Heist Simulator has a plan. Look here. See that bit I’ve circled? That’s where your little team of reprobates break into a fancy mansion, or a bustling casino, and make off with the spoils. No fuss. Seems simple, yeah? Well, look over here. This is where the players will be able to set up the heists themselves. They create and publish their own missions, using complex tools to build the levels, hide the loot, and set traps. Not so simple after all. Things could get tougher than an overcooked steak that’s been marinated in diamonds.
The next game from publisher No More Robots is an interesting prospect. It’s a strategy game where you plan out a heist. Your character(s) will only be able to see what’s in the room when they get there, but in the first level I tried I could walk around and inspect things, like a mouse-controlled Agent 47, feeling out what’s good to steal and how best to steal it.
It’s immediately clear that there will probably be a lot of lateral thinking, because in order to steal a book you need to distract an old lady with a microwave. What a heist! It’s just a couple of rooms, but if there’s a whole mansion to explore then the heist could get tricky.
Players can, and probably will, build their own heists for others to attempt. The level editor looks like a friendly version of proper developer tools, letting you build and bend walls, set puzzles, and even create interactive elements with NPCs. The game comes with over 8,500 assets, which is almost certainly enough for you to trap visitors in a decent facsimile of your childhood home. You get to vote on how much fun the misson was, so the good ones should be pretty obvious.
It’s got a plucky vibe to it. With a two-man development team planning and plotting the game, it’s a smart move to shunt some of the dastardly designs off to the community. Make them accomplices. They’ll also do things with the game that the developers never, ever imagined, and it’s those mission that I want to play.
It’s playable right now on Steam as a playtest. Go on, take it.