The Marvellous Miss Take

I keep coming back to the feeling of playing The Marvellous Miss Take for the first time and realising the game wanted me to move, not crouch. Most stealth titles are about patience - about waiting in some dimly lit corner for the right moment. Wonderstruck's indie heist flips that contract. The galleries are bright, cartoonish, cel-shaded London interiors, and the soundtrack has the loping, brassy confidence of a 1960s heist film. That combination of visual warmth and musical swagger signals the game's intent clearly: this is stealth as a quick-reflex puzzle, not a meditation. You play as Sophia Take, a London heiress whose inherited art collection was swindled away by a greedy collector and scattered across 25 galleries. Joining her across the run are Harry, an older thief with a bum leg who can't run but carries a noise-making ball to lure guards - and who must retrieve it before he can leave - and Daisy, a nimble teenage pickpocket who carries no gadgets at all but can lift keys directly off guards to crack open locked safes. The three-character structure means each of the 25 gallery layouts is effectively played three times, with the map geometry tweaked per character: dogs replacing certain guards, security doors appearing where they didn't before. On paper, 75 total mission slices sounds like padding. In practice it functions more like the game teaching you its own levels from three different angles, each one asking you to unlearn what the last character trained you to rely on. The core loop is mouse-only and deliberately stripped back. Left-click to walk, hold to run, right-click to throw your current gadget - noisemakers, smoke bombs, a teleporter in later stages. Guards have visible blue sight cones and randomised patrol routes, meaning no two attempts at a level play out identically. That randomness is the game's clearest fault line in the critical record, and it is real: sometimes guards cluster in the one room you need to cross, or post up directly in front of the exit elevator, and success starts to feel less like skill and more like waiting for the RNG to cooperate. The cramped gallery corridors don't help when pathfinding occasionally takes Sophia around an obstacle in the wrong direction. These are genuine frustrations, not ones the game ever fully resolves. Difficulty spikes between chapters arrive without much ceremony - dogs and security cameras suddenly stacking on top of guard randomness can tip individual levels from tense into exhausting. What saves it, and what the middling Metacritic of 69 doesn't entirely capture, is that the underlying read-and-react design is sound. Information is always visible: sight cones, noise radiuses, your own concealment status. When a level clicks and you ghost through it using a smoke bomb to split a guard cluster, then sprint past a camera blind spot while Daisy lifts a key in a single fluid motion, the whole thing feels genuinely alive. The start screen, which fills in paintings as you reclaim them, is a small but lovely bit of craft - the kind of detail that shows Wonderstruck cared about the texture of progress, not just the destination. The cel-shaded art holds up, and the soundtrack remains a highlight that some reviewers singled out specifically for evoking the heist-film era Wonderstruck was clearly chasing. That mood is consistent throughout, even when the mechanics chafe. The honest read: this is a niche game for a specific player. If you can tolerate runs restarting because a guard wandered the wrong way through a door, and you find the three-character framework interesting rather than repetitive, there is a genuinely clever little stealth puzzler here that deserved more attention than it received at launch. If randomised AI unpredictability makes you put controllers through walls, do not let the charming exterior convince you otherwise.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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