The British Museum

Lore & Background

In the world of Sly Cooper, the British Museum is treated as a high-value target: a vault of cultural treasures guarded by cameras, patrolling officers, and locked display cases. The museum's layout—its long colonnaded galleries, the central Reading Room with its domed skylight, and the Egyptian and Greek wings—provides a natural maze of sightlines, elevated platforms, and narrow gaps between exhibits that a small, agile thief can exploit.

The heist is framed within the game's larger narrative, in which Sly and his band (Murray the platypus, Bentley the tech-savvy fox, and the gang's other members) must recover a specific artifact while Clockwerk and his forces close in. The museum serves as both a stage for set-piece stealth sequences and a narrative beat that underscores the tension between the gang's thieving code and the Clockwerk's more destructive ambitions.

Sucker Punch's art team drew on the museum's real architectural vocabulary—the Portland-stone façade, the hexagonal Reading Room, the long enfilade of galleries—to build a level that feels like a lovingly stylised diorama of the actual building. Every display case, every marble bust, every potted palm in the atrium is placed to create a readable stealth map: high ground for Bentley's turrets, low cover for Sly to duck behind, and vertical routes for Murray's bouncy traversal.

In Their Own Story

The evening fog rolls off the Thames and settles over Bloomsbury like a grey wool blanket. Through the fog, the British Museum glows amber from within, its colonnade a row of candlelit sentinels. Inside, the galleries are empty of visitors but not of eyes: red camera lenses blink in slow, metronomic sweeps above the Egyptian mummy cases. A single guard's flashlight cuts a pale wedge across the polished floor of the Greek sculpture hall.

On a marble cornice forty feet above, a small raccoon in a red bandana crouches, tail flicking. Below him, a platypus in a green vest is already three galleries over, bouncing off a display case with a soft *thwack* of rubber feet. A fox in a white lab coat types furiously on a laptop balanced on a Roman column, muttering about 'overriding the perimeter grid.'

The target sits in the centre of the courtyard, under the dome: a single artifact in a glass case, lit from above like a jewel in a setting. The raccoon grins, adjusts his bandana, and lets himself drop.

Reader's Guide

The level opens in the museum's grand entrance hall: Portland-stone columns, a sweeping staircase, and a chandelier that casts warm pools of light across polished marble. The aesthetic is neoclassical grandeur rendered in a slightly exaggerated, cel-shaded style—tall, clean lines, muted creams and greys punctuated by the rich colours of the artifacts in their cases.

The heist target sits deep in the central Reading Room, beneath the famous dome. Reaching it requires threading through a sequence of galleries: the Egyptian wing (low, cramped, with mummy cases creating narrow corridors), the Greek sculpture hall (open, with tall columns you can climb and swing between), and the long enfilade of general collections (a gauntlet of display cases that double as cover and as traversal platforms).

Environmental mechanics include rotating camera sweeps that force timing-based dashes, glass cases that shatter when hit (creating temporary gaps or hazards), and a few sections where a moving platform or elevator carries you between gallery floors. Bentley's gadgets—turrets, mines, and a grappling hook—become essential for reaching high ledges and disabling security nodes. Murray's bouncy movement is the fastest way to cross open floor space without triggering floor-plate sensors.

Collectibles are tucked into the corners of the architecture: gears hidden behind pedestal bases, in the gaps between column fluting, and inside the glass domes of display cases that can be popped with a well-aimed gadget shot. Masks (for the game's mask-collection system) are placed on high ledges above the main path, rewarding vertical exploration. A few are tucked into the Reading Room's upper gallery, visible only if you look up at the dome's interior ribs.

Did You Know?

• The real British Museum, designed by Robert Smirke and opened in 1759, inspired the level's neoclassical architecture, including its colonnaded façade and central Reading Room.
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves was developed by Sucker Punch Productions, the same team behind the Infamous series, and marked the franchise's shift to a more global, multi-location structure.
• The British Museum's real-world collection includes the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, and over 8 million objects—making it, in-universe, a heist target of almost absurd value.
• Sucker Punch's art direction for the level treats the museum as a vertical playground: every cornice, capital, and display-case rim is a potential perch or swing point for Sly.