The Sting! - Burglary and Nostalgia

'ello 'ello! Michael here! And we did the thing again! We played and finished an old game that i played as a child!

..... and this one's really quite old, too. When this game came out in 2001, i was 9 years old. And Amalia wasn't around at all, yet.

So anyways, get your lockpicks and crowbars ready, because today, we're breaking and entering our way into the unknown and largely forgotten little game that is....

The Sting!

Our protagonist is Matt Tucker. A burglar, fresh out of jail and right back to work.

So then, the first question is, what -is- The Sting?

Well, it's a 2001 stealth-puzzle game made by a small Austrian development studio called Neo Software. That is, before they were bought up, traded around a bit and eventually acquired by Take Two Interactive, becoming Rockstar Vienna in the process.

Unfortunately, the Studio was shut down just a few years later, mostly having worked on ports and bits and pieces of Manhunt 2.

Getting back to the game itself however, The Sting! is actually a sequel, known in german-speaking regions as "Der Clou 2", following on, unsurprisingly from "Der Clou", which was actually titled "The Clou" in English, so that's nice and confusing.

Anyway, the first title was a a 2D game, unlike this one, which is 3D.

And speaking of 3D, well.... let's rip off the band-aid and talk about...

The graphics!

This might be a bit of a harsh surprise.

Are you ready?

Okay, here it comes.

Brace yourselves.

AAAAAAHHHH

EEEWWWWW!

Close your eyes, children! Don't look at it for too long!

..... yeah that ain't good, is it?

Yes. Well, i won't try and deny it. I might have a lot of nostalgia for this game, and Amalia and i did have fun playing it, but holy cow, this game is seriously uggo.

Like, incredibly uggo. I mean, it's actually got some decent art direction in places and again, our nostalgia is strong, here. But even so, the sheer ugliness of the graphics overpowers it all.

It is, in short, hideous. There's no avoiding that.

In particular, as you can tell from the pictures, the character models stand out. The blurry textures, the polygons all clipping into one another during animations, the faces..... oh by jove, the faces...

You'll be haunted by the pictures in this post for all eternity. We're so sorry.

*shudder*

But ehrm, in the name of fairness, there are, in fact, a couple of things that are..... less ugly about it!

For instance, we actually like the way cars are designed, and the way they're animated.

You can't drive around, by the way. But you -can- hail a cab.

Even through the low-poly, low res lens, they show some cool art deco stylings, and they way they bobble around on their wheels gives them a very cartoonish charm. Feels like Cruella Deville could be sitting in the back of any of 'em.

Speaking of art deco, the whole game kinda has that vibe. It's set in a retro-dystopian city of sorts, and there's a lot of ominous sights. Though overall, the game's fairly jovial and humorous in tone.

This is the bank. Looks trustworthy, no?

Now, with all that said, there's a topic adjacent to graphics that we need to go into for a bit:

The compatability!

Not gonna lie, it's a bit problematic on modern systems. At least that's been our experience.

See, this game, in the launcher, asks you to install DirectX 8.0. Which we couldn't, because any DX8 installers we found went:

 "Nah, i don't think this Windows 11-thing is real. I'd prefer Windows 98, ME or XP. That would be tubular, thank you."

Buuut it worked anyway. Mostly. It needed a few workarounds. You see, for one, every time we restarted the game it forgot which resolution we'd set and defaulted to 640x480. Now, for funsies, we actually played on that resolution for a bit, just to get that authentic "CRT monitor gaming after school"-feel. Buuut mostly we set it to 1080p each time we started the game, in order to spare our eyes a little bit.

Honestly, the softer image on lower resolutions is a better look for this game.

And well, we also couldn't set it any higher without the game crashing. Couldn't turn on shadow maps, either. 

And a very curious thing: When you hover your mouse over alarm systems, the game gives you a picture-in-picture view of what that alarm is connected to. Now, if we were just playing the game normally, we couldn't see that, because the PIP view simply showed our game camera, which would be a massive problem in later levels, because alarm systems get kinda complex. So how did we manage to work around this issue?

We had to alt-tab out of, and then back into the game.

Awyep. After alt-tabbing, the PIP view correctly showed the connected alarm systems, allowing us to work out the later levels.

...... but only after restarting the game, because alt-tabbing also made the the object-interaction UI invisible, making it effectively impossible to do more than walk around the levels and look at stuff.

So, especially in the late game, where alarm systems and switch puzzles are quite common, the approach became:

Start level > Alt-tab > Check and memorize what all the alarm systems do > Restart game > Start level properly

'tis a good thing this game had my nostalgia going for it, because without that, we definitely wouldn't have stuck with it. 😉

You're reading that right. What you're seeing here are "high resolution" textures!

