BLOODTHIEF - Preview!

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You’d be forgiven for seeing screenshots of BLOODTHIEF and calling it a “Boomer Shooter” - the catch-all term which has come to encompass any first-person game with a 90s aesthetic. BLOODTHIEF does fit squarely in that category, but the knife-wielding dark-fantasy theme also evokes retro immersive sims like the original Thief games. 

All of that said, there is a big difference in how this game plays, and it’s not simply down to knives versus guns. It’s all about speed. BLOODTHIEF is a speedrunning game. It’s not just a game that you can choose to speed-run as an added challenge. After a few initial levels, speed-running becomes a requirement for advancement. If, like me, you’re a bit more casual when it comes to action games, don’t let this talk of speedrunning dissuade you. The thing that makes BLOODTHIEF shine is that its construction is so slick and frictionless that you’ll enjoy sliding and gliding around, whether or not you’re succeeding according to the game’s rules. 

Although BLOODTHIEF might look like Doom meets Dishonored, the moment-to-moment feel of it is much like a chaotic arcade racing game like Mario Kart or WipeOut. Sure, you need to be able to control a character and their aim using a keyboard and mouse, pretty standard FPS stuff. But it’s the game’s emphasis on movement speed that sets it apart from its Boomer Shooter brethren, and adds up to a game where success is exhilarating, while failure is often hilarious. Playing as a sort of ultra-fast vampire-ninja, you’ll be given various traversal abilities, running up walls and bouncing between them, sliding through small gaps or traps as they close, and vaulting towards enemies while dodging their arrows.

Most of your abilities use a single resource: blood, which can also be stockpiled and used as a shield, preventing you from being killed in one shot. Orienting everything the player can do around a single resource (your health is basically also your mana) makes the game feel incredibly tight and focused. It gives you a reason to take out enemies in order to top up your blood bar, while the need to beat levels in specific times will have you replaying over and over again, working out where best to take shortcuts through slides and air-dash attacks. It’s possible to play most levels through in a slow and methodical way initially, to return later and treat them as race courses. 

It’s also worth noting that while the game is bloody, it has a slapstick tone reminiscent of the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Chivalrous enemies rush to attack you with their limbs flailing, only to be hacked down in a single strike. Many of my in-game deaths came with a slight delay as I misjudged a jump to launch myself slowly into a void of darkness, or lava; the generous air-time allowing for a few seconds of “nooooooo” before the end of my vampiric reign of terror. All of this is to say, if you’re generally put off by the idea of a game which is very, very hard, there may still be something very joyous for you in Bloodthief. Here, failure often feels less like getting shot to pieces in an FPS and more like plummeting off of Rainbow Road in Mario Kart. 

The game also makes a strong case for the gameplay benefits of the retro 90s aesthetic. The spaces you move through are incredibly easy to read as a player, given their construction from very simple shapes and textures. Those of us who’ve been gaming since the 90s will recall the gradual move from abstract, blocky locations to ones which more resemble a movie, and the advent of “yellow paint” environment design is something which has come hand in hand with that. Playing an original Tomb Raider game, or an old FPS, might feel painful on an aesthetic level, but it’s often just much easier to see what is going on. Where a wall ends and a floor begins. What is and isn’t a climbable surface. Yellow paint in AAA games is a price we pay for cinematic realism. Indie games which deliberately choose these older, simpler aesthetics do so not just out of nostalgia, but also to show us what we’ve lost in terms of a smoothness of comprehension which can come with a seemingly outdated visual approach.

BLOODTHIEF is currently playable as a demo on Steam.