If you’ve been reading My Dpad for a while (or if you follow our Steam Curation page at Great Medium-Spec Games), you know that we love Terry Cavanagh games more than anything. Most people know about Super Hexagon and VVVVVV, but Terry Cavanagh has also made all sorts of other games that are available for free at his website. I’m here today to tell you about one of my favorite games of his, Tiny Heist.
Tiny Heist is a very small roguelike game with retro graphics that absolutely any computer should be able to run. It’s made up of 15 randomly-generated, increasingly difficult floors that you have to sneak through, collecting gems along the way. If a guard spots you, all guards on that floor are alerted and immediately start trying to apprehend you. This means that most of the gameplay, like many roguelike games, consists of strategically moving around without being spotted or attacked.
You don’t just have to avoid guards, though. You also have to avoid security cameras with moving lines of sight, as well as sleeping guard dogs with variable areas of awareness. This makes Tiny Heist an incredibly strategic game that you can either treat as a game to speedrun through or a more tactical game of chess. Tiny Heist isn’t all about avoiding enemies, though.
As you move through the floors, you also come across many items you can try to get. These can vary from security jammers which give you a brief respite from the cameras to optional keys that you can use on subsequent floors as a shortcut. At the beginning of the game, you can see the entire floor right away, but as you move up the tower you enter a fog-of-war situation that you can only clear up by moving through the floor or by finding a lightbulb item. You can also collect gems, which can be used to buy items from the shopkeeper, who appears at certain floors with certain deals.
Tiny Heist is an engrossing, brilliantly simple free roguelike game that can easily take up a few hours of your day before you even notice it’s happening. You can also play it a million different ways, such as by playing it straight from his website or Kongregate, or by downloading it for Windows, MacOS or Linux. You can also just grab the source code yourself, if you’re a tinkerer or something. If you like roguelikes or puzzle games in general, give Tiny Heist a try. If you do, I’m sure you’ll soon become as big a Terry Cavanagh fan as we are.
Check out Tiny Heist on distractionware
