Warren Spector is a legend in the stealth and immersive sim genre, having given us classics like System Shock, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and one of my all-time favourite games, Deus Ex. So when Thick As Thieves was announced as a PvPvE immersive stealth experience, it immediately had my attention. Then, just weeks before launch, it pivoted into a cooperative PvE stealth game instead. Even with that sudden shift, I stayed cautiously optimistic that it would still turn out great. Unfortunately, it never quite lives up to that promise.

It might look promising, but this map is half of what the game offers.

You play as an amateur thief in an alternative 1910s Scotland, where technology has taken a rather different path. As the newest recruit in the Thieves Guild, you’re sent out on a variety of contracts to prove yourself, climb the ranks, and slowly uncover a larger mystery lurking in the background. That said, there’s not much of a story to really latch onto, as most of it is delivered through brief flavour text attached to the contracts you receive, making the narrative feel more like set dressing than a real driving force.

Thick As Thieves is a first-person stealth heist game where you break into places you absolutely should not be in and scoop up everything that is not nailed down to sell for cash. You’ll be sneaking past guards with painfully predictable patrol routes, dodging turrets that immediately open fire the moment they spot you, and dealing with magical orbs that can lock you in a room while waking up every nearby turret until you find somewhere to hide.

The gameplay is mostly functional, helped along by a small but useful selection of gadgets. There’s a grappling hook for quickly reaching higher vantage points, smoke bombs for breaking line of sight and vanishing back into the shadows like you actually know what you’re doing, and a magical diamond that highlights enemies and loot around you, making your life considerably easier.

Thick As Thieves is a first-person stealth heist game where you break into places you absolutely should not be in and scoop up everything that is not nailed down to sell for cash. You’ll be sneaking past guards with painfully predictable patrol routes, dodging turrets that immediately open fire the moment they spot you, and dealing with magical orbs that can lock you in a room while waking up every nearby turret until you find somewhere to hide.

The gameplay is mostly functional, helped along by a small but useful selection of gadgets. There’s a grappling hook for quickly reaching higher vantage points, smoke bombs for breaking line of sight and vanishing back into the shadows like you actually know what you’re doing, and a magical diamond that highlights enemies and loot around you, making your life considerably easier.

Snook up, steal stuff, sell stuff, repeat.

Whilst the content itself is fairly lightweight, the maps are actually pretty well designed. There are plenty of entry and exit points to experiment with, and the occasional randomised elements add just enough unpredictability to make repeated runs feel a little less like you’re clocking in for a shift. There are also secrets to uncover and scattered notes that help paint a broader picture of what’s going on in the world, even if the game never does a whole lot with that setup.

That said, the maps are not especially sprawling, and familiarity sets in fairly quickly. Which is a shame, because Thick As Thieves can still squeeze out a few genuinely enjoyable hours thanks to stealth systems that, while fairly simple, are satisfying enough to carry the experience for a while.

Thick As Thieves initially began life as a PvPvE extraction looter, where a group of players would be dropped into these maps with a shared objective. On paper, it’s a solid enough premise, though I can also see why it may not have worked particularly well in practice. That likely explains why the game ultimately pivoted into a PvE stealth experience with optional co-op shortly before release.

The problem is that some of those older design ideas still feel very much intact. You cannot pause the game, dying does not fail the mission or send you back to a checkpoint, and the mid-mission safe deposit system feels like a leftover from that original extraction-focused vision. These are mechanics that make perfect sense in a multiplayer extraction setting, but feel strangely out of place here. As a result, Thick As Thieves ends up feeling a little at war with itself, with systems pulling in different directions and almost no real consequences for a failed heist.

All of my time with Thick As Thieves was spent in the single-player experience, as cooperative play was not available in the review build I received. During that time, you’ll be bouncing between the same maps to complete contracts, climb the ranks, and unlock a fairly limited selection of gadgets and cosmetics.

Not a looker.

The most meaningful unlocks are the higher difficulty modes, which, honestly, probably should have been available from the start. The default Rookie mode offers very little in the way of genuine challenge, making those opening hours feel a bit too forgiving and mechanically flat. It takes a couple of hours to unlock the more engaging Thief difficulty, which introduces extra traps, more guards, and enough added pressure to make Thick As Thieves feel a little closer to the Thief successor it so clearly wants to be.

Visually, Thick As Thieves does very little to stand out, with environments that feel surprisingly lacking in detail, to the point where I’d expect this level of visual fidelity more from a Quest 2 title than a full flatscreen release. That would be less of an issue if the art direction made up for it, but it never really does.

For a genre that thrives on environmental storytelling, atmosphere, and spaces that feel lived in, Thick As Thieves comes up disappointingly short. The world rarely tells you much just by existing, and the overall presentation feels bland and oddly anonymous, with very little visual identity to make it memorable.

Thick As Thieves is not a completely bad game, and there is genuinely the foundation for something better here, but as it stands, it is an underwhelming stealth experience. The core ideas have some promise, yet they are wrapped in a bare-bones package that does not offer much of an interesting challenge unless you push through repetitive contracts just to unlock the difficulties where the game actually starts to come alive. At the very least, the relatively generous pricing makes it easier to recommend to the truly stealth-starved, the kind of person foaming at the mouth for anything involving shadows, lockpicks, and poor life choices. Just keep your expectations firmly in check.

Thick As Thieves is available now on PC.

Reviewed on PC with an RTX 4070, Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 32GB RAM.

A Copy of Thick As Thieves was provided by the publisher.