Although we first learned of Stolen's existence in July 2003, the first time we got to see the game in action was at the GameStars Live event in London just a couple of months ago. We left that particular meeting with the UK-based developer Blue 52 feeling pretty impressed with what we'd been shown, so we recently contacted project director Jaid Mindang to see if he was willing to divulge any further information on the game.

GameSpot: Can you tell us about the game's lead character? Who is she, and where did she come from?

Anya's acrobatic skills allow her to reach areas that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Jaid Mindang: Anya Romanov is a professional thief. She's the best in Forge City. She's audacious and headstrong, and [she] likes to cherry-pick her jobs according to [the] prestige [involved]. She likes to go for the most challenging, headline-grabbing marks. In the background we've created for her, she originally came from Russian parents, but it goes with the territory of her career that she has to remain necessarily enigmatic.

GS: What kinds of abilities does Anya have that distinguish her from other stealth action heroes?

JM: Anya is a very skilled athlete and acrobat, which allows her to traverse environments in many unexpected ways, [so she can] strike where the security of a building or location is weakest. With the help of her partner Louie, who is radio-linked and builds her gadgets, she can undertake the most sophisticated of raids. One of the game's features is that Anya does not kill her enemies. She only renders them unconscious.

You will be able to confront and fight guards, but since they can only ever be knocked out, they will always, ultimately, regain consciousness. As a result, you may be able to get out of tricky situations with the heavy-handed approach, but you'll never be able to succeed the mission unless you choose to do it quietly. In order to reciprocate that, we've expanded upon the range of player skills and abilities within the spectrum of subterfuge to give Anya much more [skills and abilities] than normally afforded to player characters in the stealth action genre.

GS: And what can you tell us about her gadgets? She has plenty of those, right?

You'll be able to get guards in choke holds to prevent them from calling for backup.

JM: Of course. Her trade requires that her toolkit be replete. Louie not only acts as her fence and agent, but [also] acts, [because he's a former serviceman], as a communications and security specialist. He designs and builds Anya's high-tech gadgetry, some of which would impress 007. Anya's work helps fund this research. The central interface for all her gadgets is her ArmPad, which pipes information directly to her heads-up display and uses ultrasound to provide internal schematics of mechanical locks, [in addition to] identifying weaknesses and stress points in metal plating. [Her ArmPad also] determines the position of tumblers in combination locks. It can even interface directly with computers. She also carries a silenced projectile weapon that carries nullifier rounds for [either] stunning enemies at range or short-circuiting unprotected electrical apparatuses. She has sonic emitters for use as decoys and can deploy trackers to locate enemies and security systems all over the map, [which she can then] display on her GPS map. There's more, besides.

GS: What kinds of locations will Anya be visiting as players progress through the game? We've heard there are only four?

JM: There are only four distinctly different locations, but these are much bigger than the themed levels in, say, a platform game. If you consider Metal Gear Solid, for example, the whole game took place in and around a single military installation, from the docks to the helipad to the research labs, etc. Similarly, in Stolen, although the first location is a museum, you have a network of corridors, the rooftops, the basement and generator rooms, the exhibit halls, etc. Within each location there are numerous areas and loads of restart points. They all stream seamlessly from one to the next, so the player isn't bothered by loading points while the game is in play. It would be disingenuous to describe Stolen as a game of only four levels.