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Review
Playing Lady Thalia is an all-around good time. I'll start off by saying that I love its style of writing; a lot of Lady Thalia's observations on snooty, upper-class lifestyles made me laugh. A favorite would be this at the art museum: "As the group strolls along towards yet another picture of a basket of fruit; you've never really understood the point of these, [...]". I also really appreciated the game's avoidance of info-dumps, preferring to let me take in information naturally through the conversations I had and the places I went. Despite this, I never felt like I was uninformed. If I was unable to truly pull something off, it was solely due to my own mistakes. I'd also like to praise the game's presentation: it's a royal purple-and-gold combination that looks visually striking without being distracting.
The game's main feature is three heists against the obnoxiously uptight Lady Satterthwaite. In each one, you get a daytime period to sneak around and get a sense of the layout, search for design flaws that will help you in your heist, or talk to others in your daytime-civilian persona to extract information. Then comes the nighttime, where you have to pull off your heist with as much stealth as you can. A newspaper article recaps your actions for the day, and your partner Gwen will tell you how you did and give you an idea of if you're on the right track. You also get a bit of planning for what to do the next day.
Three heists feels like just the right amount for the concept; just two would have left me wanting more, but four in one game would have overstayed its welcome a bit. Each of them grows in intensity and difficulty, too. I definitely performed the best on the first, where my only slip-up was not figuring out the combination to the safe and opting to pick the lock instead. The second and third didn't go as well, but that's mostly because I became accustomed to picking the most rude and sarcastic dialogue options. Yes, I wanted to still do my best with the heists, and yes, they're rarely helpful, but I very much appreciated the fact that I could make Lady Thalia say exactly what I was thinking at the moment. I jumped at the chance to tell Mel to go to hell.
I'd had my eye on this game for a while, and I'm glad I decided to give it a try. There are two sequels, which I'm looking forward to checking out; I hear one even has a romance system included. Maybe I'll give Lady Thalia a bit more reserve there. Maybe.
