As I began Kill Code: A Thief’s Bane, I wasn’t expecting the very first obstacle that the lore-based Apex Legends mode had to offer me—a locked blast door. I was mostly just expecting to walk through some hallways and maybe throw Loba’s bracelet around, but didn’t think I’d encounter any puzzles.
After a few seconds of looking around, I finally glanced up. A vent. Of course, I’m supposed to crawl around in an air vent. I’m a thief.
This style of narrative gameplay was once a hallmark of how Respawn Entertainment delivered lore in the Apex universe. From the slow-burn tease of Ash and Olympus in season five’s Broken Ghost quest to Chronicles featuring Bloodhound and Bangalore, the Apex devs have frequently dipped their toes into the narrative stream with their competitive battle royale title. But these lore drops became few and far between over the last year, with seasonal comics and text-based lore seeming to shrink over time.
A Thief’s Bane reunites the game’s lore with its gameplay experience, and it’s the secret sauce that Apex has been missing to keep its audience engaged and make its new releases feel exciting once again.
In many ways, running through A Thief’s Bane felt like a bit of a culmination of the best parts of both the Broken Ghost’s PvE missions and the seemingly-defunct Chronicles. It provides a cool atmosphere and custom level to run your way through, while also forcing you to think and play a bit like Loba might when she would be sneaking around a facility with the intent to steal something valuable.
Crawling through vents and traversing dangerous zipline arrays felt akin to completing Bloodhound’s “Old Ways, New Dawn” Chronicle. The Chronicle required players to find a white raven and track a wounded Prowler around World’s Edge. Since the Chronicle needed to be completed in actual battle royale games, I completed the tracking sessions by dropping in solo and hiding from other teams as I just tried to finish the story. It felt a bit lowly and cowardly playing the game that way—similar to how Bloodhound was feeling in regard to what had become of their home at the time.
Instead of going through more of Loba’s lore in a real match, however, we got a custom level more like Broken Ghost, or even the hidden teaser for Loba’s introduction to Apex in the World’s Edge vaults all the way back in season four.
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It also helps that the facility we got for A Thief’s Bane is a fun little experience to explore, and even has some shades of Titanfall 2 with its moving platform section. The entire thing is relatively straightforward but does require players to explore and figure out light platforming puzzles to progress, allowing for individual player expression.
The mode isn’t a masterpiece of single-player FPS gaming, but it doesn’t need to be, either. It’s a fun, short mode that hooks players into the game as it currently stands and the content that is coming as well.
Obviously, most players will primarily care about Apex as a competitive multiplayer experience. Not everyone cares about lore or backstory in the game. Not everyone needs some narrative hook or to feel akin to any of the characters beyond how fun their abilities are to use in a ranked match. But the addition of this lore as actual gameplay does make the game’s storytelling feel more immediate and important. That goes double for a story that seems to be leading to a legend rework that will absolutely have large PvP gameplay implications.
Storytelling in Apex never fully went away. But it did feel like it was placed on the back burner over the last year to such a degree that it wasn’t clear if stories of a magnitude of Broken Ghost, or even the Apex Chronicles, would ever be told in the game again.
Kill Code has wiped away that doubt, and with the second part of the cinematic still to come at the end of July alongside A Thief’s Bane, Apex just feels a bit more alive once again.
