The Thievius Raccoonus (Sly 2)

Lore & Background

The Thievius Raccoonus predates Sly Cooper's own criminal career. It is a compendium of lockpicks, disguise tricks, escape routes, and heist blueprints passed down through the Cooper bloodline. In the first game, the book is a single, intact volume that Sly must defend from the Muggles. By the time Sly 2 begins, that intact volume is gone—its pages torn loose and collected by a rotating cast of thieves, scientists, and clockwork madmen who each want a different secret for their own purposes.

Muggshot, Sly's former mentor turned arch-nemesis, is the thread that ties the scattered pages together. Whether he is hoarding them himself or using them as leverage against the other villains, his presence casts a long shadow over every heist. The band's mission is not just to steal the pages back; it is to do so while juggling the new, clunkier dynamics of a four-person crew, each with their own gadget set and personality friction.

The book itself is treated with a mix of reverence and pragmatism. Sly reads from it between heists, treats it as a reference manual, and ultimately depends on its secrets to crack the final vault. It is, in the language of heist fiction, both the prize and the map.

In Their Own Story

The vault door hisses open on a breath of cold, oily air. Bentley's scanner flickers, painting the room in pale blue light—gears the size of dinner plates, a pendulum swinging behind a wall of glass, and there, on a velvet cradle in the center of the room, a single page of the Thievius Raccoonus. The ink is still wet. Someone was here an hour ago.

Sly's tail twitches. He mouths a count to Bentley, who is already threading a wire through the pressure plate. Murray, three feet tall and entirely too optimistic, is trying to befriend a clockwork hound that is definitely not a friend. Carmelita has her baton out, her badge catching the light, and she looks like she'd rather be anywhere else in the world.

The page lifts off the cradle. The pendulum stops. Every gear in the room begins to turn at once.

Reader's Guide

Each heist in Sly 2 follows a similar skeleton: infiltrate a themed lair, navigate a gauntlet of environmental puzzles and enemy patrols, and reach the page of the Thievius Raccoonus hidden in the innermost vault. The lairs escalate in scope. Early heists introduce the core mechanics—Bentley's tech gadgets, Murray's brute-force interactions, Carmelita's combat and stealth—while later ones layer in more complex sequences, timed events, and multi-stage traversal.

The pages are always the final reward, but the real test is the route to them. Pressure plates, rotating platforms, timed switches, and enemy sight-lines force you to use all four band members in sequence. A single misstep can reset a section, so learning the patrol rhythms and gadget cooldowns matters more than raw speed.

Hidden objectives reward exploration: bonus pages of the Raccoonus tucked in side rooms, secret vaults that require a specific gadget combination, and optional challenges that test a single band member's skill. These do not advance the main story but deepen your familiarity with the mechanics, which pays off in the later, denser heists.

The final confrontation with Muggshot synthesizes everything: the band must work in concert, the environment is the most complex yet, and the last page of the Thievius Raccoonus is the one that unlocks Sly's ultimate move. Treat it as the capstone, not a surprise.

Did You Know?

• The Thievius Raccoonus shifts from a single object to be defended in Sly 1 into a distributed set of pages to be recovered in Sly 2, changing the game's structure from a chase to a collection.
• Carmelita Fox, a police officer in Sly 1, becomes a full member of Sly's band in Sly 2, and her combat and stealth kit is distinct from the other three members.
• Sucker Punch Productions, the developer, went on to create the inFamous and Sunset Overdrive franchises after the Sly Cooper series.
• The band's four-member composition in Sly 2 introduced a new layer of puzzle design: many obstacles require a specific member's gadget, forcing the player to think about who to deploy rather than just where to go.