I’ve been trying to find one throughout the Steam summer sale and come up dry, and now I’m out of money until the 15th. Hopefully y’all can help me find a good one before the winter sale. Here’s a rundown of what I’ve tried so far and what I’ve liked and dislike about them:
Arkham series
Positive: I played through Arkham Knight a few years ago, and it made me fall in love with the genre, or at least what I wish it were. My ideal game is an endless series of well-built, challenging Arkham-style stealth puzzles I can just binge like sudoku with no brawling and no plot. I’ve now resigned myself to just trying to get through the rest of this series again before I spend more money. My wife also likes watching it.
Negative: I made the mistake of playing the last game first, and now the others feel disappointing and half-baked. The series got harder as it went, and Arkham Knight was still a little too easy, even on the hardest setting. Brawling scenes are monotonous and make my hands hurt. I’ve heard bad things about Gotham Knights, so I’m not about to spend that kind of money.
Alien: Isolation
Positive: Almost as close to what I want as Arkham, but in the opposite direction. Still should probably give it another chance.
Negative: Instead of padding it with combat, they padded it with tedious walking simulation. Also too dark. The glare on my living room screen makes it hard to play during the day.
XCOM series
Positive: XCOM 2 is another of my favorites. I’d like to know what recent turn based tactical games in this genre are good and emphasize stealth. And maybe local multi-player? Although those are kind of at cross purposes.
Negative: Once again made the mistake of starting at the end of the series with War of the Chosen, and now I have trouble getting into the earlier games. Chimera Squad was also very underwhelming.
Bioshock series
Positive: You know, I should probably just get back to Bioshock, come to think of it. Don’t know why I didn’t quite finish the first game.
Negative: I guess the only thing stopping me is that I’d want to finish the first one before getting to the sequels, and I’m not sure I still have my old save, and if so I’m dreading jumping back in at the end when I’m rusty. But no, I need to just finish Bioshock. I’d like to do a “good” playthrough, anyway. Are the sequels as stealth-oriented as the first one, though? I’ve heard you play as a Big Daddy in the second game, and that doesn’t sound stealthy.
Hitman series
Positive: So close. I got the pre-reboot Hitman bundle on sale, and the overall playstyle seems like exactly what I want in theory.
Negative: Yet so far. First off all, the earliest titles are just too clunky and old fashioned for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a graphics snob, I can still enjoy an NES game. But that era between Doom and Portal or so, when they were fumbling around trying to figure out how to make a 3D game, I just don’t have the patience for that.
I tried Absolution and it was tantalizing but obviously flawed. I looked up some reviews to see if it got better or worse, and it turns out it definitely got worse.
It appears that what I’m looking for is the 2016 reboot. Problem is, IO Interactive doesn’t want my money. They took the first two games off of Steam, folded them into the third installment, and charged $69.99 for it. This makes me feel morally obligated to pirate these games and see how good the “Peacock” experience is. So now I have it torrented and I’m waiting for another ten+ hour window when no one else wants to use the computer and I can devote every single clock cycle of my long-suffering i5-2500k to decompressing Hitman, and hope it doesn’t have a random error eight hours in like it did last night.
Deathloop
Positive: Runs surprisingly well on my old rig, even with a video playing on the second monitor. The graphics on reduced settings still look way better than what I’m used to.
Negative: I had such high hopes for this based on the reviews, but it’s been my biggest disappointment so far. How is this even a stealth game? I try sneaking around, but then someone spots me, and instead of that being game over, I can just Doom my way through the rest of the encounter, and that works out more or less fine. Does it get better? I’m afraid to see for myself because I don’t want to put on so much playtime I can’t return it. My wife also hates it because it’s too violent. I was intrigued by Dishonored and Prey, but they’re from the same studio as this garbage, so now I’m leary of trying them.
Assassin’s Creed series
Positive: Seems too obvious not to include. I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid hands on a controller when it was playing, so I don’t want to be too hard on it.
Negative: Every time I’ve seen it played, it just strikes me as dumb. The Da Vinci Code shit is dumb, the puzzles are boring, the gameplay is gimmicky and dumbed down in all the worst possible ways. They’re obviously similar to Arkham and Hitman games, but I’ve never heard someone say they were better or harder, so I’ve never bothered giving them a chance.
Conclusion
I gather that designing good, challenging stealth puzzles is an extremely difficult feat of game design. So what developers tend to do is spend as much time as they can afford on stealth puzzles, and then fill in the rest with action, exploration, and plot when the deadline looms. But there’s so much out there, I’m sure there are hidden gems I can track down before winter.
A lot of the games you tried are on gamepass, including hitman world of assassination.
There are some others aswell, like Aragami 2, sniper elite and plague tale.Might be worth just trying gamepass for 10€ for a month or to see if you can buy a trial key for cheap somewhere, to test the games.Another game I can recommend but it is a bit different genre is Outlast:Trials. It is a stealth game but if you fail you have to escape and hide. Though this game is pretty explicit with nudity, violence and gore
Have you played We Happy Few? I think it has elements of stealth, like Hitman.
What about Subnautica? Some stealth required there. Maybe. A fun game nonetheless.
Some other decent ones in my opinion:
- Styx: Master of Shadows
- Styx: Shards of Darkness
- Thief (2014)
- Aragami
- Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (really liked this one)
- Monaco
I would give both Dishonored and Prey a shot — I had a better time with those than Deathloop.
Second Aragami. It’s a very chill game to play, and optionally chat with a friend.
I need to add to the dishonored pile here. Deathloop is a much more doom-able game. Dishonored can be played in a fast way, but you can play the entire game with killing anyone, or being seen by anyone, or both. I highly recommend it, they scratch the itch.
