A Collection Aside
It has been a month for obsession with gameplay systems. From difficult party stealth to optimal arrangements of pretty gems, MEGHANN O’NEILL has been preoccupied with quietly, and not so quietly, taking people out. Yes, including in the Match-3 game. She
you can’t keep your thieves unless you pay them and their morale remains high
I know I’m going to love a game when I have to alt-tab out of it to take notes about the pre-game selection screen. In this case, it was exciting to have to choose how many days thieves should stay in prison when captured, before I knew literally anything about gameplay or context. Uncharacteristically, I chose an easier option. (It was that ominous.) Many hours in, I’ve come to suspect that thieves who train with high morale might get better results for their time and experience. Was curtailing tavern visits for all but the most traitorous thieves a mistake?
Every choice in Killers and Thieves has consequences, especially the ones you don’t realise you’re making. As a party-based stealth game, heisting raises a host of questions. Who needs to fight? Who is most anonymous? Who can climb out a window and fall three stories, when guards enter the building? Who is indispensable? Who can you allow to die? These questions are largely answered by how you build characters, with abilities, and by always boosting their base statistics through training, but it’s a delicate balancing act.
As characters gain experience, they can spend one point to bolster strength, skill or stealth. Strength, for example, adds hit points and allows for carrying more loot. For three points, you can buy acrobatics, prowling, vigilance or appraisal. Prowling allows a thief to move while hidden, anonymity then dropping more slowly while you’re acting dubiously. This is particularly effective when combined with a high stealth stat. Five points buys climbing, alchemy, eavesdrop, knife fighting or lockpicking, with the latter two being essential for most heists.
Of course, a thief can’t gain experience unless they’re heisting or completing missions. Using low level thieves with a specific, requisite ability for a non-heist mission is a good idea, as is taking a “newbie” along on basic heists, but they do have to actively participate or they’ll leave with no experience gain. And, you can’t keep your thieves unless you pay them and their morale remains high. Time has to be invested in staking out new areas, to find taverns and high value houses to rob. Fencing stolen goods through an optimal store yields extra money.
The heists, playing out on 2D scenes, generated to be district-specific, are most difficult when you’re following the story’s progression. No matter how carefully you prepare, a great manager of thieves must be flexible. Heists initially terrified me. Now, my fighters skulk at the bottom of staircases, ready to murder a guard, or liberate a captured friend. Or, after their anonymity drops, they run from building to building, closing doors behind them. I always eavesdrop before entering a building, and I’ll close windows when I suspect someone will have to scale a wall.
Killers and Thieves is not for the faint of heart. Characters will be killed in a moment of stupid panic, possibly caused when the control scheme requires several actions to be taken but you’re only one player. If you’ve built the character carefully over several hours, replacing them will genuinely hurt. But, like me, you may find yourself absolutely intoxicated by the party stealth experience, getting ever greedier for every uncommon honeymead sold to unwitting customers, and noticing ever more ways the game’s systems and statistics are interacting with each other.