Thick As Thieves Is a $5 Stealth Game From the Creator of Deus Ex. It Needs More, But What's Here Is Good.

Warren Spector's studio shipped something smaller than expected. But for the price of a coffee, it might still be worth your time.

There's something weirdly refreshing about a game that knows exactly what it is and prices itself accordingly. Thick As Thieves launched yesterday on Steam from OtherSide Entertainment at $4.99. That's not a typo. Five dollars. From a studio led by Warren Spector, the man who helped create Deus Ex and System Shock. The guy behind Thief. One of the most important designers in gaming history.

For five bucks, what you're getting is a stealth action heist game set in Kilcairn, an alternate history 1910s Scottish city where magic and early industrial tech overlap. You play as a thief taking contracts from a guild, sneaking through guarded locations, cutting lights, picking pockets, avoiding patrols, and hauling out as much loot as you can carry. It's playable solo or with one other person in online co-op.

And honestly? For what is there, it's pretty good. Well done, even.

The Atmosphere Pulls You In

The first thing that stands out is how this game looks and feels. The visual presentation is genuinely impressive. Kilcairn has a level of polish that makes the world feel immersive right from the start. The lighting is moody. The streets are layered with detail. The interiors of the estates you're infiltrating feel lived in and purposeful, not just hallways connecting objectives.

The guards are well designed and engaging to interact with. They have personality. Their patrol patterns are readable but not robotic. Distracting one while your co-op partner slips past adds real tension to what could have easily felt like a basic stealth loop. The sound design reinforces all of it. Footsteps on different surfaces, distant chatter, the ambient hum of a city that feels like it exists whether you're there or not.

For a $5 game, the atmosphere is punching way above its weight class. You can tell that somebody at OtherSide cared deeply about how this world feels to exist inside.

The Problem Is What Isn't There

My only real criticism is that there just isn't a lot to do. Two maps. Sixteen contracts. About four hours of content if you're thorough. You can replay missions for better scores and try different approaches, but the replayability hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. Once you've cleared both locations with both characters, you've pretty much seen what the game has to offer in its current state.

It also launched without some basic PC options that people expect in 2026. No FOV slider. No key rebinding. No brightness settings. For a game built around precision stealth in dark environments, the lack of a brightness option in particular is a weird miss.

But it's five dollars. And I keep coming back to that because it changes the math entirely. If this game was $30 or $40, I'd be a lot less forgiving about the content gap. At $5, it feels like an honest price for an honest amount of game. Not every release needs to be a 100 hour commitment. Sometimes four focused hours of well crafted stealth is enough, especially when the price isn't asking you to bet the farm on it.

The Pivot Nobody Talks About

There's a bigger story behind this launch that's worth knowing. Thick As Thieves was not originally this game. When it was first announced, OtherSide marketed it as a PvPvE extraction heist game. Multiple thieves dropped into Kilcairn competing against each other and the city's guards for a shared objective. The FAQ from late 2024 still describes it as a "PvPvE multiplayer stealth game" with cross platform play across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.

Then in April 2026, weeks before launch, that version vanished. The PvP was stripped out. The "living world" was cut. Areas and characters that are still visible on the Steam store page are no longer in the game. What shipped is a PvE co-op experience with two maps and a fraction of the originally promised scope.

That pivot tells you something went wrong in development. Whether it was budget, scope creep, technical challenges, or feedback during testing, the game that exists today is not the game that was originally sold. I would have loved to have seen the PvPvE version play out. The concept of an immersive sim extraction game with competing thieves is a concept that sounds incredible on paper. The stealth genre has been starving for something like that.

But I'd rather a studio recognize what they can actually ship, price it honestly, and release something polished than try to force a broken version of their original vision onto the market at full price. We've seen what happens when studios do that. This industry is full of games that launched as something they weren't ready to be. OtherSide made a different choice. And I respect it, even if the result is smaller than what we were hoping for.

Warren Spector Deserves Better Context

I've seen some commentary online framing this launch as some kind of failure. People pointing at the Mixed Steam reviews and the thin content as evidence that the game isn't worth anyone's time. But I think that misses the bigger picture.

Warren Spector is not a AAA executive with unlimited resources. OtherSide Entertainment is a small studio. They've had a rough go of it over the past several years. Their previous game, Underworld Ascendant, launched in 2018 to a rough reception and never recovered. The fact that they're still making games at all says a lot about the team's stubbornness. And the fact that what they shipped here, even in a reduced form, is this polished and this atmospheric says a lot about the talent that's still in that building.

Five dollars. From talent that made Deus Ex. If you care about stealth games at all, that should at least be enough to get you curious.

Where It Goes From Here

What Thick As Thieves needs is simple. More. More maps. More contracts. More gear. More reasons to go back into Kilcairn after you've cleared it once. The foundation is solid. The atmosphere is there. The stealth mechanics are satisfying in a way that reminds you why this genre used to matter more than it does today. All it needs is room to grow.

If OtherSide supports this game the way studios like Ghost Ship Games supported Deep Rock Galactic or Hex Works supported Lords of the Fallen there's a real chance this becomes something special over time. The bones are good. They just need more meat on them.

For now, it's a $5 stealth game from a legendary developer. Its short. It's missing features that should have been there at launch. But the world feels alive and the guards are fun to outwit. Co-op adds a layer of chaos that makes every heist feel different even when the map is the same.

If you've got five dollars and a couple free hours, give it a shot. You've spent more on worse.