I won’t lie — when I first found out about “Volume,’’ maybe sometime in 2014, I was a little underwhelmed. The developer, after all, was Mike Bithell, the Brit behind “Thomas Was Alone,’’ a brilliant side-scrolling platformer from a few years ago with a surprisingly weighty, touching story, given that the characters were simply shapes — a rectangle, a square, and so on — that had to help each other out to get through different levels.

The narration in that game was delivered beautifully, and the title had a feel to it unlike anything I had ever played played before. “Volume’’ looked, at first glance, like a somewhat straightforward stealth game — sneak around, trying to avoid the guards and steal loot. It seemed somehow . . . unambitious, maybe, given the surprising punch packed by Bithell’s previous title.

Now that the game’s out (it has been for a bit, actually, but I had a backed-up queue of games to play through), I can safely say that I’m glad to have been wrong. Yes, “Volume,’’ available for Windows and Mac PCs and several consoles, is a “straight­forward’’ stealth game in some senses, but Bithell has brought just enough creativity and novelty to it to pull it off.

You play as Locksley (intended to ring in your head next to “Robin of,’’ given some of the game's plot elements involving injustice and thievery), a character in a series of virtual-reality simulations where the only goal is to grab a bunch of floating jewels and get out. Of course, there are obstacles in your path, foremost among them creepy guard-things called “pawns’’ that patrol the levels, as well as turrets. Generally speaking, if you’re spotted by a pawn or a turret you have very little time to get re-hidden — otherwise you go back to the last checkpoint you passed through. Little cones of vision indicate a guard or turret’s line of sight; stay out of view, and you’re fine.

“Volume’’ works in part because of the deft way it combines different in-game tools and gameplay elements.

You can use a bugle to make a sound that for a pawn will seem to be coming from a particular corner, causing the pawn to turn for a moment, allowing you to sneak by.

Sometimes you need to chain actions in a particularly tricky way to move past a series of pawns and bolt to the exit.

Story takes a back seat here, especially as compared to “Thomas Was Alone.’’ The voice acting is good, again (Danny Wallace, who narrated that game so nicely, returns to play an artificial intelligence), but while the plot is entertaining and interesting enough, I simply found most of my attention focused on the task of beating the levels.

A nice bonus here is the potential for unlimited future content — “Volume’’ has a level editor that allows you to build your own levels and publish them online, and within the game you can search for online levels to try out. Given that the basic building blocks of “Volume’’ are pretty simple, I’d imagine there are some great levels out there, and I look forward to checking them out once I’ve made my way deeper into the game’s main campaign.

Overall, this is a strong take on the stealth genre, even for those, like myself, who are usually a bit tepid about all that sneaking around.

Jesse Singal can be reached at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com.