‘Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow’ Review – So Close to Stealing My Heart

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow does a respectable job of bringing the storied series to VR for the first time, all the while offering up one of the best stealth games currently in the medium. Some stumbling blocks keep it from being the end-all VR stealth game of my dreams, and it’s painful to know how surprisingly close it actually got.

Developer: Maze Theory
Publisher: Vertigo Games
Available On: Quest, PSVR 2, SteamVR 
Reviewed On: Quest 3, SteamVR
Release Date: December 4th, 2025
Price: $30

Gameplay

We’ve been waiting more than a decade for the next Thief game, with the last having landed on console and PC back in 2014. I wish I could say that playing the VR installment feels like a long-awaited homecoming, although I’ve never actually played any of the older titles, which reach back to Thief: The Dark Project (1998).

I did however have an hour-long hands-on with Thief VR back in September, which left me pretty impressed with what developer Maze Theory was building towards, and also curious as to what it could become.

Now, with the full game under my belt, I can say the studio has delivered on many of the promises: great visuals, immersive storytelling, world-class voice talent, and (mostly) well constructed missions that feel like lived-in places. While I initially called its object interaction “smart”, continue to the Immersion section below for more on why I think that isn’t exactly the case. There are more gripes beyond object interaction, but nothing that made me want to hate Thief VR—maybe just not love it as much as I could.

Anyway, here’s the setup: your name is Magpie, a professional thief who finds a magical relic, turning you from your standard sticky-fingered prowler into something of a Super Thief. At the behest of your fixer and chief mission-giver Cassandra, you need to dig deeper into why Baron Northcrest is so intent on gathering up relics for some surely evil plan. I mean, he’s evil, so of course he’s doing evil things, but you have to stop him somehow.

Gameplay mostly follows this pattern: you’re placed outside of a large building that needs infiltrating, of course covered with guards walking their various circuitous routes. Most of the guards can be knocked out and dragged away into the cover of darkness, while a small minority are essentially immortal tanks that need to be avoided entirely. It’s up to you whether you want to knock out, kill, or avoid any guard. Not killing one of the armor-clad goons, doing a mission undetected, or sweeping up a specific amount of loot can unlock more abilities to choose from at the end of each level.

While you don’t need any of the abilities, they certainly make life a lot easier: better heath regen when eating food, quieter movement when crouching or jumping from high ledges, and a ready supply of arrows that you would normally have to scavenge levels to find.

I always stole everything I saw regardless of whether it was gold, silver, bronze, or whatever. That tactic worked until around the halfway mark, when levels get a little larger, and you need to explore a lot more beyond the main mission objectives. There’s no time limit, so it entirely depends on your appetite for completionism.

While you can hunt secondary objectives, thwack guards and turn each level upside down for hours until you’ve shaken out every last coin and golden goblet, the most scarce resource of all is invariably arrows. You have a black jack for knocking out guards, a lockpick for opening pickable doors and chests, and your inherent Glyph Vision, which lets you temporarily highlight important things and reveal otherwise invisible secret areas.

But it’s the bow and (lack of) arrow that could mean the difference between you restarting from an automatic checkpoint, or restarting the mission entirely.

Arrow types include a water arrow to put out fire, a fire arrow to light key items on fire, a blunt arrow for knocking out guards, regular arrows for killing and disabling lights, and rope arrow, which lets you spawn vertical ropes to climb up on specific attachment points. While the game usually serves up the arrow you need at the time, levels are chock-full of byways and different ingress points, making variety an important factor. The bow works well, although I think the aiming angle is somewhat odd, making shooting the thing a bit of a chore.

Missions often serve up a good amount of variety, save the last two, which I talk more about below. Levels are often multilayered buildings with high and low ingress points, which means you can mostly tackle them in any style you want—or at least it appeared to be that way to me. Granted, Thief VR doesn’t give you the sort of freedom you get in Hitman, but it’s also a built-for-VR game that doesn’t need to make any of the weird affordances you see in the various Hitman ports/VR modes.

In all, it took me a little over five hours to play the campaign all the way through, although your mileage may vary according to how safe you want to play it, or how much loot you’re willing to hunt for. That said, missions are replayable once you’ve beaten the game, so you can go back and try to get high scores and unlock more abilities.

