The Thief II (Uncut/Original)

I played the original The Thief on stream and enjoyed it enough to decide to play the sequel directly afterwards. Until relatively recently the original readily available version of the game was one which had several boards deleted. The assumption (or perhaps something found explicitly stated on another site) was that some boards were removed because of memory limitations. This uncut release of the game comes in at nearly 380 KB, an absolute gargantuanly sized game almost the size of "Fred 2".

Eventually an uncut version of the game was recovered and I opted to play that version on stream so we could see the full game, and then later find out what exactly was removed. The answer is: nothing worth dealing with in this version.

Boards removed include all boards imported from STK. A twelve board maze of identical rooms. A maze board with centipedes that have to be destroyed. A "trap" board attached to a pawn shop that forces the player to quit the game if they enter it, and one actually cool looking board that leads to three passages forward that are moved to the previous board in the cut version. You will most certainly want to skip everything but that last one if you're playing this game.

As for the game itself, it's definitely weaker than the original where a younger Leamas has a very nonsensical attitude towards what belongs in his game. This sequel still has its moments of absurdity and humor (more unintentional than intentional in this part), but is marred by many slow gameplay segments and demanding action boards. If you enjoyed the first, this one isn't awful, but you'll likely hit a point where you have to give in and cheat for a bunch of health. The cut version helpfully removes the worst of these moments, but there's still quite a lot of fat to trim for those who have grown tired of simple action boards with little bearing to the events unfolding around them.

This uncut release serves as a good reminder that there are good reasons for removing content from a game. Even with that content removed in the trimmed release, there's still a substantial amount of game here, but it feels like a lot of filler that make it tough to whole-heartedly recommend to those who aren't die-hards for fighting through board after board of lions and tigers and bears.