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Review
I decided to play Grand Island Bank Robbery for a few reasons. First, it was recently a co-winner of ParserComp 2026, so that made me feel confident that it would be a polished and interesting game. The second reason I wanted to play it is because of the air of mystery surrounding the heavily spoiler-tagged reviews. Why aren’t people willing to say openly what the game is really about? There must be some kind of wild twist. Finally, the author, MathBrush, is a pillar of the IF community and quite generous with reviewing a kind of shocking number of IF projects, so I wanted to experience a new big project that he had created and seemed excited about. All that set my expectations: a fun, twisty parser game by someone with a lot of experience playing and writing them. Sounds like a good time, no?
At the start, I found this game difficult to approach, so much so that I quit playing after the first 20 minutes and had to try again a few days later. In general I’m someone who takes a while to warm up to new games (not just interactive fiction, but most video games as well). My big issue in starting this game was a clash between the premise of the game and the gameplay itself. The game is framed as a heist. The player arrives to the scene of a hostage situation in progress, and our job is to steal all the items from the bank according to a checklist one of our gang members gives us. Based on this, I was acting under the assumption that time was of the essence and that at any moment, cops were going to arrive to arrest us and cause a game over. I flailed around, overwhelmed by what felt like a massive number of rooms and NPCs and random objects to sort through. I could not figure out how to solve any of the puzzles and the lack of clarity about the time limit made me freeze up, hindering my exploration and experimentation. My inner monologue was basically like: I haven’t solved even one of these puzzles, there is so much going on that I don’t understand, why is every description mentioning Greek mythology, who are all these people, are the cops about to get here? Aaaaah! So I stopped playing.
I was still curious about the game though. Later, when I was in a better headspace, I tried again. I remembered my previous experience playing The Bat where I had a similar anxiety with not understanding the money mechanic. My solution for that game was to just pretend the money mechanic didn’t matter and proceed while ignoring it completely. My approach here was essentially the same: I just pretended that I had infinite time to rob the bank and that allowed me to put aside the time-limit paranoia enough to actually focus on solving the puzzles. With the anxiety pushed aside, I was able to recognize that the map wasn’t nearly as massive as it felt originally, and things became much more manageable.
This is where I will close off the low-spoiler section of the review. After this I will discuss my experiences in full. If you are still not sure whether to play the game for yourself, I definitely recommend it for fans of creative parser games with puzzles. I found it to be a novel and interesting game, and if you suffer with the same hangups as me, just do your best to ignore the time limit and find the treasures, and things will sort themselves out one way or another.
(Spoiler - click to show)Alright. Now that it’s just between us, let’s dig into it more.I think the theory of this game’s design is that you are supposed to follow the instructions without questioning them and neatly unpeel the three layers one by one: focus only on the real treasures and ignore everything else, then focus only on the forgeries, and then focus only on forming the couples, in a kind of three-act structure scripted and staged by the reveals from each ending.
My experience was not like that. Instead, let loose in this game’s world, it was more like trying to solve all three layers at once with partial information, and getting frustrated that I couldn’t get the game working the way I wanted it to. I was able to find a few of the real treasures first, but the parser puzzles of the first layer were hard enough for me that I became convinced that some of the real treasures didn’t exist and the only way to proceed was to make fake versions of them. And I was like, oh, maybe this is a game where you think you have to do a heist, but it’s really a game about doing silly arts and crafts to make fake versions of everything. So, I pivoted and stopped trying to find any more of the real treasures and instead tried to think creatively about the massive amount of random junk in my inventory to see what I could do with it.
I stumbled my way through making forgeries, fighting with the parser and unimplemented synonyms and duplicate disambiguation to complete a few of them, before finally encountering a glitch while trying to create a tin-lead alloy. First, I made a tin ingot which Pretty Boy thought was too light, then I made a lead ingot which he thought was too dark. On my third try, I attempted to melt the two ingots together, but this resulted in the tin ingot being deleted from existence and left me with only the lead ingot. This locked me out of the alloy ingot for that playthrough.
I want to be clear, this was before being told explicitly by the game’s real treasure ending to make forgeries—I couldn’t find real treasures, so I organically started making them with all the materials lying around.
Meanwhile, I kept uncovering connections between the NPCs. For example, I found the artist of the real painting, and also the person who stole the painting from her; I could see other pairs forming, and was trying to get them to talk to or interact with each other, but it seemed impossible since I couldn’t get them to move to different rooms. Something that really frustrated me was the mix of “ask x about y” and “talk to x” mechanics. If you “ask x about y,” sometimes it worked to give you more information. But if it didn’t work, the error message would keep trying to redirect me to “talk to x” instead, which then resulted in me getting unhelpful responses. It was frustrating because I knew that they can respond to “ask x about y,” and sometimes while talking to these NPCs, my player character would clairvoyantly know what their name was without the dialogue expressing it. This showed me that there was more to uncover that I couldn’t access, because I couldn’t figure out how to communicate to the game what I wanted to do. I was so curious about the love connections. Honestly, I was mostly motivated by trying to figure out which of the characters were secretly gay and anticipating how the 1920s setting would handle that. (As it turned out, none of them are. We are just a bunch of dudes who call each other cute nicknames and very platonically rob banks together, which is fine, I guess, I just wasn’t expecting it.)
