I was a big fan of 2013’s Monaco, a top-down, pixel art heist game with a Rashomon-esque plot. It was clearly meant to be played co-op, where your friends ruin your plans and then you all fight, but I mostly played it as a solo experience. It was a lot of fun that way–stealthing through its sprawling mansions, banks, discos, and art galleries until I ruined my plans all on my own, at which point I’d run around in a panic and then hide in a vent. Developer Pocketwatch announced a sequel in 2022; there’s currently a demo available as part of Steam Next Fest, which makes single-player a more viable way to play.
The core of Monaco 2 is essentially the same as Monaco 1–a group of characters is drawn together to break into glamorous buildings, locate some coveted object, and try to get out alive–but how all that works has gotten an overhaul. Most noticeable is that the sequel has nixed the pixel art, and has shifted to an isometric perspective. I wasn’t quite sold on the game’s new look when it was first announced, having such fond memories of the first’s bright, blocky colors and relative simplicity. But the new style grew on me quickly while playing the demo; the more detailed art brings life to the levels, and the new perspective makes heists feel more akin to playing a Hitman level than the somewhat cerebral remove of the original’s overhead design. Levels feel busier, which makes them more engaging to move through, if not sometimes a bit more chaotic, especially when things go south.
Developer Andy Schatz told Aftermath in an interview that some of the visual changes were due to ways Pocketwatch saw players struggle to understand the original. This is especially true of the way Monaco 2 iterates on the first game’s most unique visual feature, which is that parts of a level outside your immediate vicinity were greyed out. Schatz said, “Some people's brains literally cannot parse [the original look]... and I wanted to be able to make the sequel something that more people could parse.” The original game had a blueprint vibe, which is preserved in the sequel through your ability to pore over the map before you start or during gameplay. But the moment-to-moment is different now; while in the first game, areas outside your line of sight were essentially invisible, here, you can see a lot more of their contents. This reduces some of the first game’s tendency to feel like a disco when things went haywire, but still maintains enough mystery to keep you on your toes. Schatz said, “There’s basically like a shadowing [in Monaco 2], but it's a more subtle shadowing that doesn't completely change the visual style of the region that is unseen versus the region that is seen.”
Drawing on the lessons learned from players over a decade of the first game influenced other changes for the sequel as well. One is the new way that characters work, especially when playing single-player. In the first game, you could only change characters when you died; here, you can swap them out at various checkpoints. While Schatz admitted Monaco will never have quite as much “riotous fun” in single-player as in co-op, he thinks the single-player experience in Monaco 2 is better than in the first game. As a solo player, being able to change characters more often lessened the feeling that I was the wrong person for the job as I moved deeper into a level and faced new challenges.
The game’s eight characters fall into basic archetypes, each with their own distinct look and powers, like the ability to heal or a drone that can hack alarms. The variety within the team is a reflection of the heist movies Monaco is inspired by, in which Schatz said “the people within the crew are all unique from one another because they have a unique role within their team.” My favorite demo character was The Socialite, who has a little dog she can deploy to distract single guards. (Schatz told me that, alas, other players can’t pet the dog.) Playing alone, I’d use her in the early parts of a level, where her dog could handle the scattered enemies. When later areas got too populated, I’d swap to The Prowler and use her dash ability to sneak by multiple patrolling guards.
“The primary approach is really that we're designing for different player personalities and player styles more so than player skill,” Schatz said of the differences between the characters. “Monaco is designed around the idea that everyone always has the opportunity to be the hero under different circumstances.”
Characters also have “trinkets” they can unlock through diamonds earned by completing challenges; trinkets give characters new abilities at the cost of some of their health. Schatz said there’s more like 40 different characters, given how much a trinket can change your playstyle. He said that trinkets largely follow a certain progression: “For the most part, they all stay within the theme of the character. I did always try to make sure that there was one trinket that was like a speedrunning trinket, and another trinket that was a team-based trinket. Then the other two were typically just like, well, this would be a cool variation on the character. I generally tried to order their unlock order so the first one is, how do I make this character a little bit easier to play?”
