We check out Thick as Thieves at SGF 2025 and come away excited to hide in the shadows

We’ve finally gotten our second look at Thick as Thieves and now, for the second time, our interest is piqued.  Billed as the next evolution in games like Thief, we’re even more excited for the PvPvE from the team at Otherside Entertainment.  Led by Thief / Deus Ex creator and industry veteran (and arguably genre creator) Warren Spector, this multiplayer-focused looter has far more up its sleeve than meets the eye.  Let’s get a look under the hood and see what lies hidden in the darkness.  

If you need a reminder, Thick as Thieves is a stealth experience, taking place in a deeply immersive gaslamp-inspired and magic-tinged metropolis at the dawn of the 20th century.  You play a member of the Thieves Guild, and you’ve been given a mission for the evening.  You are welcome to compete with other thieves to tackle that main mission, or you can hit some side work to pad your pockets, but one thing is for sure – you are far from the only one on the prowl this evening.  Every other player is vying for the same spoils, and then there’s the guard to contend with.  Even dodging both of them, you might find yourself running afoul of enchanted problems as well – such is the life of a professional thief, it seems.

Stepping out into the night, the Guild has sent you to a noble estate in the streets of Ordene.  In our demo, we got a closer look at the three classes (a fourth to-be-revealed lies cloaked in shadow) – The Hood, The Spider, and The Chameleon.  The Hood is a melee-focused rogue who can use a baton to thump their fellow footpads and foes to relieve them of their goods.  Conversely, the Spider uses a grappling hook and zipline to scale walls and stick to more vertical approaches, though this can stick out as others might struggle to reach the same heights.  The Chameleon utilizes stealth and gadgets, focusing on things like smoke grenades and illusions to blend into the environment.  Selecting The Spider, our demoist joined a live server with other players.  

It was immediately apparent that the team is working hard to capture a certain feel of moody streets and shadowy opulent interiors for their fictional city.  Drenched in the glow of lamplight and patrolled by deeply British guards, the world feels alive and enigmatic.  Rather than stepping foot on the street, our Spider took to the rooftops. 

As I mentioned, running across the rooftops will stand out if you’re spotted – guards don’t do that, so it’s pretty likely that when you see it, it’s another player.  Sticking to the shadows, and ensuring we always had a building as a backdrop so as to not cast a silhouette against the night sky, we made our way towards a distant mansion.  In it lies a jewelry vault, and we wanted what lies inside.  Standing in our way, however, was a second player who played…well, we didn’t actually know quite yet.  They could be anyone and anywhere, just like us.  

Creeping our way through the city, we went to great lengths to avoid the lamplight gaze of various guards patrolling the city.  Given that the entire affair is procedural and emergent, there’s no telling when you might bump into some dangerous scenario that might change the night in a hurry.  Our character was light-footed enough to pad across ropes and cables stranding between buildings, allowing us access to an otherwise-inaccessible skylight.  Electrified, we had to disarm the glass with a rewiring kit from our tools.  Other items included lockpicks, snares, smoke bombs, and more that we’d be able to unlock through leveling up, though we didn’t get to see that in our demo.

Slipping through the now-open window, we spotted our first potential sign of another player.  Running or flubbing things like lockpicking or other thieves skills will cause you to leave footprints behind that other players can see for a period of time.  Following guards that patrolled the building’s interior gave us a clue as to where the vault lies.  Like the layout, the location of the vault, any alarms, any potential switches that could disarm traps, or any other intricacies are random to ensure that the entire experience is as nail-biting as possible.  We overheard that in the vault was a golden statuette, and we needed that for our collection.

Making our way into the vault involved sneaking up on a guard, cracking him in the skull with a blackjack, finding a trigger underneath a jar as a safe trigger item, and even finding a dynamically placed and randomized code.  We put in the hard work, cracked the safe, and retrieved the statue.  Adding insult to injury, we also left a small calling card behind, letting anyone who comes behind us know that we got there first.  We could do the same thing with chests and other opportunities, but before we could salt the wound, we literally bumped directly into a fellow thief.  As we scrambled away, and the other character who was playing a Chameleon worked to regain stealth, both of us were spotted by the guards.  Alarms blared, the anti-thief traps triggered, and the race to escape was on.  

While our demoist worked to extricate himself from his self-imposed screwup, I talked with the team about The Chameleon.  This character can sneak about in plain sight by impersonating nearly any NPC, but it’s not always a perfect copy.  As one of the hulking guards, they might be holding their arm out, but perhaps doesn’t have a lantern in their hand.  Similarly, they might not have a hat or some other detail that could cause them to stand out for highly-observant players.  Or they could reveal themselves in other ways like having a guard that would otherwise patrol the streets suddenly wander into a building’s interior.  Being the right person at the right time can keep you invisible.  

The team revealed that ultimately you don’t have to be the best thief for the entire mission, and that they’ve seen players literally lie in wait rather than do the work.  Instead, they would hang out impersonating a guard eyeing the sewers.  They’d then crack a player in the skull on their way to their escape, snaking the prize from them at the last moments, and then briskly walking the last few feet with their ill-found gains.  

Our demo player managed to use the rooftops to escape his pursuers. Doing so provided a rundown of the loot they captured, as well as how their performance influenced their standing with the guild.  Being a good thief means being invisible, so your performance is being graded.  The team is aiming to have a more lateral upgrade path rather than a vertical one.  For example, everyone gets a dart to stun others, but upgrading might give you different darts with different effects. Ultimately, all of this will shake out in testing as the game expands, but on paper it all sounds like an atmospheric, tense, unpredictable, and emergent multiplayer stealth game.  We’ll need to get our hands on the game for ourselves to see, but from what we saw at Summer Game Fest 2025, this is one we’ll want to watch.  It comes as no surprise that this one picked up a nomination for our Game of Show.  

Thick as Thieves is currently in development for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.  No release date has been announced yet, but a general “2026” timeframe has been revealed.  Stay tuned right here at GamingTrend.com for all the Thick as Thieves news, as well as all of the other great things we saw at Summer Game Fest 2025.