Compatibility mode alleviated a couple of issues, at least. Though weirdly, we had to set it to Windows 7.

So yeah, the game is very uggo and barely functioned on our system. So, why did we stick with it? Well, partially, it's because this is one of those games i played a lot of when i was a wee lad, but, despite having the full version (and having a physical copy right here), i had never finished it. So it was time that we tried again, sticking with it this time until it was done.

But there's another reason, too.

 

The sound!

This is where the nostalgia...... weirdly *didn't* hit that hard.

Not because we don't remember each and every sound an music track in the game. No, quite the opposite, actually. See, the sounds of this game were so deeply burned into my young mind that they never really left.

This soundtrack popped up in my mind so often over the years that when we heard it again playing this game, it weirdly just felt like an everyday occurrence. 

There's also the fact that today, our own music is *definitely* influenced by this game's soundtrack. Lots of piano, lots of jazzy/blues-y vibes. But also some electronic influences and stuff like that. I'm not saying we're trying to recreate this game's music, but without a doubt it's one of our big influences. Well, one of my influences, in particular. Amalia tends to lean more into the electronica and hip hop side of things.

As a little side-note, under the third video we posted above, we actually found a comment by one of the game's composers, who as it turns out, didn't really release anything since.

The comment is years old, but we couldn't help but drop a line and say thanks. Maybe he'll see it at some point. 😉

Weirdly, this rather noticeable building is never mentioned in the story or anyhing.

Unfortunately, though the game does have other sounds beside the music, and they're..... less nice. I mean, most of them are perfectly serviceable, but there's some things that stand out.

Like the dogs. There's one dog-model in the game, and they spawn occasionally in the city, running around. And they go "Woof" every second or so. Like, on tact. Constantly. Whenever there's a dog close-by, you're just hearing a constant "Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!".

Doesn't get annoying at all, as you can imagine.

There's also some mechanical noises that happen in the city that seem to be 3 times as loud as the rest of the game.

Oh, and there's one downside with the music: Whenever it changed track (which often happens when changing location), the game froze up for a second or two.

Now, this might not be the game's fault. Our theory is that it reads the music from the CD (Which needs to be inserted to play. Old-school DRM). And well, since our computer isn't 20 years old, we only have an external USB disc drive, which might slow down the process of loading up the next tune. Not sure if that's it, but it's seems plausible.

But now, let's talk about...

The gameplay!

The game's interface is quite colourful, with lots of animations and charm.

So, we talked about how the game looks and sounds, but what do you actually do in this game?

Well, as mentioned, it's a stealth-puzzler. I'd hesitate to call it a stealth game per se, because there's zero sneaking (characters just waltz around with inaudible footsteps), no hiding in shadows (you're either in someone's vision cone or you aren't) and no chances to evade and re-enter stealth after getting caught (if you raise an alarm, the plan instantly fails). But then, you are evading vision cones and circumventing security systems, so at least in concept, some form of stealth is definitely involved, here.

Basically, the game consists of 3 Stages:

You've got the open world, where you can walk around the city. This is where you can buy tools, recruit accomplices and fence your stolen goods. The world isn't gigantic, but big enough to where you might want to occasionally hail a cab to save yourself a couple minutes of walking time. You can buy cars, too, but you can't drive those. They're purely there to use as a getaway vehicles during your plans. And in that role, they only function as a stat to determine how much stuff you can carry back with you.

Some serious AI snafu going on, here!

Then, there's the planning stage. This is really the main meat of the game's playime. You can think of it a bit like the planning stage in the old Rainbow Six games.

Basically, in the planning stage, you select your target building, select your getaway car, a maximum of 3 accomplices, and who brings which tools with them. Theoretically, every character can perform every task given the correct type of tool, but having someone crack a safe with say, a manual hand-drill, when they've got like 2% skill in that field can take forever, even when you fast-forward. So you have to pick somewhat intelligently.

Each target building can only be finished once. They're straight-up missions. You complete a few, then unlock the next story chapter and with it, a new set of levels. No grinding for extra money here.

Some of the loot is kinda..... daft, not gonna lie.

But yeah, during the planning stage, alarms won't actually trigger and guards won't spot you. The idea is to set up a whole plan to make sure those things won't happen, then watch it play out.

And so, during this stage, you effectively have to free run of the level. You can check where all the loot is, where you have to go, which alarm systems to disable (and in which order), what the guards' patrol routes are like and so on.

