Back In The City Hume, not Garrett: The Black Parade is the Thief game Looking Glass never made

A guard bumps into me. Deep shadow, light gem as black as a Hammerite’s sense of humor, and his shoulder finds my shoulder anyway. He yelps. I yelp. Then I run, because Hume can’t fight, and 25 years of Thief muscle memory evaporate on a rooftop in the year 833.

That’s the first lesson The Black Parade teaches, about 20 minutes into mission one, and it teaches it with a shoulder.

Return to the City

Hume is a convict. Exiled, time served, back in The City with nothing – lost and without a penny to your name, as the briefing puts it, which is the polite way of saying the game hands you a blackjack, a handful of arrows and a grudge. Your old associate Dahlquist is somewhere in town and owes you a conversation. Between you and him lies the City I’ve been sneaking through since 1998, seen a few years before Garrett ever picked a lock in it: soot-caked brick, greasy fumes, machinery that never sleeps, Hammerites on the corners, Keepers in the walls. The only faction I fully trust is my own two feet.

The first mission is a city hub. Open, vertical, the kind of thing Deadly Shadows promised in 2004 and delivered as a loading screen. So we go up. Rope arrow into a beam, mantle, rope arrow into a gutter, mantle, and suddenly the mission is a rooftop tour of a city that talks. Guards greet each other when their rounds cross. A watchman finishes his route, sits down on a crate and stays down. Two Hammerite priests bicker over a bottle in a chapel kitchen while I lift the silverware behind them. Nobody in 1998 had the budget for this and nobody in 2023 asked for it, and it’s the one thing that makes The City feel inhabited instead of patrolled.

Hach.

Then the bump. The team spells it out in the readme, dry as a Builder’s sermon: Hume is not a Keeper and never received Garrett’s training, so the AI notices you when it walks into you, sometimes even in a perfect shadow. One rule. It rewires the whole game, because darkness stops being a cheat code and becomes a place you have to think about – which, if you squint, is what Thief was pretending to be about all along.

25 years, to the day

The Black Parade came out on November 30, 2023. Thief: The Dark Project came out on November 30, 1998. The team calls the campaign a love letter to The Dark Project; the release date is the postmark.

Feuillade Industries is seven fan-mission authors from the old Looking Glass forums, led by skacky – Romain Barrilliot in daylight, level designer at Arkane Lyon, and before that the man behind fan missions like Between These Dark Walls and Endless Rain. Announced on TTLG in 2016. Seven years in the oven. What came out: 10 missions, 28 voiced characters, ≈1,800 new lines of dialogue, ≈30 minutes of hand-drawn briefings and cutscenes in the scratchy monochrome of the originals, four new tools from the undermarket, and an AI that got a personality transplant. Price: 0 USD.

You do need Thief Gold, which Steam sells for the price of a bánh mì during every sale (≈1 USD; my lunch that day cost ≈25,000 VNĐ and was the worse deal), plus TFix, NewDark 1.26 or newer, and a loader – AngelLoader in my case. 15 minutes of setup, difficulty set to Hard, and then it ate my December.

Old faces

I’ve been writing about this game since a CD case fell on my head in 2010, I’ve written about patching it back to life in 2013, and my 2020 gaming-year roundup has the full trilogy in it under the diagnosis unheilbar verliebt (incurably in love). I even liked Thief 2014 – a solid game with real strengths and real weaknesses and roughly as much of Thief’s soul as a Mechanist has of rhythm. So my bar for a fan campaign was not low. It was somewhere around the Bonehoard.

Mission two clears it. Where Old Faces Fade sends Hume into the Halleford compound, and the map lies to you: it reads like Bafford’s manor, a tidy two-story job, evening’s work. Then you find the overgrown wing, and the overgrown wing keeps going, and the map stops matching the building, and there’s a passage that has no fucking business being where it is, and around the time the layout stops making Euclidean sense you realize you’re inside the love child of Bafford’s and The Sword. Constantine’s mansion. The house with the doors in the ceiling that gave me the creeps in 2010 and, for the record, still does. A clock, a vase, and a piece from the vault are the objectives; the actual job is understanding the building, and that took me ≈3 hours on Hard. I resented none of them.

