Firstly: this video’s creator spends about five minutes fighting a door.
Secondly: the Thief games, if you’re not familiar with them, are some of the greatest stealth games ever made.
A few of the game’s biggest fans came up with an unusual playstyle known as “Ghosting.” There are three variants of ghosting (Ghost, Strict Ghost, and Supreme Ghost), but they are all basically summarized as follows:
No one should ever know you were there.
Don’t knock anyone out or kill anyone unless the mission absolutely requires it. Close all doors behind you and lock all chests you open. Don’t use any tools that leave an obvious trace. When the hypothetical police check out the crime scene after you’ve left, they should be utterly baffled at the complete lack of evidence. Also, you can’t even get spotted by spiders because evidently all spiders are fucking snitches.
What’s really interesting about Ghosting is that, where many other unusual playstyles push the player to explore mechanics or systems they might not otherwise rely on (in Living in Oblivion we see Chris Livingston rely more on alchemy and speechcraft than the average Oblivion player; the Super Mario 64 Mushroom Challenge forces its players to use Mario’s platforming abilities in highly improvisational ways), Ghosting cuts away roughly 90% of Thief’s interesting mechanics and the way they intersect with each other.
You can’t shoot a noisemaker arrow into the distance to distract a guard. You can’t toss flash bombs. You can’t use water arrows to douse torches, or even switch off lights unless you later switch them back on. So much of Thief’s genius comes from the interplay between its many systems, yet the Ghost playstyle intentionally locks off most of those systems in exchange for higher difficulty and a cooler narrative fantasy. After all, stealing stuff is cool, but having the cops think that you’re an actual, I-float-through-walls-and-grab-key-items-but-otherwise-leave-no-trace ghost? That's way cooler.
