Few people like to remain in the shadows. Everyone, even modest individuals, from time to time wants to bask in the rays of glory - to receive long-deserved recognition and people's love. Unfortunately, fate often has other plans, and instead of a flurry of applause, unknown talents are left to listen to a couple of dull but sincere claps. Similar stories happen all the time - and not only to people, as the past year, rich in masterpieces, showed.
AWhile the whole world was carrying Baldur's Gate III in its arms and celebrating the metanarrative quirks of Alan Wake II, few people noticed how, perhaps, the best stealth action game of recent years was released in November - unprepossessing in appearance, but beautiful in almost every aspect. Ironic! And a little sad. What kind of game is this, what’s good about it, and why does it deserve a place in the top major releases of 2023? It's time to answer these and other questions, because we accidentally missed Thief: The Black Parade - and missed it completely in vain.
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Dark Project
It’s common to talk about Thief with reverence—a legend of the genre, after all. However, it’s hard to escape the thought that the series is cursed: the first part was born in agony, the sequel became Looking Glass Studios’ swan song, Ion Storm Austin ’s resume ends with the threequel, and if the reboot is discussed, it’s usually in a negative way. Perhaps this is why publishers (first Square Enix, and now Embracer Group ) do not remember the famous brand: after a meeting with Garrett, not a single studio - in its entirety, at least - survives for long.
Fortunately, where no businessman has gone before, fans boldly go into battle, and modders do not disappoint in this regard - for several decades now they have been creating levels with enviable regularity, some of which are not inferior in quality to the original trilogy. The main achievement of the community is considered to be the Thief 2X campaign, released in 2005, but recently it has a serious competitor - The Black Parade.
From the outside and purely from the descriptions, the mod announced back in 2016 does not look like anything out of the ordinary: 10 missions, several unique tools for theft, a conditional connection to the original sources... However, the creation of Feuillade Industries and Romain Barrilliot from Arkane Lyon conceals There are many surprises in itself, the first and most important of which is that this is not an amateur craft, but a skillfully designed, almost commercial (in the best sense of the word) video game.
New Heights
The events of The Black Parade begin shortly before Thief: The Dark Project. After a very long absence, Yum returns to the nameless City - once a member of the Thieves Guild, and now a penniless ex-convict. Without thinking twice, the robber takes up his old ways... or rather, he tries.
Not even a couple of days pass before the bandit gets involved in a complicated story involving eccentric aristocrats, creepy cultists, smug magicians and, of course, evil spirits. Surrounded by intrigue, the anti-hero has no choice but to engage in his favorite “craft” in the hope of escaping from the circumstances surrounding him; he is unaware that in this way he is only plunging deeper and deeper into a nightmare.
The opening scenes of The Black Parade give a very clear idea of what kind of adventure awaits Yuma. Native neighborhoods greet the burglar in the best traditions of mystical noir - unfriendly guards and tired servants scurry through the cold, dank streets; Tall houses with peaked roofs line up in an ominous panorama worthy of Gotham from Tim Burton's films, and if you stop and listen, you can hear inexplicable laughter in the alleys that makes your blood run cold. The mod doesn’t even have time to really start, but it already makes a lasting impression: with just a couple of masterful touches, Feuillade Industries turned the City from an ordinary decoration into a stone monster, predatorily observing the lawlessness that is happening.
But it’s not just the setting that’s so strong—in addition to the general mood, the prologue serves as a great demonstration of the gameplay of fan-made Thief. Its basics were left untouched: just like a quarter of a century ago, the lion's share of the levels are vast stealth sandboxes, and the tasks boil down to finding jewelry and important items with breaks for hiding from an army of unusually long-eared guards. The maps of the area that you have to navigate by are ascetic, the equipment store offers to purchase assorted arrows and bombs, and the requirements for the successful completion of a particular task directly depend on the selected difficulty. Simply put, everything is as before.
While carefully preserving the central formula, Barillo and company decided to surprise fans in a different way - with an incredible amount of detail worthy of the Hitman World of Assassination trilogy. For example, although the first chapter can be characterized as a journey from point A to point B, a kind of warm-up for those who have not stolen anything for a long time, on the way to the finish line, something interesting, curious, and invitingly brilliant lurks on almost every corner. Over there is the house of some merchant, who sent the cook to buy food for the night. And a little further - a string of towers with barracks, where the head of the garrison probably had a handful or two of coins lying around. Mmm, a pawn shop in an inconspicuous dead end! Ooh, the window is ajar! A flophouse with a crazy bandit in one of the rooms! It is not necessary to rob everyone and everything - but how can you resist? The authors seem to despise the very idea of empty, useless rooms, and, to their credit, the game really suits the manic desire to fill every nook and cranny with life.
