Beloved first-person stealth series Thief is being resurrected for a new instalment on PlayStation VR2. It’s called Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow and it’s out later this year.
Thief, the brainchild of System Shock developer Looking Glass Studios, first surfaced back in 1998. Its initial instalment, Thief: The Dark Project, was immediately heralded as something of a classic and three further entries followed. Unfortunately, 2014’s Eidos-Montréal developed Thief reboot was poorly received and the series floundered.
Now, though, over a decade later, Thief is back in the form of Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow. It’ll one again see players slinking through the streets of The City, but this time there’s a new protagonist doing the stealthy. Gone is the Garrett of earlier games, this time replaced by Magpie, a “cunning thief orphaned by Northcrest’s brutality and shaped by the streets, who steals as the only means to survive”.
After stumbling across a legendary artefact holding a mysterious secret, players embark on a journey across The City that’ll see them evading and outsmarting its controlling forces as they seek to expose a “sinister conspiracy”. All this, of course, takes the series’ classic shadow stulking and gives it a VR twist.
“Physically crouch, hide, and move between shadows, using every inch of the environment to stay undetected,” Sony explains on the PlayStation Blog. “Whether you’re sneaking through darkened alleys or scaling the rooftops of towering buildings, your every movement feels real. Extinguish light sources with your water arrows, hands, or even a well-aimed breath to deepen the darkness and expand your cover. The VR mechanics allow you to live out the fantasy of stealth in a way that no other medium can replicate.”
Thief VR is the work of Vertigo Games and Maze Theory, and is being developmed in collaboration with Eidos-Montréal. It doesn’t have a release date yet, beyond a vague “2025” window, but “new gameplay footage, missions, and special features” are due “in the coming months”.