Thief is 'not about spending nine hours crouched'

Square Enix is about to release its long awaited reboot of the classic stealth game, Thief. As the title suggests, you play as Garrett, a master thief tasked with swiping as much valuable loot as possible in a grungy and murky steampunk Victorian city.

Outside Xbox sat down with the game's director, Nicolas Cantin, and quizzed him about the tactile nature of the game's puzzles and environments, in which Garrett's hands are almost always on-screen, prodding, touching, groping and prying the scenery.

"It's about immersion," Cantin explained. "It's about being connected to your world. It's not only walls where you run through it, you can touch them, steal an object, look at it. Becoming Garrett in that world was the main goal, and also it's to show the personality of Garrett in those hands. It's a first-person game so you don't often see Garrett, the character, himself, but the hands are a character in themselves and we really put a lot of effort and details into those."

Cantin also went into more detail about the game's occasional action sequences, the most notable deviation from the pure sneak and steal gameplay of the 1998 original. "It's more about pacing," says Cantin. "It's about not spending nine hours crouched. Those sequences are really short, but at the same time you can flee. You can do them crouched, stealing things, but you'll have a bigger challenge. It's really about giving different variation in the pacing of the game but the main goal is still about the infiltration, the stealing and then escaping."

Thief is released for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One and Xbox 360 on February 28th.