Thick as Thieves Launches May 20 for Just $5

Five dollars. That's the price OtherSide Entertainment is asking for Thick as Thieves, the stealth game from Deus Ex and Thief: The Dark Project designer Warren Spector, when it hits Steam on May 20. I thought it was a pricing error when I first saw the number. It wasn't.

The game takes place in Kilcairn, an alternate-history 1910s Scottish city where you play as a thief sneaking across rooftops, through sewers, and past guards to pull off heists. At launch, it'll include what OtherSide calls an "introductory campaign" with 16 missions spread across two dynamic, replayable maps and six pieces of unlockable gear. The studio estimates at least four hours of playtime, with plans to expand the game based on how players actually engage with it.

For anyone who's been following this project, the game arriving in this form is a pretty dramatic shift from where it started. Thick as Thieves was originally announced in 2024 as a PvPvE experience, where players would be pulling heists while simultaneously trying to sabotage each other with Dishonored-style abilities. Last month, OtherSide revealed they'd scrapped the competitive element entirely in favour of solo and co-op play, saying the team was simply "having more fun" that way.

I think that was the right call. PvPvE is a brutally difficult format to get right, and the list of games that have tried and failed to sustain a playerbase in that space is long and grim. Stripping it back to a focused single-player and co-op stealth game plays directly to the strengths of a studio founded by former Looking Glass developers, the people who essentially invented the immersive sim. Trying to chase a competitive multiplayer audience with a small team and a niche genre would have been a recipe for a dead game within three months.

The Underworld Ascendant Question

There's an elephant in the room, though. OtherSide's last major release was Underworld Ascendant, which launched in a state that was, to put it plainly, terrible. Broken systems, missing features, the full checklist of problems that sink a game on arrival. It was eventually patched into something passable, but the damage to the studio's reputation was real. If you're skeptical about OtherSide delivering on the promise of a spiritual successor to Thief, you've earned that skepticism.

But the $5 price tag changes the calculus entirely. At that price, this isn't asking you to take a $40 or $60 gamble on a studio with a rocky track record. It's asking you to spend less than a sandwich. If the stealth fundamentals are solid and the two maps offer replayability, that's an absurd amount of value. And if it's rough around the edges, you're out the cost of a coffee.

The obvious question is what happens next. OtherSide says it intends to expand "the setting and its stories across future content," but hasn't confirmed whether that content will be free or paid. Given the entry price, I'd be stunned if future expansions don't carry their own cost. The model feels a lot like Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, a compact, low-cost package designed to get players invested before the larger experience arrives. Whether that larger experience materialises depends entirely on how May 20 goes.

With the mainline Thief series effectively dormant outside of last year's VR entry, there's a real gap in the market for a proper first-person stealth game. Thick as Thieves won't fill that gap at launch; four hours and two maps is a taste, not a meal. But as a proof of concept from a team with deep roots in the genre, priced at a point where there's almost no reason not to try it, this is about as low-risk as it gets for stealth fans.

Thick as Thieves launches on Steam on May 20 for $4.99/€4.99/£4.99, with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions also planned.