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I was impressed with the early Thick as Thieves build I saw in a hands-off game session at Summer Game Fest – but despite the fact that Deus Ex creator Warren Spector's new PvPvE game seems to offer compelling, magical intrigue in its early 20th century setting, I couldn't stop thinking about cheese.
Developer OtherSide Entertainment's lead producer Samantha Stetler explained to me that her coworkers and fellow playtesters were obsessed with fighting over a Baldur's Gate 3-style, chunky cheese wheel you could pick up in Thick as Thieves; you play as one of three thieves planning clever Ocean's 11 heists, so there are jewels and other stacks of loot you can creep out of a mission with, but the cheese seemed most appealing to me, too.
While demonstrating her character's ability – each rough-and-tumble Brit you can play features a special move, like zipline agility – Stetler snuck around an old manor picking locks, impersonating cube-headed security guards, and even using magic to deploy a cute pickpocket fairy to lift keys. But in the bottom right corner of her screen, where she could stay updated with her rival thieves' movements, a stalemate was unfolding: first one player grabbed the cheese wheel, then the other took it back, then the other yanked it away, and so on.
The gameplay Stetler was demonstrating was completely charming – a more PG, Dreamworks movie take on the 1998 stealth game Thief: The Dark Project, I think. But I admit to feeling a little checked out about it until Stetler herself found a finely aged cheese in one of Thick as Thieves' multiple possible, randomized missions.
It was a good cheese, a cheese that could inspire men to scale mountains – or to unrepentantly betray their friends, as was the case here.
