The Clue! - They Stole a Hundred Bucks

Written by Menhir Mike

We’re starting the game at Victoria Station and have a first look at the interface. The game has essentially two different modes: Exploration and planning/executing a burglary. I can control the game with either the keyboard or a mouse, but the keyboard is significantly more efficient.

Exploring the surroundings at Victoria Station.

In exploration mode, I can walk to another location, wait (to advance the clock), talk to people (if anyone is around), look at surroundings or people, investigate (more on that later), and think. The “Look” command mostly gives some flavor to a location or person, whereas the “Think” command gives information about everything Matt knows, like how much money we have (3 pounds) or any people that we know (we don’t).

Since there is nothing to do here, I am calling a taxi to go elsewhere. And as luck would have it, we’re the one millionth customer of the taxi company! Our reward is a full year of free taxi rides, which is a very convenient mechanism to make sure we’re not wasting money driving around (and potentially softlocking ourselves) that thematically fits in the game.

They drove a million.

The only other location I can go to is Holland Street, which is one of two main areas we’ll be frequenting a lot. Here, we can talk to a man named Frank Maloya, who introduces himself as a dealer. We can ask most people about their occupation, if they ever had trouble with the police, what their experience is, or hire them as accomplices for our burglaries. Some people have additional flavor text, while others cannot be recruited.

Moving locations, talking to people, and some other actions advance the time. I do not know if the game has a hard time limit, but the time of the day seems to impact whether the stores are open.

But Matt saw right through him!

 First, we need a place to stay, and the Ugl(e)y Dog Hotel is the place to be. Unfortunately, Matt does not have enough money for a hotel room (he claims that his purse had been stolen), which has the receptionist send us to make a police report at Watling Street. Going back to the taxi shows two new locations: Cars & Vans, Wellington Road, and the aforementioned Watling Street. There, we can go to the police station and lay in information. The friendly Inspector Gludo offers to lend us 10 pounds in the name of justice, which we gladly accept. Matt also takes the liberty to steal Gludo’s identity card from the table.

I wonder if they have something special for their millionth guest?

With the money in hand, we’re able to book a hotel room and Matt calls the one person in the world that matters to him: His mum. She gives us the number of an old friend, Mr. Briggs, and we arrange a meeting with him in the Fat Man’s Pub.

Mr. Briggs is planning something big, but is short on money for tools and a car, so he enlists our help in return for a share of the loot. The target is a Kiosk in Fulham, he gives us an old car, and 15 pounds for tools. We get some thoughts about Old Matt (the game is him reminiscing about these events) calling Briggs a “fat dickhead”, so clearly there’s no love lost between them.

Can someone that gives us a car and some money truly be a bad person?

Now that I have a target and a car, I will need an accomplice and some tools. The Fat Man’s Pub is one prime location to recruit accomplices, but I’ve made my way to Watling Street and another pub called Walrus & the yellow shades, where I meet Justin White. When I offer her a job, she requests “47 percent of the prey”, which I accept. Also on Watling Street is a tools shop where I can buy a jemmy and some gloves, which is everything I need to plan my first heist.

Maybe she’s a member of the Gedde family over in New Orleans?

Before I explain how burglaries work, a tangent about the English localization: It doesn’t seem to be very good. The first indication is that the date in the status line is formatted as 03.02.1953, which is correct in German (3rd of February) but to my understanding it should be formatted as 03/02/1953 in the UK. As a sidenote for American readers, since the game is set in London and was released for PAL machines, I am assuming that British English is the intended language. But that’s not what’s bothering me, it’s stuff like going to the “Policestation” (shouldn’t it be “police station”?) to “lay in information” (shouldn’t it be “file a report”?). When I offer a job to someone, they want a percentage of the “prey” - which is definitely wrong, shouldn’t it be a share of the “loot”? And in the tools shop I just bought a “jemmy” which is apparently the Australian English term for a crowbar? I don’t think that the translator of the game was a native English speaker. It’s not a completely atrocious translation that makes the game unplayable, but it does feel clumsy. I’m not a native speaker of any variant of English, so if I’m off here, please correct me.

Jemmy, don’t change your number, I need to make you mine!

