We need more heist videogames!
Don’t get me wrong, we already have Payday, we already have The Swindle, and of course we already have Grand Theft Auto V. But these games are all more “Heat” than “Ocean’s 11.” We need more suave, non-violent games where it feels like you’re manipulating and hacking a building to your will – and executing a plan to perfection.
When we started building Relooted years ago, this was our goal. We made many prototypes. We tried many things. But we didn’t make much headway.
Laying the Groundwork
The problem lay in hidden information. The best heist movies are similar to detective stories – you don’t know who killed the victim until the end. In heist movies, you never really know the plan and how they pull it off until you’re in the heist montage at the end. But how can you keep the plan of a heist from a player when they are the one making the plan AND executing it?
We were stuck on this problem until the impeccable Teardown came out. As it should, Teardown gets a lot of praise for its destructible terrain mechanics, but its core gameplay loop is brilliant as well. Pick up your target, and the alarm goes off – you only have 30 seconds to get out after that, so better make sure you’ve planned your route out of there.
Inspired by this loop, we decided to try this out with Relooted, and it instantly clicked and made sense. Explore the space, set up your team members, manipulate the guards to where you need them and flow through your escape. Relooted takes this incredible loop and builds upon it, adding crew members, a different perspective, and even more heist tropes! In Relooted, each heist is made up of three phases: casing the joint, setting up the plan, and executing it.
Executing the Plan
When casing the joint, you get an understanding of the space – where the obstacles you might need to address are, and placing your crew members where you’ll need their help. Your brain develops a sense of the building and the space and gets an idea of the possible routes to escape when the sirens begin to blare.
In the setup phase, you specify the details. Your crew member might be assigned, but do you want them to grapple you up somewhere? Or throw you through a window? There is a security shutter that will close – do you block it from closing, or go around it?
In the escape phase, whatever the choices you’ve made, you can flow through your plan. Your crew appearing where they should be at just the right moment, your character, Nomali, effortlessly maneuvering over and under obstacles in her path.
The goal of Relooted was always to make you feel like you were in a heist montage from a movie of your own planning.
Complications Arise
Figuring out how to enable players to pull off these heist montages was an interesting problem! All plans (in life and in Relooted) are made up of a series of steps. Move from here to there, jump here, grapple up here, etc. Because the human mind can only hold onto roughly 7 things at a time, each step has to be quite simple. Each puzzle has to be quite simple.
Each individual puzzle in Relooted is only a few steps to solve if you can figure it out. But each heist, each level, is made up of 5-15 puzzles that you have to solve and execute in one go in the escape! Once you’ve figured out these puzzles, you’ve created your plan. Executing them as the alarms go off with your pre-prepared solutions becomes your heist montage.