After you've got a decent idea of the layout, you start recording a plan, laying out and timing the actions of each character, properly planning out the whole heist start to finish.

Your footsteps are inaudible, but every time you use a tool, an audibility bar appears, based on proximity of guards, and the loudness of the tool.

In concept of course, you're sneaking and doing burglary stuff, though in practise, it's more problem solving like: "the guard checks this door for damage during his rounds, so use a lockpick instead of a crowbar" or "The guard will notice if this painting is gone, so be sure to only steal it on your way out, and time it so you can escape before he has a chance to see it". Things like that.

Plus, in the later levels, the game really goes all in with the puzzle aspects. In fact, during the last five or six levels of the game, it hugely pivots towards timed switch puzzles. Like needing accomplices to flip 2 switches at the same time to deactivate a door alarm or a light barrier on the other side of the level, usually for just long enough for another character to pass through.

Or in a couple of cases, not even long enough for that, so you have to say, start picking the door once the alarm is disabled, interrupt the action before it turns back on, re-flip the switch to turn the alarm off again and finish picking the lock.

This one was pretty extreme. Dodging sight-cones like a ninja while also flipping switches to allow other characters to access different areas of the level.

But yeah, once you've completed your objectives (mostly stealing stuff worth a certain amount) and you got everyone into the getaway car, you can save your plan and move on to the third stage, which is the execution.

Well, i call it the third stage, but really, it's the smallest part of the game. Basically, you just watch the whole plan you just put together play out in real time, but this time, if a character steps into a vision cone, or is heard using a tool, or triggers a light barrier or such, the alarm is raised and the mission fails.

...... which, weirdly, has no actual consequences. You simply go back to the planning stage and edit your plan. Sometimes all it needs is a small tweak, other times you might have to redo most of it, depending on where and how things went wrong.

Did we mention the game has a lot of highhearted humor? Because it does. ;)

That about sums up the gameplay. Now let's briefly talk about...

The Story!

Well actually, there barely is one, and what's there is quite basic. It's told through a few comic-book-panning cutscenes. And i do mean a few. There's like 6 of these, including the intro and ending.

Most of the levels also have absolutely no connection to the story at all. In fact, we counted. Only 5 of the 18 levels actually have any story relevance. One of them taking place around halfway through, and the other 4 making up the final missions of the game.

Also, a little quirk that occurred to us as we were writing this: At one point in the game you're tasked with stealing a special key card that's meant to be used to access a secure area in the final level.

...... but come to think of it, the final level is another big switch puzzle, and the key card is never used! We've been duped!

The safe in that room? Bane of our existence, we tells ya. Took forever to crack.

But yeah, the story is simple, and the conclusion is.... well, we won't be spoiling it for you, just in case you go and dig this up, but we will tell you that the big reveal is anticlimactic, abrupt, and quite daft. But also in keeping with the light-hearted tone of the game, so it kinda ends up getting away with it.

Oh, and after the story was done and the credits rolled, the game reminded us that it was barely functioning on our modern system and unceremoniously crashed to the desktop. Ah well.

Ugliest statue in a game ever? We think so.

The Conclusion!

So, that was our visit to The Sting! One of those games that i didn't just play as a kid, but rather had my childhood defined by. No, i'm being serious.

This was a huge influence on me as a kid. The art-deco vibe, the cheesy humor, the bluesy music blended with some electronics. This game had a real role in shaping my personality and making me who i am today. Heck, it might have imprinted on me so much that the memories even indirectly rubbed off on Amalia, too.

But, having said that, i had never beaten it before. I think i got as far as the Harbour in one of my later revisits, which is quite far into the game, but i never got past that point.

Until now.

And so, the question we must soberly ask ourselves is:

Is this..... sacred childhood memory of mine a good game, or not?

Well..... i mean, 's a bit of an ugly git, innit?

Buuuut the gameplay's actually quite fun. I think it benefits from the fact that even today, there's very little to compare it to. The gameplay is fairly unique, and that helps it stand on it's own.

Having said that, with the technical difficulties we had for this playthrough, and the fact that there's basically zero replay value after a full playthrough, i suppose we're kind of finished with it.

We're kind of closing a chapter here, if you will. A defining but unfinished childhood memory, revisited and fully put to rest.

I mean, i ain't shedding tears over finishing a cheesy 20+ year old game about burglary, but still. It's a little poetic and profound, right?

Well, in any case, we hope you enjoyed our little writeup, and that perhaps we've shown you a game you a game you wouldn't otherwise have heard of, today.

Until next time, dear readers, have a lovely time! 😉