Heist

This game is everything that I look for in a long and involving game--the kind that I always seek, I guess because I am an old-style IF veteran. It makes use of all of my IF habits--map-making, object list, puzzle list--and it's full of puzzles. And I just had to find those last few points!
It's impossible for me to give a detailed review of this game, because it's just so sprawling and there is a number of self-contained chapters. Yes, there are many puzzles. Yes, the puzzles are real stumpers. But you see, I take that as par for the course--for me, a game is satisfying if it is challenging, and I can make it through on my own steam.
If you are looking only for a good story, that you can complete in a weekend, I'd say look elsewhere. But if you are looking for both a good story AND a challenging game, that will keep you occupied for days, maybe weeks, 'Heist' may be your choice.
I gave this game 4 stars, if only because I could not give it 4 1/2, and I wanted to somehow communicate that the writing needs some serious editing in terms of punctuation, grammar, and spelling. Obviously, the author is British, and his phraseology reflects it. Though overall, I thought his language and story-telling was very atmospheric and carried a lot of the ambience that I think he was trying to convey.
I think the best thing that I can say here is that I came away from this game wanting to play another Andy Phillips game.

Like all of his other games, this Andy Phillips game is extremely long. Typing in and reading the output of the walkthrough took me several days of playing.

You have an beginning area that is longer than most games, and then you can teleport to 6 different sub-areas. Each sub-area is fairly long, about as long as an IFComp game but with high difficulty.

The idea is that in the first area, you become a thief, and then in each subarea, you pull off a heist. Every kind of theft is represented: (Spoiler - click to show) housebreaking, military espionage, a booby-trapped pirate cave, a ritzy ocean liner, a museum, and the crown jewels. Each area has its own inventory separate from the others.

As always, the writing is evocative and beautiful, and the puzzles are vastly and deeply unfair. If you don't do exactly the right thing, you will die. Unusually for these games, however, is a large randomized element, so that even those using the walkthrough will have to experiment for some time. This was fun.

Overall, you really have to have a taste for this type of game to enjoy it. Without a walkthrough, don't expect to see more than 10% of the game.

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.

The game revolves around your incipient skills as a master crook, urged on by your dead and unpopular uncle from his graveside. The transformation from nervous teenage ingénue to grizzled burglar is somewhat difficult to swallow but leave credibility aside and enjoy the thrill of the chase. Over several pre-planned scenarios you must prove yourself up to the final challenge, stealing the Crown Jewels of Denario, via a cruise liner, a locked museum, a top security nuclear base and an assassination at a disused airbase. There are many many ways to come a cropper before you emerge toughened and ready for the big showpiece heist.

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 in this case.

The parser is generally adequate with a handful of exceptions. Gag for instance 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 interaction is pretty exhaustive and smooth.

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.

As with all of Andys' games 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. Some vital meta objects are not described in the initial room decription and you really need to drill down to the nuts and bolts (sometimes literally) of an object to be sure that you haven't overlooked something.

The real saving grace of the game and indeed his entire oeuvre are the clever puzzles. Several have been award nominated down the years and they are easily his strong suit. There are some cracking ideas in here and some very entertaining action sequences. Unfortunately 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. The solution to making one's egress from the Countess's bedroom, for example doesn't seem logical to me.

If you manage to drag yourself exhausted and dripping to the final test there is a nice and somewhat unexpected finale which runs counter to all previous expectations.