Getting Out of Monaco Alive.
8-bit Neocean’s Eleven?
This is taken from an article originally posted on the videogame zine, Unveiled Codex. Check it out here.
We were one coin away from clearing out the place, when my teammate and I were shot to death in ‘Manoir Moucharder’. This wasn’t the first time I had seen our skeletons scrawled on the sectional plans of whatever Bank, House, Boat, Government Facility or Prison we were trying to rob. In fact, I couldn’t tell you the exact number of times I had seen ourselves fail in the eternal hunt for gold. I can’t count that high.
When I first heard about Monaco a year or two ago, I was excited to play a top-down stealth game that had the aesthetic of an 8-bit Drive. Growing up watching films like Ocean’s Eleven (original and the remake) all I’ve ever wanted to do is pull a heist. Unfortunately the law precludes me from doing that. Monaco satisfies that dream — for the time being.
Please don’t misunderstand this to mean that I am skilled at this virtual life of crime. I am not. Monaco is an exercise in controlled patience and in my case — frustration and failure. I want to get in, get the goods and get out. I do not tread lightly, I tread fast. This is a mistake I make repeatedly. Of course its not a mistake for some. At the opening of each level as your crew discuss the narrative reasons for the heist you’re about to pull (except for The Cleaner. He doesn’t really discuss things.) you are met with a display of the record times for the level — usually somewhere between a third and a quarter of the time our crew completes it in. So clearly I have the right idea and just terrible execution.
Let’s say, unlike me (or my partner-in-crime, Editor-in-chief: Ibrahim) you play the game the way its meant to be played. Correctly. You, as the Lookout run point on this heist, your particular skillset of having a Daredevil-esque awareness of your surroundings, are also a benefit to your crew. You avoid the flashlights of the guards, you do not trip the security lasers, your cleaner takes out a curious guard silently, your monkey picks up all the gold you might have missed (yes, there is a monkey). You control the pace. And the game will reflect that. The silent-film era, ragtime piano tunes are reminiscient of an earlier time but just eery enough to make you feel there is some wrong-doing happening just around the corner and perhaps the cautious guard of this manor should check it out. He asks, to no one in particular, “Qui est là?”, in his Monacon accent and then there is a fantastically satifying ‘crunch’ sound as everything goes black. He was just knocked out by your Cleaner. You move through the house collecting your gold silently, you see a guard emailing his parents about the lack of fulfillment from his job. That’s fine. He won’t have one tomorrow.
As you empty the safes of the manor for all the diamond shaped gold coins it’s got, the fire in the living room still roars. You work your way back outside to the getaway vehicle sitting in the rain and escape into the night. What was theirs is now yours.
Of course, you could play it the way we did. Impatiently. Chaotically. We were haphhazard, we tripped security lasers, alerted “innocent citizens” and guards to our prescence. We would try and play it stealthily, mess up once and SPRINT FOR THE GOLD LIKE OUR LIVES DEPENDED ON IT. And it did. We died many times. All we could hear were alarms, gunshots, the French screams of the citizens and the old-timey piano accurately representing the chaos of the world we had recently left.
There was one time, we accidentally left our match set as ‘public’, and a ‘Lookout’ known as Scruffy joined us for a game. He played very well and we were terrible. He had to revive us countless times. We thought he would jump out of our game when we finished the first level. He did not. He stayed for three more. We only improved slightly over that period too. At one point I even revived Scruffy. He eventually left us due to a disconnection error on my part, closing the game but I felt for a moment — we had a real crew. We looked out for each other, we had each others backs, we revived each other — we even killed for each other. We were a crew.
The thing that Monaco does especially well I think, is handle your tension as you progress through the level. If you move past a guard’s eyeline a question mark slowly fills up over his head. He’s getting curious. If you stay in his sights for too long, that punctuation becomes an exclamation mark. He realizes who you are and what you are here for. And so he shoots you. As you play the game you understand more about what actions you take affect the guards curiosity and then it becomes a game of risk vs. reward. Figuring out the best route through a space — I could take Route A to the Basement where there’s only one guard but I’ll definitely be seen or take route 2 where there’s 3 but I could concievably make it through undetected. Monaco acts out this tension with the laser puzzles as well. If you hack the computers they’re connected to, you can disable them, allowing the rest of your crew easy passage — but the laser swings. You only have so much time to hack the computer. You run, click, see the laser swing away, the little octagon above your avatar’s head telling you how close you are to shutting the damn thing off — the laser swings back. Hopefully you’ll make it. Monaco is, appropriately, a game of risk vs. reward.
That aspect of risk vs. reward in Monaco’s DNA comes from a lot of places. Metal Gear Solid, 1920s silent films, Atari videogames, even arguably Pac-man. It is also none of those things. Monaco feels old-school without any of the drawbacks of playing a truly old-school videogame. Visually, the game aspires to be a cross between a pixel-perfect 8-bit game and a detailed set of architect’s plans, all the while maintaining this polygonal looking glass you see Monaco’s world through. It does this successfully. It is stylish, and tense in exactly the way it should be. The levels are architected, perhaps not for living in but certainly in such a manner as to be challenging for a group of thieves to infiltrate.
Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine, is a videogame where you gather a crew of yourself and three friends, you assign your roles, you get in, you get the gold and you get out. What’s theirs is now yours.
This was originally an article for the videogame zine Unveiled Codex. You should check it out. Kumail Rizvi is an architecture student at the University of Brighton. You can check out more of his work here, or contact him on twitter.