After blundering my way through the game, knowing I was locked out of submitting all the counterfeits, I decided to submit a mix of real and fake treasures based on what I had found/made just to see what happened at the end. So my first playthrough ended with a score of -2 out of 8 in 504 turns. Look, not all of us are cut out for this. My goodness.
In my next playthrough, I was determined to avoid the vanishing tin situation, and this time I was able to correctly make the alloy ingot. I continued working on the counterfeits but simply could not solve some of the puzzles. For instance, I had found nothing I could possibly use as a fake stack of cash throughout the game.
After feeling stuck yet again, I decided to start over and play a third time, and pretend that I actually cared about stealing the real treasures. This turned out to be the only way to make progress. You have to pretend that all the people there who you can interact with and all the otherwise unused random junk doesn’t matter at all, and actually care about the score. Once I did this, the game unfolded much more smoothly, and I was able to more or less follow the intended sequence of events. The main place I got tripped up was in solving the last few counterfeit puzzles. I had no idea there was a third vault in Virginia’s office, and by the time I had any sense that the clock was involved with the puzzle, I had read the employee manual so long ago that I never would have thought to check it again. Since the hints only point to the real treasures, I ended up looking at the David Welbourn walkthrough linked here on IFDB. Unfortunately, that walkthrough had massive unavoidable spoilers, but by that point I had spent enough time with the game that there wasn’t much left to spoil (I had already gotten the gist that some kind of love connections were part of the game).
Something I find really fascinating about this game is how much score-non-motivation affected my experience. The moment I learned that I could make forgeries and score negative points, my conclusion was “Oh, the score is a meaningless joke mechanic” rather than taking seriously that I needed to still solve the stated main objective. Because of my meta knowledge from the heavily spoilered reviews that this game had twists, I prematurely stopped caring about stealing the real treasures and was focused on everything else. That caused me to struggle a lot with the game, where it might have been a smoother experience if I played it without the context of anticipating major twists from the outset and only followed the instructions without questioning them.
I also think that because I am a relatively inexperienced parser game player, some of the “first level” puzzles were hard enough to dissuade me from continuing to find real treasures. When I did find a bunch of “junk,” it made perfect sense to me that I could play arts and crafts with a bunch of sequins or melt down scrap metal in a cast iron pan, since those objects were easy to access and mess with. It was not at all intuitive to me to search a refrigerator in order to find a necklace encased in a stick of butter. But an experienced parser player might have thought, “A refrigerator is here for a reason, let’s search the fridge and get the point and move on. The score is a very real thing that I care about increasing. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if I didn’t care about the score?”
I would say the least impactful section of the game for me was the final act with the romances. There weren’t any surprising love connections, everyone pretty much went with who you would expect, and we didn’t spend enough time with any pair in particular that I felt emotionally invested in them. I had spent so much time in my first playthrough trying to talk to the NPCs and ask them about things that went nowhere, that by the time I got here, it was mostly just a relief to have a way to solve the things that were previously impossible to access solutions to. I didn’t really have the mental bandwidth to shift my focus to something more emotionally driven after being beaten down by the puzzle mechanics and confusion for a few hours.
At this point, after seeing me lay out a lot of criticisms and descriptions of my angst in playing this game, you might be wondering, why did I still give it four out of five stars? And the answer is honestly, because the central concept of this game is so genius. It really is that cool to have the three layers, to have this weird multi-level mystery to solve. It’s an incredibly creative use of the medium, and there are so many little jokes that only really make sense once you are more aware of what is going on. I was motivated enough to write a review for it, which I don’t normally like to do. It’s kind of demoralizing when you spend a lot of time writing an IFDB review and it instantly gets buried under the fold, never to be seen again. Like, why bother, right? Why make anything? But I am hoping to encourage more people to play this game even after its comp ended. Setting aside my own personal hangups, like my anxiety about the imaginary time limit, and my incompetence in solving what were probably meant to be easy puzzles, my critiques are mainly around execution: undercluing, underimplementation, mistakes where information is revealed that should not be, and the (to me) iconic self-deleting tin ingot, that kind of thing. Even though this game has such a high number of credited testers, it probably still needed more rounds of revision. It sure must be hard to make parser games, especially ones with this level of complexity.
Upon reflection, this game is much like a pomegranate: tart, sweet, delicious, but challenging to carve into. I’m sorry for staining my fingers; for making a sticky mess of this beautiful game.
