Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

One hit. That's all it takes to kill Sly, unless he happens to be carrying a lucky horseshoe, and the whole design bends around that fragility. Sucker Punch's 2002 debut on PlayStation 2 looks like a cartoon and plays like something far more exacting: a platformer where you spend most of your time reading guard patrols, spotting the blue sparkle that marks a climbable ledge, and committing to a route before you touch the stick.

The cel-shaded look was the hook at the time, and it still carries the game. Thick black outlines, flat colour, a jazz-noir soundtrack and comic-panel cutscenes gave the PS2 something that didn't age into muddy textures the way photoreal ambitions of the era did. The Fiendish Five each own a world with its own palette and its own villain's accent, and the between-level binocucom chatter from Bentley and Murray does more character work in a few lines than most mascot games managed across a whole campaign.

What separates it from its obvious rivals is how little combat there is. Sly's cane strike exists, but it's a punctuation mark, not a verb. Levels are short, dense obstacle courses strung along rooftops and rafters, and the collectible economy is tight rather than sprawling: thirty clue bottles per stage unlock a safe holding a page of the family thieving manual, which hands you a new move. Earn the roll, the mine, the dive, and old levels open differently. It's a clean loop with no padding in it.

The weak spots are honest ones. Vehicle and turret sections break the rhythm and haven't improved with time, the platforming can be unforgiving about depth perception on narrow pipes, and the one-hit rule occasionally tips from tense into tedious when a checkpoint sits a long run back. The game is also short, around six hours if you aren't hunting bottles, which felt slight in 2002 against the bloat of its contemporaries and reads as a virtue now.

Sucker Punch would widen the formula considerably with the sequels, adding playable Bentley and Murray and open hub cities. This first one is leaner and stranger for it, closer to a stealth game wearing a mascot's clothes, and the pleasure of slipping past a searchlight on a Parisian rooftop hasn't dulled.