Played from a top-down perspective, you assume one particular role such as a locksmith or lookout and put your special abilities towards aiding your team.įor the most part, each level plays out like a little video game story, a digital and malleable novella.
It is a heist video game wherein you and optionally three friends (or enemies or strangers I won’t judge) attempt a series of robberies. Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, the latest from Andy Schatz’s Pocketwatch Games, is an excellent example of this. Blake Snyder, screenwriter and author of his seminal how-to book Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, actually calls the middle shenanigans “Fun and Games”, so it should be pretty clear that the middle is open to be manipulated in its most pliable form. What they can leave up to the player, however, is the middle, which is usually the most exciting part of stories anyways. That’s why I only say “largely” succeed video games also tell stories, and the nature of stories is that they start in one place and end up in another and we’ve yet to reach the point of truly and totally dynamic storytelling technologies. Even in Choose Your Own Adventure books or the theatrical release of Clue, the beginning, middle, and end are all already set in stone. Movies, books, and cave paintings all tell a very specific and inherently static story the author has pre-conceived notions of who does what and when and it’s all laid out in words and images for you. This is largely where video games succeed.
When was the last time you saw a heist movie where everything went according to plan? No Country For Old Men is a story only about how everything goes to shit, just like A Series of Unfortunate Events, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, every play ever written by Shakespeare, and almost anything else you can think of.
Almost every story you’ll ever hear is only about how things go sideways. In fact, there are a lot of somethings to be said about that. There is, however, also something to be said for when things go horribly wrong. It’s the inability to pick up anything so much as a bump or kink as you glide down the mountainside. It’s the smoothness of the operation that provides the ecstasy.
At times you feel like you can’t see the way forward, but you know the plan, you know what you need to do, and you know how to do it. Sometimes it can feel a bit like riding down some snowy slalom course, pivoting and carving out hard turns at an exhilarating speed as powder kicks up all around you. Being the mastermind behind some plot is its own reward in many ways. Every single thing happens when it is supposed to happen or not happen and you arrive at your goal without so much as breaking a sweat, literal or figurative. It feels extremely validating when machinations are perfectly executed and go off without a hitch. There’s something to be said for when things go according to plan.