Download Keef the Thief - A Boy and His Lockpick

Keef the Thief - A Boy and His Lockpick is a mixture of adventure and role-playing games. You play as Keef, an orphan raised in a city from which he has been exiled, because he didn't have the talent for a normal fantasy life (which means that he lacked the skills to be one of the usual roleplaying characters, such as a warrior, priest or magician). No skill at all; that is, except for thieving. So he became a thief, and surprisingly not the sneaky kind, but a fighter. You begin your adventures at the gates of the city Same Mercon, which is in the middle of a jungle.

The graphics aren't really that awesome, but they suffice for VGA graphics. The interface is simple: you have buttons at the bottom of the screen, like 'talk', 'buy', etc. You have a compass at the top right corner, that can be used to navigate through the game. The white bar on the top has two buttons: File, and Keef. The first one is for saving/loading, turning music on/off (important!), and so forth. The second reveals character information, and has a special button used to sleep. The fights are somewhat interesting: a tiny black square will appear in place of the picture, with coloured pixels in it. The white one represents you. You can move forward and backwards, and turn left and right with the cursor keys, and attack your enemies with the spacebar. Under the "local map", there's a rectangle where you can see the area from Keef's point of view (The most fake illusion of a 3D environment I've ever seen, yet it was good for '89). You can also see how many health points you have -- and if you die, well, it's over. You can change the difficulty of the fights in the File menu. After every successful fight you'll receive a small amount of cash, which you'll definitely need in the game. In the city of Same Mercon, speaking -- or more likely, asking about anything -- will cost you money, so be careful what you do! You can also sneak into houses, but the houses of the rich are full of traps; the cheap ones are empty, but guards patrol the streets, so be careful.

The music is... annoying. It seems the guy who made it was high. Perhaps it would be suitable for short fights, but you'll hear the same tunes over and over again, from the intro picture until the end. Fortunately you can turn it off. The fight system of the game is fun, but the game itself lacks a lot in other ways, mostly because you can't interact with your surroundings too much. If you get stuck you can always use the walkthrough anyway.

The game was meant to be a parody, but except for a few allegedly "funny" lines, don't expect real comedy. It reminded me of Eric the Unready -- the plot is similar, with its silly medieval madness -- but Keef the Thief isn't as much fun. It's good for rainy afternoons, though, and it's not even that painful to play. I'll give it a 3.