This is a solid title. I bought it blind, as is fun to do sometimes, and was mildly delighted with what I found.
The graphics, though yet ANOTHER entry in the pixel style glut, add a lot to the game. In particular, the animations actually provide helpful information about what works, how to do things, etc. I can't fault the designers here, stylistic approach worn thin or otherwise.
The audio is nearly as good, but not quite. It matches the presentation, but isn't as full or detailed. I muted it eventually to make room for listening to audiobooks.
The controls never let me down. The simplicity of everything at hand does a lot of the lifting here. That I don't even remember how the controls work, button for button, testifies to that - it's all so fluidly natural that I never even pondered it.
You run around as a brat, slipping and dodge-rolling behind innocent old folks, nursing home staff, security, and a host of more dangerous fellas, screaming to scare them. You make the old people faint, snatch their cash, and make for the exit. There are doors and environmental objects at your disposal to help aid or mask your activities. The challenges of each level arise from the way all of the elements are clustered. Arcade stealth silliness.
The only mandatory part of this challenge, which is to say the gate-keeping element of the game, is having all of the geriatric sprites knocked out of commission simultaneously for a moment, which opens the elevator doors to the next level. The nursing staff, in their ability to resuscitate the old folks or each other, are the biggest obstacle to this, forcing you to retrace steps and waste precious time if not careful enough in your planning. The aggressor NPCs provide mostly obstacles to your movement, in their myriad ways.
There are time and cash challenges for each level, which contribute to the old 'out-of-three' star rating given each completed level. As far as I could tell, a perfect run of star ratings never unlocked, advanced, or otherwise contributed to anything but whatever stock one puts in 'gamer pride' (none, myself) so I abandoned my perfect streak around level 95 of 99, as the levels started to get a little absurd for my level of commitment. However, if there are more endings than the one which I saw, this star rating is the only possible metric to affect it, and thus presents its place in the design.
Whatever compromise I made there was quite unpleasant, let me just say. I'd like to say something about the ending.
I'm not totally thrilled with the weirdly spiking violence that occurs at times through the game. It's not painfully tasteless or dark in tone - some moderating hand did its work here, one senses - yet there is still the matter of a small child (even criminal unruliness of the child does not excuse here) being shot and maimed in a few brutal death animations. For example, there's a 'robotic police officer' type enemy (it's no mystery) that kills you instantly if it sees you. You WILL die at least a few times at its merciless hands, and the results are ugly. It's just discordant to the rest of the game, which is overall very impish, but not so doggedly edgy.
The ending I saw employs the same eye-rolling edginess in a move motivated, I suspect, by misguided appeal to gamer humor. What was the point?
I liked the game well more than enough to overlook these few stupid decisions. It's short (in a good way), to the point, and fun.
