Arsene Lupin – Once A Thief

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

The character of Arsene Lupin is a classic literary figure arguably almost on par with the likes of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes (and amusingly, Lupin author Maurice Leblanc wrote an encounter between the two characters, but was forced to change the famous detective’s name to Herlock Sholmès after Arthur Conan Doyle took legal action against Leblanc). However, while Poirot and Holmes are renowned literary detectives, Lupin is their opposite, in his stories depicted as a legendary thief.

Arsene Lupin – Once A Thief is a videogame adaptation of Leblanc’s classic stories, released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game uses a framing device of a conversation between Lupin and Leblanc discussing the former’s adventures, which players play from the perspective of various characters, including Lupin trying to figure out the best way to accomplish his goals, as well as those investigating Lupin and trying to track down his identity. For those familiar with the classic novels this may not be a surprise for you, but those who haven’t read those works will likely find some enjoyment of trying to guess who the supposed master of disguise actually is, or whether they may be playing as Lupin in disguise even as they try to track him down.

The presentation here is pretty good, with the game using stylized slightly cartoony 3D visuals with some pretty expressive character designs, as well as some nice lighting effects. This is joined by good voice acting for all characters, and a soundtrack befitting a mystery game, building up the intrigue.

Unfortunately, these nice visuals come at a high price, and that is frequent, nasty loading times. In a given mission you’ll often need to cris-cross an area to collect evidence and compare with witness statements multiple times, and when you do this you’ll be looking at a long loading time every time you walk through a doorway. In one early level onboard a ship, you’ll find yourself walking in and out of the cabins of multiple guests, then to multiple public rooms, then to the deck, then crew cabins, and then back and forth between those areas again, each time bringing with it a torturously long loading time.

Walking around and collecting evidence is a pain even after this issue, because this game doesn’t let players freely control the camera, only swapping it between 45-degree angles. And whatever you the player can’t see because it’s hidden behind a wall, the character can’t see either, and this even includes objects you’ve already found, or even doors you’ve just walked through, forcing you to mess with the camera just to get to where you can exit a room to get one of those long loading times. And just to drive home that the game doesn’t value players’ time, the characters you control have two walking speeds depending on whether or not you’re holding a button – slow or agonizingly slow.

You might hope that after putting up with all of this time-wasting garbage, that the core mystery-solving gameplay is at least decent, but here too there are major problems. At least in theory there are some good ideas here – players must connect related items on a chart to come to conclusions, or must order a sequence of events to piece together what must have happened.

Unfortunately, the logic behind both of these puzzles is severely lacking. In the chart puzzles, there are often clearly points that have something in common that your character will refuse to connect, and then other things that don’t seem that much in common at all but are required for you to progress. After failing to connect chart items a few times the answer will be highlighted for you, but at that point it feels less like you’re solving a mystery, and more like you’re being given an answer to a puzzle that was too poorly-constructed to actually be solved rationally.

The same issue is present in the order-of-sequence puzzles – sometimes there’s a clear progression of events that you must place items in to solve these puzzles, but often there are things that happened that needn’t have happened at a specific time, yet must be put in an order that the game designates anyway. And because this order isn’t clear, you’ll need to basically brute force these puzzles through trial and error as it tells you which step you’ve gotten wrong in the order.

It’s really frustrating, because Arsene Lupin is a fantastic character to base a videogame on, and this game’s presentation is wonderful, but the gameplay is so frustrating and cares so little about players’ time that it’s outright torturous to play. Frequent and long loading times, slow walking speeds, the strange requirement that players spin the camera to even so much as walk through a door you just walked through a moment ago, and the nonsensical puzzles all make this a game that will steal your time and money, but is highly unlikely to steal your heart.

tl;dr – Arsene Lupin – Once a Thief is a videogame adaptation of a classic series of literary stories about a legendary thief. The premise is great, and the presentation is excellent, but this game is absolutely destroyed by extremely frequent and long loading times, molasses-slow walking speeds, infuriating control issues, and nonsensical puzzles. Don’t let this game rob you of your valuable time and money.

Grade: D+

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