The mechanic: solve the puzzles. The controls: Just click around. How’s that for easy to pick up? You’ll be taken into different areas over the series, but in all of them, you have to click around the screen to zoom into a specific area like a cabinet or a tabletop. In these zoomed areas, there are either puzzles waiting for you, or items that you collect for your inventory which you will use later to solve the puzzles, or hints that will help you with what to do. Sometimes, some puzzles that you solve actually gives another tool to use in yet another puzzle, and so on. It’s a chain of events and you may sometimes not know what to do with the difficult mind games unless you solve the early riddles first. You can look at a different side of a room by clicking at the sides of the screen. If you see a clickable door, then you can go to different rooms. As I said, a bit of exploration is needed for this game.

In the first entry of the series, you fly into a seaside manor with an unfamiliar looking helicopter-thing with all your orange suit glory. You break in into the office in search for items created by a Prof. Bellamy. After finding them, you can then play the second game which brings you into the middle of the ocean, to be eaten by a giant robotic fish. You’ll be doing the detective thing inside the belly of this metallic seabot and it’s quite difficult because there is a lot of clutter inside it making looking for the smaller things a bit hard. When you finally escape your eater, you swim into a nearby island and find a hatch among the rocks. You enter and journey through an underground facility with multiple rooms making for a huge area to move back-and-forth into. When all is done in that underground base, you then strap a rocket into your back, and fly up to a zeppelin flying nearby. Just how awesome and crazy is this guy that he does such cool things. About the series, the sequels aren’t boringly entitled as sneak series 2 or 3 or stuff like that. They’re subtitled, meaning you play Sneak Thief Prime Catch, then Sneak Thief Second Strike, and so on. Not that it’s of any importance, I just think it’s better than adding numbers to a game title.