In this game series, you normally start off on your normal routine of robbing some fat nobleman's manor of his prized possession(s). But then you get caught in the middle of conflict between order and chaos, and Nightmare Fuel ensues in all three of those games.
In general
- The series can be quite scary, given how everything's dark, you're relatively weak, and you regularly traipse through places containing strange creatures, the undead, or uncanny robots. The first person perspective and the fact that Garrett is rather fragile will simply add to the moments of panic.
- The Haunted Cathedral (Thief 1) and the Shalebridge Cradle (Deadly Shadows) have been touted as two of the scariest levels in non-horror games. Both created an uncomfortable and unexpected atmosphere that left us dreading the necessity of going though that door...
- Zombies, while slow and easy to knock over, are very stubborn. You cannot defeat them completely without sacrificing valuable gear. Otherwise your best bet is to make them prone and hope they don't spring back up if you get close to them again. Or, you can just run run run.
- Hammer Haunts. An undead Hammerite with a skull for a face. As opposed to the aforementioned zombies, Haunts are fast, strong, relentless in their pursuit, and take a fair amount of hits before going down. The truly nightmarish part are the sounds they make. When patrolling you hear a chorus of whispers and clinking chains. When active, ghostly screams and voices demanding that you, "Join us, join us, JOIN US NOW!!", and in Deadly Shadows, make extremely loud shrieks of pure anger.
- Especially their horrific Laughs
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Fanmade content
There are a lot of fairly scary or outright horrific fan missions for all the Thief games, particularly for 1 & 2.- Calendra's Legacy
not only had a minor recreation of the Tomb of Horrors but also had you running through an entire city filled with undead of all sorts, including a cemetery boss-lair. - One particular Thief fan mission, Phantasmagoria, caused a heart attack. It's been strongly recommended you play the remake, which doesn't have the potential to kill you. Yes, the mission is that scary.
- A fan mission called Rowena's Curse achieves an excellent creepy atmosphere. To begin with, you are sent on a mission to retrieve a woman who has disappeared under unknown circumstances. Then, you find the mission is based in a mansion with a HUGE guard contingent, and A LOT of marble flooring, which makes your footsteps very audible to them, setting you up for an anxious investigation. But the mission only gets creepier as you delve into it's recent fatal misfortunes, and then in to it's grisly history, all the while hearing about a mysterious previous resident named "Lady Rowena." The jump moment comes when you discover a note left on the ground, addressed to you, personally (nobody was expecting you to be there), and signed by Rowena, who supposededly met her gruesome end more than a century beforehand! And the scares just keep coming. Special props to the author (who also goes by the name "Lady Rowena") for the eerie "breathing-like" background audio that surrounds the focal bedrooms, and the tribal drum music behind the iron gate. You can't help but be on edge from start to finish in this one.
- The fan mission Eclipsed, set in a mysteriously abandoned port town, is fairly rare among fan missions for focusing primarily on a Keeper-related plot. Aside from that, though, it has a highly immersive atmosphere and some of its sections are among the scariest and most foreboding ever created for the series, whether in an original mission or a fan work.
- Some truly scary missions for The Dark Mod include Glenham Tower, Requiem or Exhumed. A genuinely frightening ghost story with some unusual mixing up of gameplay is A Night to Remember. Reap as You Sow has some pretty terrifying sequences, despite being mostly set during broad daylight.
- From the first mission of A Night in Rocksbourg, we have Garrett suffering a surprise hallucination reminiscent of Silent Hill. You can see why it drove the disappeared nobleman of the level insane if this was what the Artifact of Doom was incurring in his dreams every night. The audio is fingers on a chalkboard nerve-racking and then you get what can only be described as burn-victim Slenderman inexorably shambling out of the darkness to eviscerate your ass, while you are trapped in a well-lit cell
