It’s hard not to gush about Tiny Thief. Earlier this morning at GDC in San Francisco, 5 Ants, a freshly assembled studio based in Barcelona, gave us a quick peek at its initial title, which merges stealth with traditional point-and-click. Simply put, it’s gorgeous, and has the kind of mechanical pop that we all want for The Next Big Thing.
As the game’s titular Tiny Thief, your job is to steal treasures like diamonds without betraying your presence. Thief can hide in wardrobes and crates, hang on chandeliers or banners, and even sneak into bed next to a sleeping sheriff’s wife. This is all in the name of avoiding conflict, of course. Thief is the world’s smallest burglar; he doesn’t have the means to defend himself.
In addition to hiding, Thief can also freely use items around his immediate environment to accomplish his goals. In one level, for example, Thief needs to use a cuckoo clock to wake a sleeping feline and its owners long enough for him to sneak closer to his goal. These solutions are never readily apparent, as each level boasts a number of interactive items, and the game logic keeps the utility of them rather fuzzy.
In our short demo, we were impressed by the sheer amount of interactive objects in the levels, as well as the hand-drawn visuals. This thing is dripping with cutesy, as you’ll see in the trailer below:
Tiny Thief is split into five themed chapters, all of which have five levels. This kind of structure in particular is intriguing: Tiny Thief relies on a lot of trial-and-error as you try to find the right combination of actions and hiding, but its instanced action seems to keeps the puzzles small and, you, as a result, focused and not annoyed.
Game is due out in the next three months. We’ll be following this one pretty closely as it hurdles towards release. Stay tuned.
Nice review. Would it be possible in future reviews to say what devices you tried it on and what differences you spotted? For example, does it run well on an iPad 1, or does an iPad 2 feature better graphics/antialiasing, etc.?
I hate to say it, as I usually really enjoy Eric's reviews, but this seems rushed. It's mostly focused on the combat, leaves out features like portrait and landscape, dragging (as well as tapping) to move, extra power ups the longer you stay in zones, more about the Hive levels, how hard it is to reach the Hive levels, checkpoints that keep your score and hit points, making it less of a score chasing game, how you can hit enemies with your tail, and how that plays into the combat strategy (which is weird considering how focused on combat the review is). It also just sounds weird, saying "are simply a joy to simply play"...
I guess it should be forgiven, I'm sure you're all tired from GDC, but the review suffered. =o/
Anywho, it is a great game, and I agree wholeheartedly with the rating, and praise, and that it could use some sort of plot/more of a story. The developers have said that they're working on another mode for score chasing that won't have checkpoints, and feel more like an arcade mode. Hopefully it'll include more than just no checkpoints, something to really separate it from what's already there. But it's definitely a game worth checking out.
Mmm. I downloaded this yesterday because it looked so intriguing. And, maybe it's just me (I'm definitely not a "hardcore" gamer") but I find the Lightopus sort of hard to control... and the fact that you have so few hitpoints and it's so rare to get healing frankly makes the game pretty hard as far as I'm concerned. I'm still intrigued, but I would rather like a mode where healing powerups are more common for the non-1337 among us. :-)