Yes, Dishonored is really fun. Having a good saving system (with quick save and load) makes it even better. I love to have the option to just fool around.
Adding onto that, Dishonored 2 feels way more fun when playing non-lethal. Dishonored 1 kind of handicaps you if you decide not to kill enemies, whereas Dishonored 2 gives you a few more Options.
Both are incredible games though, definitely worth playing.
I recently played through all three Thief games. Start with Thief: The Dark Project, then Thief 2: The Metal Age. Finally, Thief: Deadly Shadows is a bit controversial but i still think its worth a playthrough. Don’t bother with Thief (2014). They are old but IMHO some of the best stealth games made to this day. If you check them out, highly recommend looking up some mods. Tfix for the first game I think, and there are even some HD mods if old graphics bother you.
Also, I’ve never played them but heard the Splinter Cell games are fantastic stealth games. Might be worth a look.
To follow up on what was said above, Thief: Gold/The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age are easily two of the best stealth games out there, especially with all the work fans have done to keep the games playable and fantastic on modern hardware. Between the phenomenal level design, a unique and pretty engaging story, and all around fun game play offering tons of ways to approach situations, they’re always worth a recommend from me for at least a single playthrough, easily netting 15-30 hours of game time per game. The wide variance in time spent with each is partially due to the freedom you have, but also since each difficulty step up changes your objectives for each mission, giving you further reasons to explore and have fun with the world.
Thief: Deadly Shadows is harder to recommend due to it being built with consoles in mind, but once again, with some fan patches it becomes a much better experience and can definitely be worth the time, particularly when they’re all on sale for so cheap. Each of them is currently just under $1 on steam, one of the best deals you can get.
Coming from someone who bought Thief 2014 at launch (and enjoyed it), I’d recommend a skip on that one. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it doesn’t feel like it’s nearly as good as the original 3 for a variety of reasons.
Splinter Cell also are fantastic games in the stealth genre, but I’m not familiar enough with them to speak at length on them like the Thief series.
Lots of great suggestions already but I want to throw in another recommendation for Splinter Cell. The series lost it’s identity later on, but Chaos Theory still holds up in my opinion with some great levels.
Bit of an oddball suggestion, but you might want to give Metro 2033 a try. It takes a bit, but you can eventually obtain a stealth suit that has a light meter akin to Thief, and you have a pneumatic rifle that shoots silently. Spent so much time skulking through levels trying not to alert anyone the entire time, had so much fun.
+1 vote for the Dishonored games. If you want a quick showcase of what’s possible in this title or the whole series, StealthGamerBR is probably one of the best people to watch.
I enjoy top down stealth games, and haven’t seen this game get discussed much, but it was pretty fun - Serial Cleaner (and sequel, Serial CleanerS)
You play a guy who cleans up murder scenes for an unknown serial killer, all the while evading guards and other security measures. It’s a pretty fun experience, and I do recommend giving it a go if that’s your kind of thing.
There’s also the Marvelous Miss Take, a game where you play a woman on a mission to perform a series of heists. Also a top down stealth game, you get to use some gadgets to distract guards while you sneak past and to your goal.
Both are older indie games, but enjoyable for at least one playthrough.
Plan is to re-make Splinter Cell, but I haven’t heard any dates yet. :(
Is this why they pulled a handful of the games from the Xbox marketplace? I was going to go grab a used physical copy somewhere at this point.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
God I would give so much to experience Splinter Cell 3’s multiplayer again. It was perfect. An improvement upon the already excellent MP of Pandora Tomorrow, but still within the spirit of the game.
And then they fucked it up trying to make it more like COD or something.
Check out the Sniper Elite series. The most recent games have a good, challenging, and engaging Stealth mechanic to them.
Volume is an indie stealth game I’ve quite enjoyed. In addition to the campaign it has a level creator, if you want to try player-made levels.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided can be played as stealth games, and I really liked them. Note that they aren’t “pure” stealth games, there are some encounters where you cannot avoid fighting.
Also DE:MD kind of ends in the middle, so if you are a story player you will be frustrated to know that there seem to be no plans for the next sequel.
DE:MD was great, I really hoped for them to finish the story. With all the horse-trading of the companies and IP, who knows if we’ll ever see one.
you should be able to do the entirety of MD including the final boss with stealth or bypassing it entirely
Oh thank you, I could not remember what exactly was in each game. The bosses I’m thinking of must have been in HR then.
Yeah HR had unavoidable combat bosses in its original release. The Director’s Cut modded them all to allow for dealing with them by alternative means, such as hacking, robot/turret control and such. But because they weren’t originally designed that way it’s not the most organic, and you can’t pure stealth bypass them like the original Deus Ex.
Mandatory Dishonored 1 and 2 recommendation, but Prey is also very good
Highly likely Hitman World of Assassination (the whole new trilogy starting with the 2016 game) will scratch the itch for you, but yeah I appreciate the weird shambles of trying to buy that in its various forms; actually the current state is the simplest: one price for the whole thing.
I guess you may want to wait for it to be on sale though, but I definitely rate it, it’s got many hours out of me.
Steam deck verified too, if that’s of interest.
There is a demo, not sure what’s in it though. Back when they were separate games, the training missions of each game served as the demo level, and I think at some point the Paris mission of the first game was free.
Ah yeah, there’s a demo but I also don’t know what’s in it these days.
As for free levels, they cycle the free level monthly as per the current roadmap. I assume the demo lets you access the free level.
Looks like Bangkok is free until August 16th.
