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GDC 2012: ‘Tiny Thief’ Impresses

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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.

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