Trials of the Thief-Taker — Fight crime and get rich as a 1700s bounty hunter!

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We’re proud to announce that Trials of the Thief-Taker, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 25% off until August 17th!

In London, 1729, before they had police, they had you: thief-takers, hunting criminals for cash! Fire a flintlock and sip gin in the age of powdered wigs. Will you grow rich catching smugglers and highwaymen, show mercy, or become a crime boss yourself?

Trials of the Thief-Taker is a 140,000-word interactive historical adventure novel by Joey Jones, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

As a thief-taker, paid by the court or hired by the victims of crime to recover property and, for an extra price, bring the culprit to justice, you’ll stalk your prey across the misty commons and narrow rookeries of 18th-century London. Lead a gang of unwashed ruffians (or stalk the streets alone) as you apprehend highwaymen on lonely roads, and root out crooks and counterfeiters in inns and coffeehouses. Through cunning, force, or suspicious connections, you will find your mark.

You may strike a blow for justice, making a name for yourself and bringing good people to your cause. Or you can create the crimes you intend to solve, stealing the goods you’ll be paid to recover, bribing prison guards to let your associates go, building your criminal empire while everyone lauds you as a hero.

Be quick or cautious, proper or disreputable, generous or mercenary…it’s all in a day’s work for a thief-taker.

Load your flintlock! There are thieves to take.

• Play as male, female, or as a woman disguised as a man; gay or straight.
• Make your way through a world ruled by manners, harsh laws, and lurking treachery.
• Run an empire of crime or establish the first police force…or both at the same time!
• Capture, befriend, or romance corrupt officials, escape artists, courtiers, highwaymen, smugglers and grave-robbers.
• Immerse yourself in Georgian lingo: learn the difference between a cove and a swell, a blue pigeon and an ark ruffian.
• Play the high-stakes dice game Hazard in the gaming houses of Covent Garden.
• Make your way with your silver tongue, a good horse, your street smarts or with two fists flying.

We hope you enjoy playing Trials of the Thief-Taker. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

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Should I report any bugs here or send an email?

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Pls email screenshots of bugs, or ways to reproduce them.

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Should I send it to the support email?

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Meh. Send it to me.

…:.

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Did you received my email? I think I might have sent it to the wrong email.

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I got it, thanks!

…

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A few notes:

  1. There’s a background for a female PC that boosts your Oratory and London Knowledge stats, but no such background for a male PC. This sort of pushes you toward playing one gender over the other if you want to specialize in those two stats, which is odd, because there’s otherwise perfect equality (to the extent of letting a female thief-taker be a former professional boxer).

  2. The description of the game states that you can play your character as “straight or gay.” I’m not 100% sure, since I haven’t been through every possible permutation, but I don’t think it’s possible to play a male PC as gay. The only male LI is Jack, and he shows no romantic interest in my character, and vice versa, no matter how nice I am to him.

  3. I found a couple of small bugs towards the end. If you join up with Nia Maddox’s gang, then double cross her and take her place, but never recruited any hangers-on, when one of your associates starts blabbing about you around town, that person is identified as Nia Maddox, even though she’s been transported to Virginia. The other bug is in the last chapter: if you get transported to Virginia while married to Miss Featherbrook, the narration will give you a paragraph updating you on your relationship with her, and one on your relationship with Jack (which doesn’t exist).

Overall, a very enjoyable game. So far, I’ve only played it as a greedy, venal, nigh-sociopathic rogue. It’ll be interesting to see how it differs if you play a law-abiding fellow of unimpeachable respectability.

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I combined those two approaches and did one playthrough as a heedless, gin-soaked gentleman trying to live out his fantasies as essentially an 18th century Batman. That was a lot of fun.

The game seems to lose a lot of tension near the end, though.

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It is definitely possible. The trigger point for it is in the Audience at Newgate chapter after meeting with Jack in the earlier Masquerade chapter.

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There’s not quite perfect equality, as the Crimper role is gender locked male, and the Boxer role can’t be undertaken in disguise. As for equality in boxing, this is historical accurate. Women’s boxing was quite common at the time. See for instance: http://www.historyextra.com/female-boxing-georgian or 18th Century Bare-Knuckle Fighting | Girlboxing.

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The only thing I didn’t like in this game was how after the MC marries Nancy, she is gone from the history, you can’t really develop the relationship the MC has with his wife.
But overall I quite like this game, hanging innocent people to gain money, while being a criminal, was fun :stuck_out_tongue:.

1 Like