The Marvellous Miss Take

When observing the bumbling attempts at assassination from Brad and Dan as they play the new episodic Hitman, there's a certain impatient feeling of "just hand the controller here" that transpires whenever they miss obvious visual cues or lack the certain degree of spatial awareness necessary for any stealth game. It's only when you start playing one yourself you realize just how finnicky any game from the stealth genre can be, and that's without the added travails to your performance that include having your gameplay recorded for thousands of viewers and being required to maintain a conversation with a hyperactive dolt yelling about circumcision knives. It's absolutely the hardest genre to get right - you need to provide a control scheme of pinpoint precision, find a way to make the enemies the player has to avoid act in a predictable manner and also surface important tactical information like vision cones and how far any noise you're making is carrying.

With today's game, The Marvellous Miss Take, I can't fault it too much with its approach to the core tenets of the stealth genre, and yet something still feels off. As the eponymous and glamorous art thief, the player must skulk around a series of highly stylized art galleries collecting every valuable piece of art while avoiding the guards and security cameras. Every enemy has a vision cone, every loud noise you make - say, while running instead of sneaking - emits a circular shockwave of sound of a pre-determined radius and in many respects the game's stealth seems very fair. So then, why did I lose interest in it after a few hours?

Well the guards don't have predictable set patrol paths and instead act purely on their own arbitrary whims. The game is built with this in mind; rather than relying on sneaking around guard patrols and the like, the game gives you various means of piquing a guard's interest without necessarily giving yourself away. A whistle within sound range, a quick glimpse as you run in and out their vision cone, sometimes even a noise-maker gadget you can throw away from yourself at a fair distance if the level deigns to give you one. A guard will then, without fail, walk the most direct path to the last place they saw or heard you, as indicated by a red circle, and then spend a few seconds looking around before returning to their random patrol. It's through this particular strain of "predictable behavior" that you should be able to outmaneuver them. In theory, at least. In practice, the randomness of the guards will sometimes lead to them intersecting which makes it harder to get around both vision cones, or they'll spin 180 degrees at a drop of a hat (literally, since your hat always flies off whenever you're spotted and you're forced to retrieve it before you can finish the level), or they'll just stand and stare for what seems like an eternity as you wait for them to walk past your hiding spot. The idea that the guards are random until you take initiative to trigger their more predictable reactions to stimuli works in the sense that the game wants you to take a more active role in the stealth, rather than the more common passive role of sitting silently in the shadows for their patrol to pass you by, but the complications make it more irksome than not. There's also the slightly more damning fact that almost every level feels identical, just with a different configuration of walls, guards and objet d'art to steal.

Exacerbating all that further is how Miss Take makes the classic and ubiquitous game design error of equating "more challenging" to "more time-consuming". As you continue to take on tougher jobs, the levels themselves increase in size and have more treasures you need to purloin before you can exit. To the game's credit, it does the Hotline Miami thing of resetting you to the last floor as a checkpoint rather than forcing you to restart the entire art gallery, but the last floor I tried had twelve different treasures and at least three guards to weave around, and when you get caught trying to exit after such a long and thorough heist with several near-misses, there's nothing more discouraging than the realization that you have to then start over because you got impatient right at the end. I've recently discussed this as a problem with Ronin and Cargo Commander too, and it's applicable to many more games that demand a restrictive level of finesse over increasingly longer periods of time: the final worlds of Super Meat Boy, say, or the more challenging stages in Super Mario Maker that become downright harrowing without any checkpoints (thanks for that, Ryckert). As I said at the lede, it's exceptionally easy to mess up a stealth game, and I'm not sure why so many Indie developers are so attached to the concept.

The Marvellous Miss Take doesn't put a whole lot of feet wrong. Its stealth mechanics have an internal consistency, it provides clear visual data of what the guards can see and hear which you can work with and continues to introduce new features and gadgets - even new thieves with their own quirks and limitations! - and I especially like its pseudo-isometric stages and the whole 1960s classy British art thief aesthetic with a look that sort of resembles the stylized, angular animated intros that would play before certain movies from that decade, like the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies (before that fuchsia feline got his own cartoon, anyway). I just wish I found it less frustrating to play, but that right there is the core reason why I tend to shy away from the stealth genre in general. It's just too exacting and stressful at the best of times.

The Verdict: Not terrible, but not for me. If it's not the cream of the stealth crop, I'll probably lose interest before too long. (Don't worry, I have a doozy for the last day. Going out with a bang!)

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