THE BRiLLiANT COUP review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Impressive facets of this charming old-school heist adventure make for a hidden gem in need of just a bit more polish

When I was in my late teens, I spent ages sneaking all over London, staking out fancy-looking mansions and museums promising all kinds of valuables, recruiting accomplices with their own individual specialties in obtaining items hard to come by, then meticulously planning thefts. No, I wasn’t pretending to be Arsène Lupin. It was The Clue! that had stolen my heart, a 1994 Austrian burglary simulation game with point-and-click adventure elements, inspired by the 1986 game They Stole a Million. I never succeeded in finishing The Clue! though; that final heist always got the better of me.

Thirty years later, solo developer Markus Creative, who once worked on The Clue! as well, has released THE BRiLLiANT COUP, transforming that burglary theme into a more traditional 2D pixel art adventure game. And it's quite a tricky one, rattling my brain numerous times, but in a good and challenging way, with a healthy variety of puzzles. It's nothing like The Clue! except for a couple of returning character names. Instead of breaking into 18 different places, it concentrates on just one major job: stealing a large gem from the fortress-like Trustman Bank by means of inventory puzzles and tricking non-playable characters. Doing so will provide eight hours of fun puzzling, sometimes figuring things out on your own, and sometimes just following directions.

It’s England, 1987. Matt Stuvysunt is about to get evicted from his apartment because he can’t make rent after losing his job. Naturally, the only solution to this problem is turning to a life of crime. As if the man were clairvoyant, Matt’s uncle Briggs calls him up with a timely proposal: to steal the world famous Arctic Star diamond. Briggs, a well-known petty criminal, devises a full plan as well, which you as the player will have to help bring to fruition. During the course of the game, you’ll need to obtain the blueprints of the bank by conniving your way into the director’s office and the city archives, convince a handful of accomplices to help you out, and eventually put the plan into action.

THE BRiLLiANT COUP borrows heavily from well-known 80s and 90s adventure classics, which fits the game’s late 80s setting. It employs a nine-verb user interface, with an icon-based inventory right next to it. Sometimes it takes trying out a couple of verbs before Matt actually does what you initially intended. The verb “use” isn’t as universally applicable as you might think, for instance. Making things a bit more accessible, right-clicking a hotspot directly causes Matt to examine the object and give a description of it.

Those descriptions are often quite funny, making Matt a very likeable scoundrel. Since there are no voice-overs, the script can go all out with elaborate replies, though the generic “No, I won’t do that!” comment often still results when you try the wrong thing. You can change the dialogue speed in the settings, but you can also click to progress, which often caused me to click away the next line too fast when the first one was very short and thus already progressing on its own right before I clicked.

A peculiar addition to the inventory is Matt’s brain, all bright and shiny pink. Most of the time it serves only as a very basic objective reminder, which is handy should you come back after having left the game for a while and have forgotten what you’re supposed to be doing. A couple of times, though, you can also “use” Matt’s brain like a hint system to remember a piece of information that has slipped his mind, such as Uncle Briggs’s secret meeting place. It wasn’t clear to me I needed to do this at first, thinking I had to search around for that information instead, so I was surprised when the information came pretty much automatically, out of nowhere. Elsewhere the brain can be used to refresh your own memory, such as reminders of crucial locker numbers you’ve found throughout the game.

The streets are brought to life with all kinds of animations and sound effects: a plane flying by in the distance, a train rumbling across a bridge above an alley, flies buzzing around dustbins, a vagrant guzzling from his liquor bottle. There’s heavy traffic downtown, with a stereotypical Italian jingle playing whenever the pizza deliverer zooms past. The characters resemble bobblehead figurines, especially when they walk, but they have several facial expressions as well. Matt will often sport a look of surprise, or burst out laughing, and Uncle Briggs has regular coughing fits, with his phlegm spraying all over the place. There are a couple of references to other adventure games, but they aren’t overdone and basically hidden Easter eggs. One is even locked up in a room for which you need to find a special key – a room that serves no other purpose than to give you that chuckle when you discover what it contains.

Another fun aspect of the game is its soundtrack. Trumpets, drums, bass guitar, and lots more instruments all come together to provide a big band vibe. Each location has its own score, giving the whole experience a very playful and dashing feel, as if you’re watching a new iteration of Ocean’s Eleven.