Thief: The Black Parade – release trailer

The dark is a place now

Thief was always a game about reading a room before you enter it. The Black Parade makes you read it twice. Guards have rounds that end in chairs, so the patrol you memorized changes shape 10 minutes in. Servants wander. There are more of them than in The Dark Project and they pay closer attention, and Hume’s shoulder problem means the corridor you’d have ghosted through as Garrett is now a corridor you wait out, crouched behind a crate, listening to two guards complain about the night shift. The undermarket sells new toys – the disruption bomb alone justifies the trip – and the moss and water arrows you know still do what they did, just against a city that’s watching.

There’s a mission with the undead. I’m not telling you which number, and I’m not telling you what’s in it, but I played it at two in the afternoon with the curtains open, like a coward, and I stand by that decision. In 2010 I wrote that Doom 3 felt like a day at the pony farm compared to the Bonehoard. The pony farm has a new neighbor.

And it’s beautiful, in the way Thief is beautiful, which has nothing to do with polygon counts. Fog on a canal. A single lit window three stories up. Textures that look like they were painted for 1998 and lit for 2023. The team stayed inside the Dark Engine’s limits and pushed against every wall of it at once, and the result is that a 25-year-old renderer is producing the most atmospheric stealth game I’ve played since Dishonored 2 – which, given who’s directing, reads like a signature.

The writing is the part nobody expected. Readables that are worth reading. Conversations you stop to hear out even though they’ll cost you a patrol window. Cutscenes hand-drawn in the smeared-charcoal style of the originals, narrated by a Hume who sounds like a man who has been cold for a long time. The story proper takes a while to show its hand – the conspiracy doesn’t bare its teeth until about the midpoint, and there’s a necromancer in it named Azaran the Cruel, which is exactly the level of subtlety Thief villains have always operated at. I’ll leave the rest in the dark where it belongs.

Where it creaks

Five stars, and I’ll still tell you where the floorboards give. The missions are long, all of them, and by the seventh three-hour night you’ll wish one of them had the mercy to be a 40-minute smash-and-grab. The plot idles for four missions before it decides what it is. Some props are noticeably lower-poly than the ones next to them, seven years of asset drift showing through. And the finale, the mission that gives the campaign its name, is the one the community rates lowest – the Thief Guild crowd puts it around 7.1/10 while the rest sit between 8.4 and 9.3. I get it. It’s a climax built for spectacle in an engine built for hiding, and the two argue.

None of that moves the score. The five stars are for the fact that in 2023 a handful of people made a Thief game better than two of the four official ones, and gave it away.

What everyone else thinks

The Thief Guild database has it at 9.70/10 from 330 ratings. ModDB users voted it Mod of the Year 2023, first place, ahead of a Half-Life 2 mod that had the misfortune of releasing in the same year. One ModDB reviewer called it an all-time genre masterpiece that sets a new standard for the Thief series; another, more to the point: who knew 2023 would bring another T2X moment. If you know what T2X is, you already stopped reading and started downloading. If you don’t: the last time the fan scene produced something this big was 2005, and it was the closest thing to a Thief 2 expansion that ever existed. PC Gamer and PCGamesN covered it. Nobody covered it enough.

Come on, do it

In 2010 I ended the Thief post with the CD-shelf accident and told you the signs couldn’t get any clearer. Wrong. A shoulder in the dark is clearer.

Thief Gold costs a dollar, everything else costs nothing. Set it to Hard, turn off the lights, and let a guard walk into you once, so you learn.

Unheilbar verliebt. Still. Now with a second thief on the shelf.

Thief: The Black Parade at a glance

Personal rating:

Developer:

Feuillade Industries

Publisher:

Self-published, free (ModDB / Thief Guild)

Release date (Steam):

30 Nov, 2023 (fan campaign; requires Thief Gold, Steam release 30 Nov, 1998)

Genre:

Stealth, Immersive Sim, Fan Campaign

Where to buy: