The Swindle

There’s a specific kind of tragedy in games criticism: the near-miss. Not the cynical cash-grab, not the broken launch, but the genuinely smart idea that trips over one unglamorous piece of engineering. The Swindle is that game.

The setup is one of the best pitches in the indie space. It’s 1849 London, except the London of a steampunk fever dream, and Scotland Yard is about to boot up the Devil’s Basilisk — a total-surveillance AI that will make theft permanently impossible. You have 100 in-game days to get good enough to steal it. That’s it. That’s the frame, and it does an enormous amount of work: every decision in the game is measured against a countdown you cannot pause, negotiate with, or grind your way out of.

Size Five Games is Dan Marshall’s outfit, a studio with a track record of British comic sensibility and mechanical ambition — the same lineage that produced Gun Monkeys and later Lair of the Clockwork God. That DNA is all over this. The airship hideout, the hand-drawn Victorian grime, the jazzy heist soundtrack: this is a game with an aesthetic point of view, made by people who clearly know what a caper should feel like.

The market position is trickier. The Swindle arrived on July 28, 2015, in the thick of the roguelike gold rush, into a genre conversation already dominated by Spelunky — a game whose entire reputation rests on frame-perfect, trustworthy platforming. The Swindle wanted to be the stealth answer to that question. Its Metacritic score of 70 hints at how that argument settled. Not a failure, but a split decision, and the split is remarkably consistent: the praise and the complaints point at the same two things.

What’s great is the tension. What’s broken is the jump.

• Permadeath With Persistent Upgrades: Kill a thief and they’re gone forever, along with every shilling they were carrying. But the tech you bought stays. It’s a hybrid model — punishing on the run, generous on the meta — and it’s the single smartest structural decision in the game.
• The 100-Day Doomsday Clock: A hard global timer that turns every level into an economic decision. There is no safe grind. Every day spent farming a low-tier district is a day not spent preparing for the Basilisk.
• Branching Tech Tree: Loot buys longer hacking range, silent footsteps, bombs, teleport devices, and the district keys that unlock richer, deadlier neighbourhoods. Progression is horizontal as often as vertical — you’re unlocking verbs, not stat bumps.
• Procedurally-Generated, Never-Repeated Buildings: Every job is a fresh layout of cameras, patrolling automatons, trap floors, and safes. No level is ever served twice.
• The Extraction Gamble: Cash only banks if you reach the escape point alive. Everything in your pockets is unrealised. This is the whole game in one sentence.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip away the steampunk and the loop here is nearly perfect on paper. You drop into a building. You case it. You hack terminals for small money, crack safes for real money, and every action you take raises your exposure. Cameras sweep. Automatons patrol. The floor might be a trap. Somewhere above you is a roof, and the roof is the only place your money becomes money.

That last clause is where the design earns its keep. The Swindle’s core tension isn’t stealth — it’s greed. Stealth games usually ask “can you get through?” This one asks “when do you stop?” You’ve got £4,000 in your pocket and there’s one more safe two rooms over, behind a camera you haven’t mapped. The safe is worth £2,500. Dying costs you £4,000 and a thief you’ve been building across multiple runs. There is no correct answer, only a read on your own nerve, and that’s the sensation good roguelikes are built to manufacture.

The tech tree feeds this beautifully. Because upgrades persist through death, a catastrophic run is never a total write-off — you bank what you learned even when you don’t bank what you stole. That softens the permadeath enough to keep the loop turning, and the district-unlock gating gives the 100 days real shape. You’re gaining new options, not bigger numbers. You’re deciding how fast to escalate, knowing that every tier up multiplies both the payout and the failure cost.

Where It Breaks

Then you jump, and the whole thing wobbles.

The platforming is the load-bearing wall, and it isn’t rated for the load. The jump is floaty. The edge-grab is inconsistent enough that muscle memory can’t be built around it. In a game where a single mistimed input deletes a fully-upgraded character and a run’s worth of accumulated cash, imprecision isn’t a rough edge — it’s a betrayal of the core contract. Spelunky is brutal, but Spelunky is honest; when you die there, you know exactly which of your inputs was wrong. Here, a meaningful share of deaths land in the ambiguous zone where it’s impossible to tell whether the gap was misjudged or the grab simply didn’t register.

That ambiguity poisons the greed mechanic. The “one more safe” gamble only works if the execution layer can be trusted to honour a correct decision. Once it can’t, the rational play becomes cowardice — bank early, take nothing, run the roof. The design wants players to push. The controls teach them not to. Those are two systems fighting each other, and the player loses.

The procedural generation has a shorter fuse than it should, too. The early buildings are surprising. But the generator’s vocabulary is finite, and before long it becomes legible — recognising room grammar rather than reading rooms, the buildings blurring into a set of recombined modules. For a game whose entire promise is “no level is ever repeated,” a run that feels repeated is a damning technicality. Novelty of layout isn’t the same as novelty of experience.

Onboarding and Pacing Friction

The 100-day limit is defensible design and a genuine source of complaints, and both things are true at once. It’s the right call for the fantasy — the Basilisk is a deadline, and a deadline you can ignore is set dressing. But it collides head-on with the permadeath economy. Lose a couple of high-tier thieves in a bad stretch and the run can spiral beyond recovery, the clock burning while the roster rebuilds. The game offers no meaningful pressure valve. Anyone who wanted to learn the systems at their own pace finds the door locked, and being told they wanted the wrong thing doesn’t make the friction disappear.

The presentation is the least controversial thing here, and deservedly so. The hand-drawn Victorian-steampunk art has actual authorship — soot-stained brickwork, brass-and-rivet automatons, a rickety airship hideout that reads as home base without a single tutorial prompt explaining that it is. The palette does real gameplay work, keeping hazards legible against busy backgrounds.

The soundtrack is the unsung hero. That jazzy, plucked-bass caper score does something clever: it stays cool while the heist falls apart, which is exactly the tonal gap that makes heist fiction fun. It insists you’re a suave professional at the precise moment everything is going wrong.

Technically, this is a modest 2D game of modest scope, and it’s light on hardware by design — nothing here should trouble a machine from the last decade. The interface is clean and mostly gets out of the way; the upgrade tree in particular is readable at a glance, which matters when purchase decisions are being made under a countdown.

Steam is the definitive version, and the reason is input precision. In a game this unforgiving about jump timing, keyboard or a wired controller on a high-refresh display gives the tightest possible link between intent and outcome. If the platforming is already the weak point, every millisecond counts.

Nintendo Switch is the more interesting proposition and the more compromised one. The pitch is obvious: a run-based, session-friendly heist game is a natural fit for handheld, and “one more building before bed” is exactly the shape of this loop. But handheld is where the trade-offs surface. The Joy-Con analog stick is a poor instrument for precise 2D platforming — the d-pad is the better choice, and the Joy-Con d-pad is famously not a d-pad. Add the smaller screen, where scanning a room for camera cones and trap-floor tells is harder, and the game’s existing precision problem gets compounded by a control and readability tax. A Pro Controller closes most of the gap. Buy accordingly.

• Roguelike veterans with high frustration tolerance — specifically people who finished Spelunky and want that tension in a stealth wrapper, and who can forgive a jump that isn’t as trustworthy.
• Players who love resource-management tension over twitch execution — if the “do I push or do I bank?” decision is the part of roguelikes that matters most, few games in the genre deliver it better.
• Aesthetics-first buyers — the Victorian steampunk look and the jazz-caper score are worth the price of admission on a sale, independent of the mechanical issues.
• Not for you if: you want to grind at your own pace, or you consider imprecise platforming a dealbreaker. Both complaints are real and neither gets better with practice.

The Swindle is a great design document and a merely good game, and the gap between those two things is almost entirely mechanical. Every high-level decision here is smart: the deadline, the persistent-upgrade permadeath hybrid, the extraction gamble, the tech tree that hands you new options instead of bigger numbers. Those systems interlock with real elegance, and in its early stretches the game they produce is tense in a way very few stealth games manage.

But the floor gives out at the input layer. A game that deletes your character for a single missed edge-grab has to make that edge-grab bulletproof, and this one didn’t. That’s not a taste issue — it’s a specification failure, and it’s why the critical reception settled at a split rather than a rave. The middling scores aren’t a mystery. They’re the ratio of people willing to eat a bad jump for a great gamble.

At $14.99, this is a hard recommendation for most people: wait for a sale, play with a proper controller, and go in knowing some deaths won’t be your fault. What’s underneath that frustration is one of the most interesting heist loops anyone has built. It just deserved better hands.