SLEIGHT OF HAND

A stealth adventure that's all smoke and murders

- 

Even accepting the caveats — that what we're playing is a very early build — we're a little concerned when we begin Sleight Of Hand. Faced with the prospect of sneaking past an armed guard, we spend a punishing few minutes failing to attract his attention, then scoot through an adjacent room to circle behind him. As stealth games go, it's an inauspicious introduction. But in the next room we're given a handful of enchanted cards to play with, and in a stroke our clumsy creeping transforms into power fantasy. As if by black magic, we have a world of possibility at our fingertips.

Now Sleight Of Hand feels like Dishonored, or at least like the quiet approach you can adopt in Arkane's immersive sim. A key resource for our character, the occult-fuelled Lady Luck, is smoke, whether it's seeping from vents in the city streets, through manholes (once you've removed the covers), or anywhere else. Luck's on the trail of the killer of an old friend; the smoke obscures her presence and you can teleport into it from afar. Some of your cards only become active when you're in smoke, or when your victim is. And we do mean victim: we start to pick off guards like a silent predator, our magic simply extinguishing their lives.