Outside of mystery fiction, my other big obsession is the Thief franchise. The first game, Thief: The Dark Project came out in 1998 and, along with Metal Gear Solid, played a key role in inventing the “stealth game.” (Although I know about its predecessors, such as Castle Wolfenstein.) The series revolves around Garrett, who used to be a student of a group of a secretive scholars called “the Keepers” before leaving the organization. Now he uses his training to work as a freelance thief operating in an unnamed city. Garrett would like to just steal enough loot to pay the bills and be left alone, but the Protagonist Curse means he inevitably gets sucked into saving the city, if not the world. But for all its influence, the franchise has had a very short shelf life: the original trilogy of games, a tepidly-received reboot/sequel in 2014, and now a VR game set after the 2014 game.
The franchise has retained its power thanks to a very active fan mission community. Ever since 1999’s “Gathering at the Bar,” there have been hundreds of missions placing Garrett in everything from basic Thief missions set in sparkling mansions to sprawling cities to horror to comedy. While there are less missions nowadays than there used to be, the community is still going strong. December 2023 saw the release of The Black Parade, a full campaign easily on par with, or even surpassing, the original games. With such a wide variety, it should come as no surprise that some creators have turned their hands to mystery.
One of the most prolific creators in this field is Nick “nicked” Dablin, who’s made almost two dozen fan missions since 2006. Most of nicked’s missions are high-quality missions that provide twists on the normal Thief format. “The Violent End of Duncan Malveine,” a fan mission for Thief's sequel, The Metal Age, is his most “technically ambitious.”
A journal in Garrett’s apartment sets the scene. Garrett has been eyeing Lord Malveine’s Star of Séraphine, “the world’s largest diamond,” but before he can make a move, Lord Malveine is murdered, meaning it’s likely that the diamond will pass to one of his children. Garrett is about to abandon the job when he’s introduced to an anonymous figure who asks him to track down Lord Malveine’s murderer. This person doesn’t care what Garrett steals, so long as he points to Lord Maleveine’s killer by leaving their portrait light on in the gallery. So Garrett gears up to infiltrate the manor.
Of course, not too many people are weeping over the dead man. There’s his wife, Elizabeth. Or his younger son Leon, a Pagan who resents his father’s conversion to the hyper-technological Mechanists. A conversion that’s also offended his eldest daughter and a priest staying at the estate. Or what about his older son, Raymond? He’s “a sadist with a mean streak” who’s determined to get into a vault built by Duncan’s father Gregor. Not to mention his wife, Lucy, a gambler with a temper. And that’s not counting the family doctor, lawyer, various other guests, and the servants. Which of them is the murderer?
Well, it could be any of them.
The mission’s gimmick is that it’s semi-randomized. I don’t mean in the Clue sense, where everything about the solution is random, but there are nine different choices of killer, each with their own method of committing the crime. The player will spend the mission sneaking through the manor, alternating between stealing loot and digging through the diaries and letters of the guests, figuring out who has an alibi, who has motive, who had the weapon, etc. The first time through, you’ll take extensive notes, desperately seeing who could and could not have committed the crime, you’ll angst over the autopsy report, and you’ll wonder if you have the right person right up until the ending.
Your later playthroughs will be much simpler. Part of this is just what happens when you replay something, but the fact is that the scenarios are too simple for the hardcore mystery fan. Once you know how the mission works, it becomes easy to check what you need to check and ignore everything else, even taking the randomization into account. In fact, the randomization kind of cuts against the mission. It gives the mission some replay value, but I think it would have been better off with two or three in-depth mysteries, with red herrings and double bluffs, then the current set-up with nine pretty basic scenarios. But I’m approaching this as a mystery fan, rather than as a Thief fan mission player. As a Thief fan, nicked does a great job here. Most people don’t think “Thief” and then “mystery,” so it was neat to see how nicked managed to emulate solving a mystery in a game engine not really suited for it.
And the thing is, this would be a very good mystery. You have maps, and the mansion is huge. There are plenty of suspects, with secrets ranging from the mundane to the disturbing. The gameplay mechanics—such as the security cameras you can turn off, but if you flip too many off they’ll all come back on—could be linchpins of a mystery plot. The best is the horror undertones. Nicked’s missions often feature horror, but the horror here got under my skin because you can actually completely miss it if you don’t explore thoroughly. It gives the mission an unsettling undertone if you don’t pick up on the dark thread weaving through it. There are cards and diary pages hidden throughout the manor, and every time you pick one up, there’s the sound of sliding metal from somewhere deep within the estate. “I don’t believe in curses,” Raymond brags, but the player will. It’s like if John Dickson Carr was inspired more by Lovecraft than by Poe. There are more jump scares involved than I would have liked, but most of the horror comes from the atmosphere and build-up.
So while I don’t know if this will be of any interest to this blog’s normal readers, I had a great time with this mission. It’s a solid Thief mission that any fan of the games should check out. Those who aren’t can safely pass on it, or just watch a Let’s Play. Even so, Recommended.
You can check out the mission (and nicked’s other work) here.
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