Another change that makes single-player a little more approachable is the change to how weapons work. Schatz said he didn’t like the way you picked your weapon at the beginning of a Monaco 1 stage, and then unlocked ammo for it while collecting coins scattered around a level. In Monaco 2, you spend coins to unlock different weapons you find, which, like the ability to change characters, gives you more gameplay options. In the first game, similar to how I sometimes felt I was stuck with the wrong character, I’d also feel like I had the wrong tool. In the demo, I could deploy a smoke bomb to hide from guards, flee to a stairwell, then swap to a disguise to calmly stroll through the next floor. It’s not the same team-based vibe as a heist movie or co-op play, but it made me feel clever, and gave me more options when I didn’t have teammates to get me out of a jam.
But no amount of character or weapon swaps can prevent a Monaco level from devolving into chaos, no matter how much I want to play it like the perfect stealth game. It’s not that the enemies are challenging–Schatz said the game’s guards are “particularly dumb”--but that running afoul of one has a cascading effect. You can’t really fight them head-on– Schatz said that “everyone always asked for combat back in the day [of Monaco 1], they wanted to be able to fight the guards... [But] that's just not how Monaco 1 was: plan A is stealth and then plan B, we called it the ‘oh shit’ button.” Fleeing from one guard inevitably runs you into another, and they all start to chase you as you race around corners and deal with the game’s particular take on line-of-sight. Schatz said the game treats enemies like “a flock as a whole, and a giant system where you’re making waves.” This brings a slapstick vibe to things going wrong that feels core to the experience of Monaco, and I was glad to see it hold true for the sequel.
“The only piece of code that is literally shared between Monaco 1 and Monaco 2 is the aggro algorithm, the algorithm for how guards see you, how they perceive you, and when they chase you,” Schatz said. “That's the one that was like, there's special sauce in there that we don't want to mess with.”
This idea of enemies as a whole, rather than individuals, also feels like it fits with the nature of the heist movies Monaco is inspired by, which Schatz described as being about “a band of misfits that gather together to outsmart the squares.” The original Monaco was inspired by the heist movies of its time–Schatz cited Guy Ritchie movies and The Usual Suspects–but heists, and the nature of heist movies, has changed since then. Modern heists, Schatz said, “almost all involve some form of digital trickery… They often are multi-stage at this point… And that was something that kind of went into the original thoughts of some of [Monaco 2’s] story.” We only get a glimpse of that story in the demo, and what I played feels physical in the way of “classic” heists, letting you jetset around locations and put yourself in harm’s way, while also feeling more high-tech, such as through the presence of robot guards. “It’s not so much a sci-fi story, but it’s sort of mildly so,” Schatz said.
Monaco 2 is being published by Humble Games, which faced what owner Ziff Davis called a “restructuring” over the summer, but which to many looked more like a closure. Humble initially brought in third party The Powell Group to continue its games, and, later, external help in the form of a company founded by ex-Humble employees. When asked how this had affected the game, Schatz acknowledged that there was “healthy and valid skepticism of the initial statements that it's a restructuring.” He said Humble has been “surprisingly really supportive… I say ‘surprisingly;’ I mean just, even I had that kind of skepticism when it all went down. I was panicked, but… they've been supporting [Monaco 2] beyond even sort of initial promises. No corners have been cut; in fact, corners have been added… I have been given every sign that they are extremely excited about Monaco.”
Monaco 2 is set to release this year. I’m enjoying my time with the demo and the way it feels more suited to my solo circumstances, even if solo play isn’t the ideal. (You try making plans to game with friends as a middle-aged adult.) Schatz told me, “I actually think that one of the reasons that Pocketwatch has been successful over the years is… [trying] to discover new niches of people that were underserved by the games that they know and love. And in this case, we're making a sequel… so there are some ways in which we said, if there is something that works better for this game, we can't be afraid to let it go.
“We've tried to preserve everything we could about the spirit of the original, and the emotions that you have and the types of things you think about while you're playing… [We didn’t want to] change that feeling of sneak, sneak, sneak, CHAOS. That is Monaco.”
