Sunshine Challenge 2021 - Pan
The theme here is nature and music and frolicking and such! I'm currently reading The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, which seems to suit. It starts out with our unicorn in a lilac wood and the description of it is so beautiful. It's also very sad; I've never read this book before, but I have a strong sense I'm going to have a lot of emotions by the end. (^^)" BPAL also has an entire section of scents inspired by The Last Unicorn if you're interested, which you can find over here. I myself have tried The Lilac Wood scent, and it's pretty nice if you're looking for something very green.
But Pan also brings to mind our Trickster god from Thief: Gold, which only makes sense since he was so heavily based on this particular god in terms of his looks. So, have the Thief soundtrack!
Click to viewHere is also a review I wrote of the game when I first played it in 2017. Be forewarned that it is both long and super spoilery.
Thief Gold turned out to be an excellent game and ended up being on my favorites list. For my first playthrough I used the normal difficulty settings. Seeing as that alone took me 47 hours I would say there is a lot of replay value here and I’m looking forward to trying again on a harder difficulty. There are also plenty of secrets to uncover that I know I didn’t find the first time through and strategies to master, so I think it was very well crafted.
The gameplay itself is great. Flinging yourself into battle isn’t going to have very good results but you are rewarded for having patience and for taking the time to explore every nook and cranny. The NPC’s intelligence and ability seem just right to me. Small noises alert them but usually not to the point they’ll go looking. Make a loud enough noise or walk on a particularly noisy surface long enough or make no attempt to hide in the shadows and you may have a problem. I am somewhat convinced that burricks have a sense of smell though. Once they are alerted to your presence getting them to stop following you is close to impossible.
The weapons you have access to add another good strategy element to the game as they are limited yet extremely helpful. For example, water arrows are fantastic but determining whether that torch is the one you truly want doused takes some consideration. The same goes for every weapon save your blackjack, which is nearly always a safe bet as it’s how you knock out individuals who are in the way.
Speaking of, this isn’t a particularly violent or gruesome game despite facing zombies and religious zealots. The harder you set the difficulty the more you are penalized for murdering people by losing the entire mission. There isn’t a lot of blood or gore in general either, so you can thieve to your heart’s content without worry. There are still several tense moments despite this where you can’t be sure you’ll manage to go by undetected or, if you are discovered, how you will escape. There are the occasional traps and several twisting and expansive levels too.
Furthermore, Thief Gold is a true sneaking game through and through, which I was very impressed by. Even when most games would have been tempted to include a boss fight regardless of rhyme or reason this one was not pulled in and you continue to use the tactics and planning you began the game with for everything.
Probably my favorite missions in this game were Thieves’ Guild, The Haunted Cathedral, The Lost City, Undercover, and Return to the Cathedral. All the missions have really well designed levels though and, while your map won't show exactly where you are in a room, it will give you an idea of your general placement, which will allow you to orient yourself. The more you become familiar with the game and the level the less likely you are to get lost.
One thing to keep in mind is that this game does not have an autosave function whatsoever, so be sure to save at the start of each new level. The videos also have trouble running on modern systems. You can attempt some of the mods people put together or simply watch the before and after videos on YouTube to keep track of where you are in the story, which is what I ended up doing.
As to the story itself, when you first start the game our protagonist, Garrett, has left a group called the Keepers in order to pursue a career in thievery. It’s not altogether clear why Garrett left though, given his attitude toward the Keeper’s beliefs and people more generally, I suspect he was simply fed up with them. Still, the training he received by them allowed him to pursue this goal quite nicely and the game proceeds from there. I’m hoping we learn more about the Keepers in the second game as they seem to have quite a few ideas about Garrett’s fate and were ultimately the ones who took him in in his youth.
You begin with the kinds of missions you expect: you steal from a wealthy aristocrat and break a fellow criminal out of prison in order to continue to make money. Our protagonist is amusing and quite a bit selfish in his motivations, even when he’s assisting his comrades. I doubt he would have lifted a hand to help anyone if they hadn't owed him money.
Things take a turn once you decide to rob the Bonehoard though. Here the player realizes that the undead, spirits, and unusual living creatures are very much a reality in this universe. Garrett doesn’t seem fazed by this in the slightest and embraces it as a slightly more involved burglary than his previous ones. This implies that problems with the undead aren’t entirely unheard of --something that is confirmed in The Haunted Cathedral--, though I imagine most citizens wouldn’t go diving into a place filled with them.
I think that this was a good addition to the world. It added a lot more variety to the missions, required the use of slightly different tactics, and eventually introduces The Trickster.
The Trickster is despised by the Hammerites, our resident religious zealots, and the depiction is reminiscent of Christians and “pagans.” The Hammerites worship the Builder and essentially revere the ability to create things. They put great value on leading a holy life. They seem to put a lot of effort in killing off Garrett though and have a penchant for torturing prisoners, so their philosophy could use some work. They emphasize technology but they don’t seem to have an inherent distaste for using magic either although they attribute these miracles to the Builder. It's curious that the Hammerites could be interpreted as representing "progress" despite their very backwards ways. Only one comes to mind that seemed like a genuine person Brother Murus. But it's important to keep in mind we don't explore the entirety of the world and things aren’t quite that clear cut especially once we get to the sequel.
It is also noteworthy that the Hammerites were a good source of comedy throughout the game for their disdain for thieves, their old style of speaking despite everyone else using modern vocabulary, and their cursing (“By the Builder’s hand!”). They could have been a very dark element in the game but I liked the lighter approach we ended up getting where you know they are generally up to no good but you can’t really hate them either.
The Trickster is a lot more difficult to pin down since we didn’t get to see as much of him. He seems to represent a time of nebulous shades of gray where chaos and creation went hand-in-hand and one was never entirely sure whether the gods wished you ill or good fortune.
However, when you ultimately rid the world of the Trickster it comes with a cost: “the metal age.” The problems with this get looked at more in the sequel but it’s essentially what plagues us still: pollution, corruption in the police force, difficulty adjusting to new ways of life, etc. This gives us some interesting food for thought on the subjects of chaos and balance. Since we did nothing about Viktoria though I’m hoping we will get to see her again. This is another group you can’t really hate despite the things they did. There’s also the matter of The Eye, which is clearly a living spirit in an inanimate object. Considering this eye is now lodged in Garrett’s head and that it assisted Garrett in stealing it in the first place for unknown reasons, I can only imagine it will have a large part to play in future events.
While there’s no doubt the Trickster had to be stopped from bringing the world back centuries one can’t help but wonder if permanently removing him was the right thing to do. Both the good and bad of it rest on Garrett’s shoulders and he has absolutely no interest in sorting it out whatsoever. It will be interesting to see if he eventually takes more interest in the world outside of what he can rob from it or if he’ll maintain detached professionalism in the sequel.
Still one of my favorite things about the first two games, which I mention at the end of this review, is what happens when you remove "chaos." You have the metal age, the age of technology, and all the benefits and hindrances that come with it. Very interesting stuff.
I think a lot of what I wrote for Eos might also be somewhat applicable to Pan, so I'll leave it there for now. (^^)