Tangent done, time to go over the mechanics of planning and executing a burglary. We can do so in our hotel room, and every burglary needs:

• A target to break into - in this case the Kiosk.
• A getaway vehicle - the Fiat Topolino 1940 we got from Briggs.
• 1-3 accomplices - our current car can only seat 2 people and Matt is always required, so for this we can only invite Justin White.
• A driver of the getaway vehicle - Matt cannot drive, so we always need an accomplice with a skill in cars.
• A plan.

I know that later heists will require acquiring information about the target location, considerations for the skills of our accomplices, and bigger or faster cars. I will expand on this in further gameplay posts, but for our first burglary, I’m sticking with the high-level explanation.

The setup for our first burglary.

Choosing “Drawing up a plan” brings us to the real meat of the game. In planning mode, we can assign actions to every member of our group. For the Kiosk, the plan looks like this:

Matt walks up to the front door…
…and uses the jemmy to break it open
Afterwards, he walks up to a valuables case…
…breaks it open with the jemmy…
…and takes both a cigar case and some money
Finally, he walks back to the car where he arrives 1:20 minutes
Change Person to Justin, who starts at 0:00
Wait for 23 seconds (because Matt needs to break open the door)
Walk into the Kiosk…
…use the jemmy to break open the cash register…
…take the money in it
Walk back to the car

Matt breaks open the door.

Matt takes some loot.

Switching over to Justin.

Justin waits for Matt to open the door.

Everyone needs to end up in the car.

The different tools take a different amount of time, and might require specific skills. Matt needs 15 seconds to break the front door open with the jemmy, 46 seconds with his foot, and 69 seconds with his bare hands. That said, trying to use Matt’s hand or foot makes him tell us that he’s not the right man for this - I assume this requires either more strength or a certain skill that he doesn’t have.

Every accomplice needs to end up back at the car for the plan to be valid, since they all need to escape in said car. Both Matt and Justin are back at the car by the 1:20 minute mark.

I could have approached this differently: Matt could have broken open the cash register as well, which would have added some time to the plan. Or Justin could have done everything. Splitting up tasks between all accomplices is important both for time, because of the different skills, and to avoid accumulating too much evidence (more on that below).

If I want to make a change, I can undo actions by selecting “Walk” and pressing the Escape key to undo an action (which includes non-walk actions). I can change between accomplices at any time, and undoing actions doesn’t affect other accomplice plans. Overall, I find the planning experience pretty intuitive once I figured out how to undo actions.

Of note is that the plan would allow for invalid actions. For example, if I was undoing all of Matt’s actions but not Justin’s, she would try to walk through the closed door, which works fine in planning mode but will fail during the real burglary. So there is an element of keeping all parts of the plan working together while changing it that I appreciate.

Playing back the plan…

We can store up to 4 plans for each location, and these plans are stored independently from the save game, so they can be re-used in future playthroughs. It is required that you have the same accomplices and tools to use the plan. From the plan menu, we can also watch the plan being played out, with the ability to go forward or rewind. I save the game in one of four save slots, and run the burglary for real.

...and executing it for real. The “escape” option would abort the burglary early, in case something goes terribly wrong.

The burglary goes off without a hitch, and we escape with our car. The game shows our car moving from right to left, at a speed that depends on the car and the road surface, for a length that depends on the length of the escape route (the Kiosk escape route is 10 kilometers through the city). If we were chased by the police, we’d see a police car trying to catch us. No such need here, we’ll escape and that’s that.

It’s like watching a progress bar, in reverse.

What follows next is a police investigation where any traces are secured. Accomplices leave traces when they’re waiting, walking, working, fighting, talking, or being photographed. The police will build a dossier over time, which might make it more likely to catch them in the future.

Since Matt is always required, I hope I’m not building up too much evidence.

Back in our hotel room, Matt feels wonderful, and gets a call from Briggs. What is this call about? And what are we going to do with the 380 pounds worth of loot that we just stole? I’ll tell you next time! I will also tell you of alternative ways I could have approached the introduction to the game.

Spoiler warning: We will end up with significantly less than 380 pounds.

Session Time: 1 hour 00 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour 00 minutes