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It is fascinating to think about the numbers that developers choose to work with, and 100 - a plain old century - is the most intriguing number that has come my way in quite a while. The Swindle gives you 100 days to prepare for its final mission, and while that's enough time to allow you to work around unforeseen accidents, it's also enough time to ensure that failure will really sting. On my first attempt, those 100 days of build-up culminated in a mission that lasted 12 seconds start to finish, and ended, as all unsuccessful missions do, with a blizzard of banknotes and the crumpled thunk of a sodden body impacting on the cobblestones.The Swindle's a knockabout 2D platformer at heart: a Spelunky-flavoured, steampunky muddle of stealth and violence in which you rob a series of procedurally scrambled mansions. Who doesn't like a good caper? But when this game swipes at you with its claws, it can draw blood, and that 100-day time limit is the reason. You will really love this, or you will really hate it, I suspect. I really love it.
We're in Alternate Victorian London here, surrounded by clanking robots and rattling blimps. The world is viewed through a thick smudge of dirt and smoke, and technology, by and large, tends to look like it might be an early form of Teasmaid. In 100 days, Scotland Yard will turn on The Devil's Basilisk, a mass surveillance system that will basically end all crime for good. Cast as a criminal - or rather a whole motley of them - you have a certain vested interest in this not happening, so you hatch a plan to swipe the bobbies' nasty machine before it's been activated. Kitting out for that final mission is going to cost you money, though, which means 100 days of increasingly risky robberies as you spend your way through the necessary upgrade trees. Voila: a pleasant sense of escalation and a comment on government surveillance. Its mere existence fundamentally alters the behaviour of the population it is spying on - and not in a good way.
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