First posted 2024–07–11.
Audience: nobody specifically, just the rambling feelings of a fan.
As a kid, I was pretty into Harry Potter. This included the video games — I had The Philosopher’s Stone and Prisoner of Azkaban for my gameboy, and the first two on PC. Later on, I also picked up Chamber of Secrets on PlayStation and Goblet of Fire on PC.
So when I first played Thief: The Dark Project many years later (okay, actually Thief: Gold) I was struck by a feeling of kinship between it and the first two Harry Potters on PC.
Hard to describe. Perhaps it’s just the graphical and aesthetic similarities: low-poly 3D with soft textures and sharp meshes; environments featuring ornate old buildings full of secrets. 
They’re certainly not twins, but perhaps cousins. Or it could just be my pattern-matching brain matching patterns a bit overzealously, but there’s a fanboy part of me that wants to think that the developers of the Harry Potter games took inspiration from Thief.
There’s a small area in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in the Incendio challenge. You’re in a greenhouse of magical plants, in a room with a small garden in the middle holding a tree. A bookcase sits in each corner. Hitting each bookcase with a spell causes the garden bed to sink into the ground and move out of the way, revealing a staircase into an underground cave, with a delightful little garden/office.
Here’s an excrutiatingly low-res image of that area: 
Even watching a video of this area today gives me the same feeling as it did then, and it’s the same feeling as hiding in the rafters in Thief watching guards haplessly search for me below, and the same feeling as actually hiding away somewhere unbeknownst to those around you. I’m not sure how universal this feeling is, but for me it was one of the great joys of playing Hide and Seek, and one of the reasons I love Thief so much.
It’s a feeling somewhere between calm, anticipation, and of knowing a secret, and I adore it. Just me?
Though I have to admit, it strikes me somewhat as a juvenile feeling. Something about my perception of it (and it could just be that it’s a kind of deep secret pleasure that I first experienced it as a kid) tells me that it’s an expression of an inner child smiling with delight at being well-hidden, safe, comfy.
And “comfy” is not a word that comes to mind out of nowhere. It’s a word that’s been used on certain online game forums, often to describe some vague, pleasurable qualia derived from a game or in-game environment. I think this is “comfy” for me. If I had to guess or interpret what others are feeling when they say “comfy”, I think it might be something like this.
How is Roller Coaster Tycoon “comfy”? It’s not about cozying up in front of the fire with a blanket and a mug of hot chocolate. It’s not a necessarily related to nostalgia — after all, I played Thief for the first time as an adult — but nostalgia does seem to help. Maybe it’s “comforting” rather than “comfortable”.
And maybe it’s time to install Roller Coaster Tycoon again.