[CubaLibre]

Zack Snyder's Thief
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Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

DETECTIVE MODE

The level design actually looks pretty good too, at least from what I can tell. Why is it all so grey though.

Looks like a game that 50% gets it and 50% is ruined by Assassin's Creed bullshit.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

Well I wouldn't exactly call it Ubisoftian - it deserves better than that - but it's definitely Deus Ex as filtered through 2013 design tropes, which is like a 90% net negative.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

Been playing an acquired copy of this game. Has some kind of weird memory leak where performance gets worse every time a map loads, and after 4-5 map loads the game is unplayably choppy and has to be restarted. So that's annoying.

Here's the problem with the game. At first, when you are dumped into the hub city it actually seems pretty labyrinthine and eminently explorable. And to a degree it is. But you find quite quickly that there's really only one way to go anywhere, sometimes two ways, and everything else is just a "nook" off of the main path. If there's a nook, you'll find a shiny in it. The nooks are sometimes pretty craftily hidden or require some thinkin' about your quasi-platformy abilities to get to, but they're still just nooks rather than legitimate alternate paths that wrap around on each other.

So when I started the game I instantly ignored where the game wanted me to go and explored everywhere I could first. This is a certain kind of gamer's instinct that I think ought to lend itself well to a legitimate Thief-type game. And it really did feel like there was all kinds of shit to explore, even if they were just reward nooks and didn't wrap compellingly back into the stealth gameplay. BUT: when you explore in this manner, you just feel like something's... off. That there should be more. A hidden button opens a sliding floor panel revealing... nothing. A guy's diary reveals him as some kind of thug/thief/fence but his apartment just contains the standard flatware loot. You start to wondering if you're missing some kind of really deep, incredible secrets that span the whole City...

...but then you realize that as the game dribbles sidequests to you, they send you to all these places and spawn in the stuff unique to the sidequest. In other words, you've explored mostly for no reason. If you'd have just waited, a sidequest would have sent you there anyway. So actually, the superior way to play the game is not to explore the City at all, to simply shuttle yourself to the waypoints and only explore when told to. EXCEPT there are still SOME reward nooks that are actual "secrets" that the game will never send you to. So it's sending you these mixed messages. Am I supposed to explore on my own power, or with permission, or not at all, or what? It kind of sucks.

It's not a terrible game, but it's not a good game either. And it's no kind of inheritor of the Thief name.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

Yes. All these 90's-PC-heyday "reboots" are related in a fundamental way.

I just wrote an ABDN review to that effect! Hopefully it will be posted soon!
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Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

The Witness appears pretty Myst-like, and it's as mainstream as a first-person adventure/puzzle game is going to get in the age of the AAA. We'll see if it's actually any good (I have my doubts).

There's a huge space now for legitimately great games in this PC vein to be made. And they are made, actually, on a pretty regular basis. It's when AAA multimillion $$ game dev gets ahold of these properties that the nastiness happens.
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Let's Play, starring me.