At first, it seems that sooner or later this obsession with scale will play a cruel joke on modders - they say, just a little more, and the quantity will affect the quality. But no, their sense of proportion never fails. On the contrary, you’re amazed at how carefully the creators maintained the balance between the stunning (by engine standards) gigantomania and the understandable structure of local mansions and tombs. The shortcuts are where they need to be, the hiding places are hidden in inconspicuous and at the same time logical places, and even the patrol routes are built in such a way as to keep you in suspense, but not to go too far. The campaign is so luxurious in terms of design that you can’t find fault with it at all - yes, a couple of segments are a little drawn out, in some places the horror suffers due to the need to look for loot, but what kind of stealth action game can’t be accused of being too draggy?
However, the most impressive feature of The Black Parade is its authenticity in relation to the original two Thief. It's not just the textures, sound effects and models that are now so easy to copy - Feuillade Industries has reproduced the spirit of the classics so skillfully that the new product seems like an official addition lost in the 90s, and not a well-tailored fan fiction. Looking Glass Studios may be dead, but thanks to the efforts of its fans, its legacy lives on.
What's the end result? A triumph of folk art? Undoubtedly. A masterpiece that we should focus on when developing similar projects? But here everything is not so rosy. Although Thief: The Black Parade is beautiful, the game clearly illustrates a simple truth: sometimes being too fixated on the source material can ruin an otherwise amazing project.
Wandering in the dark
The claim, without a doubt, sounds paradoxical - a couple of paragraphs above, devotion to the origins is presented as an indisputable advantage of fashion. The contradiction is explained simply: there is a very noticeable line between imitation and copying. There is nothing wrong with fan service, provided that the work, even taking into account the references, remains independent. Kojima's crazy Metal Gear Solid, for example, cannot be confused with the measured Escape from New York, despite the fact that both of them star a guy named Snake. The Black Parade, for all its merits, is nothing more than a remake of The Dark Project. Meticulous and, alas, a little pointless.
Suspicions do not creep in right away: throughout the opening level, the authors cleverly lull one's vigilance with the technical and game design tricks described above, which would at least be included in textbooks. And then, literally in the next episode, Yuma is sent to the estate of an extravagant collector for a strange artifact. “Stop, that sounds painfully familiar,” a crazy thought flashes through my head even at the briefing stage. Not even 10 minutes pass before the suspicions are confirmed: yes, this is The Sword, a mission that every fan of the original game remembers, with the only difference that Garrett went up to the upper floors of a fancy mansion for the desired item, and Yum goes down to the basements. Otherwise, there are fewer differences than we would like - yes, the location itself is different, but what's the point if you know what to expect from it right away?
The above describes well the rest of the campaign, not only in gameplay, but even in terms of scenario. The latter, admittedly, is more surprising than the remixes of old robberies: Feuillade Industries retold the old story, retaining almost every plot twist, leaving familiar images in place, but changing details here and there. This is not “Dark Project”, but “Black Parade”, don’t be confused!
However, there are discrepancies - and they do not make The Black Parade any better. Hume, for example, is no match for the thief from the trilogy 20 years ago, and the clumsily written image of the brutal trickster is to blame for this. Garrett was a self-confident, but quite charming hero: his composure revealed him as an experienced professional who speaks rarely, but accurately and without unnecessary bragging; Yes, he made mistakes, but he didn’t seem like a naive fool. The new protagonist is his exact opposite: he is stupid, gullible, and obscenely pathetic.
Plus, the bandit is not given the opportunity to open up before his big adventure - in the original, several missions were devoted to the working life of the title character, during which the viewer managed to get used to him, learned his views on life and helped the poor guy go down into a crypt with a thousand corpses in search of money to pay for housing. Here the authors limit themselves to a long monologue in the “My life is a tin” format. The result is logical: they frankly don’t care about the bandit and his problems.
There’s really nothing to say about the antagonists: they exist. In theory. In fact, they appear mainly in the notes - the villains rarely appear on the screen and do not really do anything. Which again contrasts with The Dark Project and The Metal Age, whose main villains from the moment of their appearance do not allow themselves to be forgotten.
