Perhaps you have fond memories of Deus Ex designer Warren Spector’s legendary stealth game Thief: A Dark Project, or perhaps your sneaker of choice is Arkane Studios’ more recent immersive sim Dishonored. Either way, you might be intrigued to hear Spector’s latest effort, Thick as Thieves – which has been reimagined as solo and co-op game following its original PvPvE reveal – is launching on 20th May.
Announced back in 2024, Thick of Thieves unfolds in an alternate-history 1910s Scottish metropolis known as Kilcairn. It’s a city of rain-slicked streets and soot-stained rooftops “steeped in intrigue and rich in opportunity”; where technology and magic combine, where portly guards patrol the night, and where imaginative ne’er-do-wells can do all sorts of looting with a bit of a plan.
Thick of Thieves was, you might recall, originally conceived as a game of immersive-sim-inspired competitive infiltration, which is the version I saw at the tail-end of 2024. But it turns out Spector’s studio OtherSide Entertainment has shifted away from that initial vision as work has continued, and it’s now focused on single-player and two-player co-op sneakery.
“As development progressed and the world of Kilcairn has come to life,” it explained on Steam earlier this week, “we found that we were having more fun with solo and co-op play”. So if all that initial talk of PvPvE was putting you off a little, then your interest might now be re-enflamed. It sounds like the mission-based core is still in tact though, with Thick of Thieves being explicitly designed for short play sessions.
Even I, the PvP-avoidant sort I usually am, was intrigued by Thick of Thieves in its earlier guise, so I’m curious to see how it plays now, given its change in direction. And with its 20th May release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S rapidly approaching, all will be revealed soon.
