Identity Thief

Baf's Guide

A story of a high-tech burglar with surgically-implanted identity spoofing tools getting more than he bargained for. One of the few self-proclaimed cyberpunk games to grasp the attitude and prose style of cyberpunk, rather than just the gadgetry. Puzzles are mostly straightforward, although I sometimes had difficulty communicating what I wanted to do, partly because of the way the vocabulary is overloaded. Short enough that the plot development felt a bit too fast to me, with some opportunity to miss things important to the story.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Rather than being thinly disguised versions of Tolkien or Zork, Identity Thief's characters, settings, objects, and plot arise organically from a much more science-fictional premise, a premise nicely limned in the game's optional introductory material. The prose maintains a very fine level throughout, sometimes even hitting rather sublime and poetic metaphors. The gadgets, such as implanted hands with "memory plastic" that can store palmprints of anyone whose hand you clasp, are delightful and have a great "wow factor." What's more, the story starts out with an arresting setup, moves quickly into a high pitch of urgency, and then keeps going into stranger and stranger territory.
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