THE BRiLLiANT COUP

Genre:	Comedy, Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Heist
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

Where THE BRiLLiANT COUP shines even brighter is its nonlinear freedom. It’s not truly open world, but the city has several streets and buildings you can explore, many characters you can interact with, and dozens of items and tools you can gather, and you are always free to go about your business. The entire game is one big burglary preparation, leading to one of four possible endings, depending on your eye for detail. You can take the Tube to five different areas of the city, and you’ll have to travel back and forth between them to solve puzzles. Matt never throws anything away once it has proven its usefulness, instead relying on the player to tidy up the inventory. You will find several dustbins scattered about, and you can try throwing items away. Matt will always keep the important ones, but if something is allowed to go, he’ll chuck it.

The inventory puzzles aren’t that hard, though some do take some ingenuity to figure out. When I found myself stuck for a longer time, however, it always turned out I didn’t utilize one special inventory item enough: a huge mobile phone. Matt can contact not only Uncle Briggs, but also his friend-in-crime Stumpy, and even the bank’s director. I spent loads of time searching everywhere for something that would help me progress, when in fact all it took was a phone call to the right person to help me out, either by providing a key object or coming to my assistance personally.

During the course of the game, you will also have to assemble some inventory items yourself. These puzzles are presented in a sort of recipe style. First you need to acquire all the individual components on your shopping list, then you have to follow instructions on how to use them together. In another place, you need to deduce a safe combination by deciphering some basic mathematics on a code sheet (it looks harder than it actually is, and you can trust me because I failed math twice at school), and even translate a long Roman numeral into regular numbers. All this brings welcome variety to the gameplay. Personally, perhaps due to my earlier fondness of the gameplay in The Clue!, I would have liked a more active role in preparing the burglary itself. I’d have enjoyed drawing up the actual plans and telling my accomplices where to go, what to do and what to use, but that might have scared off people looking for a regular point-and-click experience.

The city is filled with red herrings – loads of hotspots that you’ll never have to use, though you CAN use them if you want. Like buying grape juice from a vending machine, or using a toilet. At the same time, though, there are many hiding spots where you might find something of importance, like a huge dumpster where people might throw away stuff you can recycle, or piles of fallen leaves that might conceal something underneath. It’s not exactly pixel hunting, but if you’re not aware of their potential usefulness, you might simply pass them by dozens of times while searching for alternate solutions.

The game does suffer a couple of minor hiccups, such as some locations not correctly displaying hotspot labels. Inside the bank, for example, after you have examined one hotspot, its label remains fixed on screen (right above the user interface), even when hovering over other hotspots, until you click on something else to make it go away. Another issue is that it’s not always easy to exhaust all dialogue options when talking to someone. During some exchanges, you’ll suddenly find yourself back on a higher branch of the dialogue tree after asking a question, or you may even get completely thrown out of the conversation. You then need to ask the same preliminary question again first, in order to ask all of the other follow-up questions, which is kind of a drag. I noticed it right near the start of the game, but thankfully most conversations don’t have this problem.

THE BRiLLiANT COUP autosaves on exit, but also provides six manual save slots to store your progress. These are especially handy once you decide to go in and steal the Arctic Star, because it’s your actions inside the bank and the dialogue choices you make back outside that define which of four possible endings you get. Throughout the game, you could learn of other safe deposit boxes in the bank that might be worth robbing as well. At the game’s penultimate moment, you can only open a limited number of boxes, and you have to decide which ones. Some hold great riches, others only slim pickings, and some are even completely worthless. Except for one particular box – the contents of which you'll need to get the best ending – what you steal from the bank has no influence on the story, only the amount of loot you acquire to divide among all accomplices. But of course if you want to be a real burglar, you just HAVE to aim for the biggest treasure, right?

Final Verdict

While THE BRiLLiANT COUP doesn’t allow you to actively plan the heist of the Arctic Star, playing assistant to Uncle Briggs is certainly a satisfying foray into a life of crime. The game is decidedly old-school in its approach, and still has a few rough edges left to smooth, but it’s sure to steal your heart with its funky music and loads of subtle animations that bring the late-80s British streets to life. And it definitely achieves what it sets out to do: tricking people to get your hands on blueprints, convincing accomplices to join you, and then coordinating them to do their part of the job will keep you busy for a decent eight hours of traditional-style adventure gaming. While there’s never any true sense of danger or getting caught, there is a point of no return that determines how successful you are in the heist. While I didn’t manage to get the most loot, I did make off with a fair amount and was able to escape abroad for some well-deserved time off – hopefully with more irresistible future targets still to come.

Johnny played THE BRiLLiANT COUP on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.          

• Advertisement
• Help support AGH by advertising with us