that brings me to my main point, which is that the writing of Thief II is really good. Yes, it all leans toward the hokey, we all know that; most game writing does (and maybe has to; is there an Uncanny Valley for words? Is this why literary realism rarely works for me?). But the plot is an extremely solid supernatural mystery. The worldbuilding is straight but self-aware fantasy, and surrounded as we are by fantasy that’s either parodic or unintentionally parodic, that’s an impressive thing. It is especially nice that the religions make sense.This is partly because they’re straightforwardly ripped from medieval Catholicism and generic paganism, but why not, if you can execute it well? And with a base that everybody understands, you can riff and expand on things freely — hence the convincing sense of tradition when Karras expounds, even somewhat esoterically, on the gospel of the Builder.

Speaking of which, some credit probably goes to the direction, but Stephen Russell’s voice acting (as smooth, sarcastic asshole hero Garrett and the perpetually disappointed-in-you, Droopy Dog-sounding, bizarrely approachable villain Karras) is outstanding and does much to carry the game. If you read these lines, they do exactly what they should. When he says them, they’re nuanced, tragic and often quite funny. It’s a performance I’d put with Ellen McLain’s in Portal.

I actually think Russell is even better as Karras; the performance breaks every reasonable law of voice acting (starting with the fact that it’s plainly a cartoon voice; ending with the fact that Karras has a very limited emotional palette, ranging essentially from “me” to “ME!”) — and still manages to contain an enormous energy and pathos. Part of it is that, due to technological limitations and storytelling prowess, you barely ever see Karras. Instead, you hear him on a loudspeaker, or as the recorded voices of his clunky steam-powered robots. The contrast between his silly voice repeating the same three lines and the robots’ brutal lethality, all encountered at unpredictable moments of unrelated tension, is very effective at generating new moods and shades of nervousness. It’s an entirely mental effect which, again, the gaming industry has spent the ensuing nine years trying to replicate with increasingly complex AI.

(Valve later used the chatty-invisible-cartoon-villain trick in Portal, and seems also to have lifted the idea -and some of the content- of Karras’ final speeches during Half-Life 2. It’s not like the developers of Thief II invented the loudspeaker, but the similarities are striking. Not that I mean any criticism by this. It worked just as well the second time.)

Where to end? It was a great game which, quite often, I wanted to murder. It was slow, hard to get used to, klutzy, with a hero who can’t put down useless items except by throwing them with the full force of his personality. (It’s hard to tell the gold candlesticks from the iron ones when you’re in a hurry, and it is precisely when you are in a hurry that it’s least helpful to fling them against the wall and make a giant clanging sound, Garrett. Honestly, you are like a petulant goddamn child, and if you do that one more time, I’m not sticking a keyboard in your butt and making you do stupid things anymore.)

But on the other hand, I actually thought that! These characters feel real, to the point (even) where you gleefully want at least two of ‘em to get a room, and you normally hate unresolved co-worker/partner love/hate sexual tension like the lazy, stupid characterization device it almost always is. Every person who writes fiction can learn something from this game. I’m not sure exactly what, but I’ll keep thinking about it.