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Heist: The Crime of the Century - Review

Review by Canalboy

Ratings

Parser/Vocabulary
7
Atmosphere
6
Cruelty
Cruel
Puzzles
9
Overall
7
Written:
22-07-2025
Last edited:
Platform:
PC

Heist is one of Andy Phillips's mid-era exercises in masochism. It is more user friendly than his earler TATCTAE but then that wouldn't be difficult. Each section contains several chances to soft lock yourself out of victory however, as well as a few instances of moon logic. The final section veers into the murky depths of surreal images, floating shapes and ridiculously obtuse puzzles that make William Burroughs look like Enid Blyton. Just save a lot. Don't do like I did initially and forget to take your bag with you as you will need it to carry all necessary items into the elevator with you.

Having said that, there is still something addictive about Andy's games that keeps me from throwing in the towel. All one hundred and twenty-eight locations of it.




Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 7/10)

GAG should be implemented in one place but isn't. There is another puzzle with a sweet that lacks an appropriate verb. On the whole though the parser is pretty exhaustive.

Atmosphere (Rating: 6/10)

Andy's prose is occasionally awkward, often when he is on his anti-capitalism and "workers of the world unite" soap boxes.

The number of typos and other grammatical faux pas seem to increase as you approach the denouement, somewhat akin to the last few yards of the mountaineer approaching his summit I suppose.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

Very very nasty. It is extremely easy to miss an item you need or misuse one you have already found. We are approaching seventies mainframe levels of unfairness here.

Pay particular attention to messages given (often only once) and examine and search everything.

Puzzles (Rating: 9/10)

Easily Andy's strong suit. There are some cracking puzzles in here and some very entertaining action sequences. There are also quite a few head scratchers that I solved knowing that they didn't really make sense. You get to lock into the author's mind set after a while.

Overall (Rating: 7/10)

Large, ambitious, occasionally unfair and memorable. A nice ending.