The Swindle

I have started a lot of roguelites with a smug sense of calm and finished their opening sequences in a cold sweat. The Swindle managed that transition faster than almost anything else I can think of. Size Five Games built a 2D stealth-platformer around a single, beautifully cruel idea: you have 100 days, one heist per day, and a ticking countdown before Scotland Yard activates a mass-surveillance AI called the Devil's Basilisk that will end your criminal career for good. Waste days, run out of upgrades, or simply make one bad jump, and the whole run collapses. There is no tutorial to soften that reality. The structure underneath that pressure is genuinely clever. You begin in the grimy slums of a steampunk Victorian London, lifting loose coins from poorly guarded homes. Every successful heist funds upgrades back on your rickety airship base: quad-jump boots, wall-stick traversal, bombs to blast through floors, a hacking tool that lets you drain computers for far larger payouts, and eventually the ability to turn guard-bots against each other. Six district tiers, from slums to banks to Scotland Yard itself, unlock as your bankroll grows. Each building is procedurally generated, so the layout of your target is always a surprise. The sound design is worth lingering on: each district pulses with its own low, erratic score, and the moment an alarm fires, the music lurches into something panicked that perfectly mirrors what your hands are doing on the controller. Weather effects audibly shift when you move indoors. These are the kinds of quiet craft decisions that make a mood feel lived-in. Here is where I have to be honest with you, because the community is split almost down the middle on this game and that split is real and fair. The procedural generation occasionally produces levels that are effectively impossible without specific upgrades you may not have yet. Cameras sitting directly above computers, underground cash caches with no accessible entry point, clusters of robot guards whose overlapping patrol lines leave no gap. In a game where every failed day costs you time you cannot recover, that randomness stops feeling like variety and starts feeling like the game arguing with itself. The upgrade dependency is also steeper than comparable roguelites: The Swindle essentially communicates which tools you need through failure rather than through design, and early runs can feel less like skill expression and more like paying tuition. A successful run clocks in at roughly six hours, but many players will see significantly more time than that before one clicks. And yet. When the heist works, when you slide down a wall to avoid a patrolling sentry, hack a computer for a fat payout, clip a crow-bot over the head with your billy club on the way out, and make it back to the airship with the alarm still ringing behind you, the satisfaction is exact and specific in a way that few games manage. The named thieves, each procedurally generated and each given an impossibly British name, have a charm to them that makes their deaths genuinely sting. The steampunk art style, all smog-stained London silhouettes and clockwork guards, holds together with real aesthetic intention. This is a handcrafted world wearing procedural clothes, and most of the time that tension produces something worth experiencing. Go in knowing that the early hours are friction by design, that some runs will end through no fault of your own, and that the upgrade tree rewards patience over aggression. If the Spelunky-adjacent loop of mastery-through-repeated-death speaks to you, The Swindle has a specific, moody, underappreciated thing to offer. If you need fairness from your roguelites, the mixed reception it carries is an honest warning.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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