Thief, Dishonored and Philip Marlowe combine in Noirmancer, a stealth sim that lets you wipe minds with a snap of your fingers

Sleutherpowers

Oh heck, colleagues, we got one: a promising videogame. Noirmancer is a first-person single-player stealth sim, heavily inspired by the original Thief, in which you are a hard-boiled sleuth with supernatural abilities. Think Humphrey Bogart, if Humphrey Bogart were a Dishonored character. Here are some things you can do: swim in midair, transform into vapour, stun alerted guards with pew-pew gestures, and chuck down telekinetic mats to serve as (usefully sound-absorbing) platforms.

It might sound like a jumble, like one of those Marvel comicbook movesets they have to prune severely for the sake of a coherent film adaptation, but the whimsical stage magician hand animations and midnight jazz SFX absolutely sell the package. Instead of swinging a blackjack (noirjack?), you'll put mooks to sleep with a snap of your gloved fingers and a rattle of cymbals. Forget Bogart - this is Penn or Teller, whichever of them has springier knees.

That said, you'll often fall back on more elementary, non-magical stealth gambits, like opening windows slowly to minimise noise, eavesdropping for hints, and identifying shadowy paths through well-lit areas using your visibility indicator in bottom right. All this takes place in a city after sundown, a mildly synesthetic world of white outlines and rippling footsteps. The missions offer a variety of safes to crack and filing cabinets to rifle through; if you're extra nosy, you might find ways to exploit "the back-door dealings of important people".

There's a 2-4 hour alpha demo for Noirmancer on Itch.io, with a full Steam release to follow (no date yet). One goal of the alpha is to test out what developer DistractedMOSFET considers to be Noirmancer's boldest idea: "a stealth game where you MUST erase memories in order to de-alert the situation."

I've had a quick play of the demo, and I'm still making my mind up about the memory wipe stuff. I'm currently preoccupied with using telekinetic mats for parkouring purposes, which reminds me of wielding the foam gun in Arkane's Prey. Come to think of it, this game could use a Mimic power, if it doesn't already have one. I would like to transform into a fedora, please. Perhaps one of those roaming guards could wear me by mistake. Then, I would be able to delete his brain at leisure.

Prefer to infiltrate in twos or threes? Please rub this piece of innocent blank paper with your cursor. It harbours the release date for Thick as Thieves, the new stealth sim from Warren Spector and Otherside.