Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick

Moby ID: 1320
Amiga Specs

Description official description

Play Keef the Thief, a promising young thief who finds himself on the outskirts of the Mercon the Merchant City. Considering the penalty of thievery is the removal of certain body parts, our young hero must be careful in his profession and ultimately (among others) train himself to access and steal from the city treasury.

Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick is a first-person perspective role-playing game. It has elements of parody, clearly identifiable from various descriptions in the game and enemy names during combat. One of the goals in the game is to steal everything in sight - at least in the city. The game map itself includes, beside the city, various dungeons, jungles, and an arena, among others.

The game introduces four vital elements of game play: Thievery, Adventuring, Combat, and Alchemy:

  • Thievery

The thievery element is based on the ability to disarm traps before the player can loot treasure. There are many houses or other places where the player can steal valuable objects (at least within the city walls). The higher the skills, the more options the player has to rightly pick which course the player wants to choose to disarm a trap.

  • Adventuring

When the player has stolen everything valuable from underwear to gold crowns from the city, eventually the player will have to venture outside the city into the unknown depths of the surrounding jungle. There are a lot of places that has yet to be discovered in the game. Just be sure to be well equipped with armor and weapons. Monsters have a bad habit of popping up, almost always!

  • Combat

The first-person real-time combat setting comes complete with a top-down radar indicating the player's positioning and the enemies. In the combat screen the player can melee to victory or just shoot them from a distance. That is if the player has the appropriate weapons available.

  • Alchemy

For the most part it's alchemy, though magic spells are also created through this process. Collecting ingredients is one thing, experimenting on what works is another. Sometimes the player may get lucky and find a recipe. Sometimes.

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Screenshots

Credits (Apple IIgs version)

10 People

Game Design
Programming
Graphics
Producer
Assistant Producer
Dialogue
Documentation
Product Manager
Art Direction
Package Design
Package Illustration

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 67% (based on 16 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.0 out of 5 (based on 16 ratings with 1 reviews)

I have mixed emotions for this RPG...

The Good
Hey, check out the screenshots...I submitted all 30 of them. Took me a whole month to do it...haha. Slow but sure progress.

Well, now this is an odd little RPG. Truthfully said, it ain't the best RPG's around. It probably won't reach the Top 10 on my list...but there's something about this little game that makes it unique from other RPG's.

The first good thing about the game, is that it's different. The game itself is a little odd, which is good in a refreshing way. Not overly great, but refreshing. You'll notice some dry humor here and there that'll give you a sneer once in a while, every time you see the names of the monsters your fighting (e.g. Killer Chickens, Idiot Bowman, etc.). This maybe the first 1st Person Perspective RPG that has 1st Person Perspective real-time combat.

This also has to be the first (and probably the last) 1st Person Perspective RPG with cool graphics. Well, maybe not the first and not the last, but you can see they put some effort on the VGA graphics.

But the best thing about this RPG is in the statistics. This is probably the main reason why I'll always remember this game. The character stats in the game has a percentage approach (%). This new concept sounds very appealing to me for some strange reason. Every time you succeed in a particular thieving action, the percentage increases.

The Bad
Well, although the VGA graphics were good, the CGA graphics was a disaster! Probably the reason why I loathe pink (then again, any respected male should also loathe pink, and any of those bright colors!).

If you see in the trivia, the game was supposed to have humor in it. Whoever "tried" to make this game humorous, sure hell didn't have a sense of humor to begin with. The "dry humor" in this game kinda backfired. They weren't serious in making it a true funny game. They could if they wanted to. It just became a bad parody of silly jokes. The fact that if you take away the humor in the game, it still won't change the game one bit. They did lousy in this department.

The story line. There isn't much of a story line really. This game just doesn't have enough information about anything. Most of the descriptions in the game refer to leading you to the next puzzle, but there isn't anything else in the background. Items you obtain have little or more often no descriptions what so ever. It lacked detail...a lot of it.

Combat was mediocre. Eventually, you'll find out that it's better off running around with a ranged weapon. There are no sound effects in combat (come to think of it, there isn't any sound effects period), so your experience is only graphical. The game also had an irritating way of having monsters attack you very often. Every time you sleep, you'll know when you wake (most of the time), there will be monsters attacking you.

The Bottom Line
Honestly, it's a mediocre RPG. Nevertheless, it's still playable and better than RPG's I've played.

DOS · by Indra was here (20760) · 2006

Trivia

Development

From http://www.naughtydog.com:

Keef was a classic sword and sorcery role-playing game. While we were making it, Andy entered sarcastic text as a place holder for what we believed would be the real text in the final release. EA liked the humor so much that they decided to make the entire game a comedy. The effect that this decision had on sales was no joke, however.

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Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1320
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Will D.

Apple IIgs added by Kabushi. Amiga added by Indra was here.

Additional contributors: Macintrash, Indra was here, Patrick Bregger.

Game added April 13, 2000. Last modified January 20, 2024.