I rarely include impressions of end levels for the sake of spoilers, but this unfortunately bears mentioning: the ending of Thief VR was such a massive letdown, I just had to say something. In the missions leading up to the ending, the game reuses two previous levels, which aren’t really mixed up to feel like anything new—possible signs that the game was rushed out the door.

Then, once you’re tromped through the last mission, and are finally served up what should be the cherry on top of the cake, it all basically ends in five minutes. You don’t get to apply any of the skills you honed throughout the entire game: just a few rando button presses and you’re done. Insult to injury: the game unceremoniously tosses you back to your home base after this short encounter, placing you in front of a mission screen to you can replay whatever.

Immersion

Thief VR looks awesome, as it’s densely packed with tons of environmental storytelling stuff, like posters, graffiti, and found notes all over the place, all of which help you understand the story beyond the periodic conversations you can eavesdrop on before guards head out on planned patrol routes.

Levels offer a ton of places to hide and explore, making it feel like a lived-in place. And what’s more, it also looks good and performs mostly well, even on Quest, which is likely the lowest tier version of the game. Notably, while it’s been a while since I played the demo, which was on PSVR 2, one remarkable thing is every version of the game feels a little too dark for my liking. Like, I need just a bit more light to read and see comfortably.

Voice acting is also some of the best you’ll find in any game, VR or otherwise. Stephen Russell reprises his role as Garrett—notably lacking from the 2014 game, which tapped fellow voice acting veteran Romano Orzari instead. In any case, Thief VR’s whole cast seem to have been directed to deliver lines naturally, and less gamey than they might have otherwise.

Immersion is a fickle thing though, and can be quickly broken. For example, walls aren’t always capable of stopping or otherwise muffling noise. This seems to be more buggy behavior than something planned, as I noticed in some levels that guards would be somewhat muffled through doors, while other levels I could hear a guard snoozing from above or below me, as if he were in the same room. At one point, I could hear a half-dozen guards having conversations in possibly three different rooms, many of them featuring the same voice actor.

Guards are also stupid as sin—much dumber than those from analogue series, such as Hitman. I initially went into the game trying to play it as quietly and as far away from baddies as possible, but if I had known I could just run past a guy and then hide somewhere else for 10 seconds before he gives up and goes back about his pre-planned route, I wouldn’t have been so ginger. Here I am (sped up) alarming a guard, which brings their indicator to red before I make a daring escape up a regular ladder, which as we all know, can only be used by Super Thieves.

Really. A miscreant has entered an impenetrable palace, knocked out a bunch of dudes, and just showed their face before hiding under a table and you’re not able to alarm other guards? To me, Thief VR seems more content using the carrot rather than the stick: you’ll lose a valuable achievement, but guards won’t go five-star mode on your ass to hunt you down, which means you’ll mostly only ever replay a mission to get an achievement, and not save yourself from getting twacked to death.

Notably, even if a guard is on you, there’s a way of parrying their hits with your trusty black jack. Simply parry in the direction of their hit three times in a row, and guards will be knocked on their knees, allowing you to pop them on the head for a quick dirt nap. I don’t dislike that, as it gives you some recourse in a game fundamentally eschewing melee combat.

Object interaction is also a bit of a sore spot too—more than I thought it would be from my initial hands-on back in September. Most objects are interactable, which is a big plus in the immersion department, but grabbing them feels just a little too fumbly to be reliable. For example, even getting your lockpicks out of your inventory can be hit or miss, which can be frustrating when you need to quickly open a chest or door between you and freedom. Items include what feel like a singular point in the middle that you need to grab for, otherwise you might just paw at it ineffectually.

Okay, questionable game logic and weird bits aside: I think Thief VR’s overall strengths help compensate for some of its weaker moments, as they just become background static to what otherwise is a fun and enjoyable game. Many of these things may be subjects of future patches, although this is the game as it is at launch.

Comfort

Thief VR is a very comfortable game, as it doesn’t include any sort of vehicle rides, or other ways of forcing your perspective in uncomfortable ways.

At times, I did find myself struggling to reach items, even when artificially crouched, which made it slightly less comfortable to play seated than standing and physically crouching, or using a combo of physical and artificial crouch to grab things on the floor.