The trailer for Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow ends with the protagonist, a young woman named Magpie, finding a strange mechanical eye. Which then implants itself in her face. Before questions can be asked (like “What happened to her squishy real eye?”), a familiarly gruff voice declares, “I thought I was dead. And who are you?”
Now I clocked that as Stephen Russell, the voice of Garrett from the original trilogy of Thief games, but then I’ve spent more time listening to Garrett cynically muttering about rich people than I spend listening to most of my friends. Other people raised doubts, perhaps due to the possibility of an AI imitation. But no, that really is Stephen Russell, as the man himself declared in a YouTube video.
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow – Message from Stephen Russell – YouTube
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“We’ve had a long history together,” Russell said, “and it is so delightful to be back with him again. I’ve missed the old guy! He’s got such a great sense of humor, and they have perfectly captured that in this new game.”
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While this cements Thief VR as a sequel to the original Thief games, that doesn’t mean it’s disregarding the 2014 reboot. For starters, it’s using the same logo. But it’s also building on the references in that reboot suggesting the events of the first three Thief games were part of the same continuity—only in a distant past before worship of the “old gods” was banned, as detailed in a deep-dive video during this year’s VR Developer Direct.
“Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow takes place between the original trilogy and the 2014 reboot,” said Richard Bunn, lead game designer at Maze Theory, “centuries before the latter. The City is fractured, ruled by fear and surveillance, under the thumb of Baron Northcrest and his obsession with forbidden knowledge. The Keepers are gone, but their secrets linger in hidden glyphs and relics.”
As one of maybe three people at PC Gamer who still cares about VR, I’m up for a game that explores what VR can do for old-fashioned immersive sims. Sure, I’d have preferred a full-length Thief sequel for flat screens, but I’m pessimistic enough to doubt that was ever on the table. It’s not like people are lining up to buy first-person stealth games in 2025. If we weren’t getting Thief VR, we probably wouldn’t be getting another Thief game at all. So I’ll take what I get, especially if it means I get to hear Stephen Russell make snarky comments about rich people’s decor like, “A throne room! How pretentious can you get?”