One could come to terms with the above-described mistakes if The Black Parade’s missions were at least somewhat inventive and not conceptually worn out to holes. Alas, the entire campaign is just a collection of old songs re-sung in a slightly different way. Here and there modders have cleverly linked a couple of familiar levels together, but this doesn’t change the essence.
Someone will probably note that this is inevitable - the fans wanted something familiar, but on different maps, with a redesigned set of obstacles and enemies. Why reinvent the wheel? In this regard, Feuillade Industries coped with the task flawlessly: against the backdrop of some locations, their counterparts from Thief Gold look almost primitive - in the remake there are more scripts, and the textures are clearer, and even the carpets on the walls can now be moved, and not just cut off. But, having recreated (and in a couple of cases surpassed) Thief: The Dark Project, the team somehow forgot about perhaps the most important element of the source material - its disarming unpredictability.
Each video game, with its title and cover, creates a specific set of expectations among its audience. Uncharted is an exotic adventure. Hitman is a story about a hitman with a spy, probably conspiratorial, spirit. In 1998, hardly anyone suspected that a stealth action game called Thief would involve exploring tombs, running around a ghost town in search of a mystical artifact, and then fighting a de facto devil. This originality was the true power of The Dark Project - its developers understood perfectly well that sitting in the shadows and stealing cups alone would not get you far.
Throughout the first two parts of the series, Looking Glass diligently avoided repetition, experimented with storytelling, with setting tasks - for example, Thief II: The Metal Age talked not about magic and demons, but about robots and their inventors, a completely new threat to the familiar with the evil spirits Garrett. Even the controversial Thief: Deadly Shadows from Ion Storm provided a unique experience that made it impossible to confuse it with its predecessors. But the creation of Barillo and his comrades has nothing to brag about - it looks beautiful, is put together superbly, but there is nothing of its own behind the soul. It's sad, considering that the designer is primarily known for EYE: Divine Cybermancy, a shooter whose hidden meanings people are still scratching their heads over.
The authors disappoint expectations a couple of times, and the closer to the finale, the more often they give themselves a free hand. More such touches!
The authors disappoint expectations a couple of times, and the closer to the finale, the more often they give themselves a free hand. I wish I had more touches like this!
To be fair, this is to some extent nitpicking - Thief is launched for the thrill and cleverly designed locations, and not everyone cares about the expressiveness of a particular campaign. However, it’s hard not to feel at least a little disappointed: skilled designers spent seven years on a defiantly secondary project. Why do this if the mod is clearly intended for fans who will immediately see borrowings?
The Black Parade leaves two emotions. If we discard idealism and evaluate the modification in a vacuum, then all that remains is to proclaim its masterpiece - 10 grandiose, but at the same time detailed missions from Feuillade Industries clearly demonstrate why fan art should be taken seriously. Each level is carefully thought out, interestingly designed, and the presentation of the plot with cut scenes in the spirit of the original sources is breathtaking in technical terms - people did everything as it should to stand on par with the unshakable classics, and for this alone they deserve applause.
Still, the community's enthusiastic reception to the campaign is hard to get attached to. No matter how beautiful it was, its authors only walked along a long-trodden path - they ideally reproduced the content and form, but did not really offer anything of their own. This may sound a little cruel, but the game is reminiscent of a typical coursework for an excellent student - an impeccably written work, but devoid of any individual features, the meticulousness of which is comparable only to its suffocating sterility. It’s not customary to criticize these, because they contain the necessary information on the subject (and even a little more to impress the audience), but beyond the number of pages translated into them and a couple of interesting notes, they are not much different from other similar studies.
Thief: The Black Parade is exactly that. It's great as a stealth action game. As a fan creation it is majestic. And at the same time, like Thief, the new product is amazingly boring, in fact unimaginative. Is it “Amazing” or “Commendable”? For me, the answer is obvious, but I recommend that others personally familiarize themselves with the long-term construction and decide for themselves.
Pros: impressive scale; locations thought out to the smallest detail; the highest (by the standards of user modifications) level of production; reasonable balance of difficulty; some interesting finds in the second half of the story.
Cons: This is just a condensed retelling of the original Thief - without any interesting surprises and with incredibly bland heroes; missions are variations on the theme of tasks from the first three parts of the saga.
Image courtesy of ShutterStock
