The Clue! (Amiga) - Guest Post

It's the Amiga's famous heist-'em-up!

Southampton, January 29th 1994.

Matt Stuvysunt is dead.

He was killed in a car crash, driving on the wrong side of the road in a stolen car.

He's getting tired of watching his own funeral, so instead he's going to tell us a story.

The story of how he became the greatest criminal mastermind of 1950s London!

Now how do I leave the station exactly?

The Clue is half visual novel, half burglary simulator. I've found you have to pick the options with the cursor keys rather than the mouse, so it's got an interface not unlike Agatha Christie's The Scoop. That's not me on the screen, there. You don't have to watch Matt walk from place to place, which is ace.

You, sir, how are you?

His Indian ancestors were interested in cars?

Oh, right.

Matt's got a bit of a one-track mind. Apart from the very rare occasions where you can ask a character to elaborate on a keyword they've mentioned, Matt can only ask the same small set of questions to every character: 'What is your occupation?', 'What skills do you have?', 'Do you have a criminal record?' and 'Would you like to go a-burgling with me?'

He's also got a photographic memory. He can instantly recall the skills and attributes of everybody he meets. To add somebody to your gang, you need only ring them up and ask. You can recruit almost everybody you meet. Except police officers. That would just be stupid.

Matt needs a home base. Time to check into the Ugley Dog.

I try to bluff my way into a free hotel room, but Patrick Stewart wants me to pay for three nights in advance. I'm out of luck: Matt's got only a couple of quid to his name.

Matt says he's had his wallet stolen and Patrick suggests we head over to the police station and report it.

Now that I know there's a police station, I can go there. But how ever is Matt going to get around the City with no money?

Life finds a way!

If Matt had any sense, he'd give up this silly idea of a life of crime and just sell the damned ticket.

Here we are outside the police station. There's some more shops here and a bar. There's a guy hanging outside the tool shop. Hey, Mr. Pooly, what is it that you do?

What?

I hope you mean you handle the stolen goods for the police or something, because otherwise that's probably not a good thing to yell while standing right next door to the police station.

Loads of people to meet in the bar. There's not a lot to be learned about the characters here. Matt's more interested in methodically evaluating everybody for inclusion in his gang.

I do like how every room seems to have its own unique music. Some sleazy, some squalid, some seedy.

Finally reached the police station. Inspector Gludo hears the story of my stolen wallet with concern and helpfully lends me some money. What a nice man.

Whaddya know, there's a policeman here. Hey, policeman! What is your occupation?

He's a policeman.

Why! Matt's nothing but a common thief!

He'd probably take that as a compliment.

In Room 8 of the Ugley Dog Hotel, London, master criminal Matt Stuvysunt plans the greatest heists in English criminal history.

And rings his mum. D'aww.

Ma Stuvysunt gives Matt the phone number for a Mr. Briggs, who can help me get some money while I'm in London. Thanks, Ma.

Oh yeah, this guy's surely on the level. No reason to be wary of this guy at all.

Surprisingly, I get the choice to decline joining his evil schemes. I'm the great Matt Stuvysunt! I'm nobody's lackey!

And so Mr. Briggs leaves. Matt spends his last fiver on a three-foot tall glass of whiskey.

The next day...

This is the most long-winded Game Over screen I've ever seen. So... Matt gets drafted into the monastery and his life of crime ends before it begins. Or does it?

I can choose to remain at the monastery... or I can just leave! I pick leave.

Matt makes up some excuses about being able to do God's work better in the outside world and the old man wishes him well.

For God's sake, Matt! Stop stealing everything!

Cha-ching! Who says crime doesn't pay?

Except I've screwed the game up now. You have to have access to a car in order to do a burglary and I didn't get enough from selling the ring to afford a car. All I can do is wander around London until Patrick eventually kicks me out of the Ugley Dog.

No, there's no way to know about this in advance. I think the scriptwriter wanted me to be able to start the game without working for Mr. Briggs, but they just got the numbers wrong. Or perhaps I just sold the ring to the wrong fence and didn't get the right price for it.

Either way, I have to restart the entire game and instead accept Mr. Briggs offer.

---

Or, you know, I could wander into a shop absent-mindedly and spend all the money Inspector Gludo gave me on a set of lockpicks before getting the hotel room and have to start the game again twice.

---

This time, I decide to wish Inspector Gludo a happy 50th birthday instead of telling him about my stolen wallet.

Does this mean you won't be lending me the money for the hotel room?

Fearing I've messed up the game YET AGAIN, I start to check all the available locations, when I encounter this gentleman...

He gives me 20 pounds and won't take 'No' for an answer. What a nice man. If only he knew the full extent of the malevolent maelstrom of crime he's realised.

With the man's money, I get the hotel room, meet Briggs and accept his offer. Briggs gives me a car and tells me to rob a kiosk in Fulham. Let's go take a look.

Briggs gave me a map of the area, but I want to check it for myself. When you find a possible target, you can tell Matt to conduct an investigation. The investigation gives you access to a whole bunch of stats like the expected getaway time, the frequency of police patrols and the maximum amount of noise you can make. The longer you stay, the more accurate the stats become. You need to have a certain amount of investigation percentage to begin the planning stage anyway, so I don't think there's much point to having it below 100%.

There's going to be two of us on this heist. Myself, and Justin White, some woman I just met in the pub who claimed to know something about cars. Good enough for me. We've got the car, we've got the intel: let's burgle.

The planning screen isn't unlike the one from Rainbow Six. Each character has their own sequence of commands, so you can have multiple characters working together on separate, synchronised tasks. All we need to do on this heist is smash open the kiosk door, crank open the cash register, take the money and run back to the car.

That's what we would have done, if I'd remembered to buy a jemmy beforehand. This is why we plan.

Exit. Leave hotel. Taxi. Tool shop. Buy tools. Taxi. Hotel. Planning. Alrighty!

It won't let me exit the planning screen without saving my plan to disk. It won't let me save the plan to anything except a prepared 'datadisk', and the only way to make a 'datadisk' is to boot up into Workbench, insert the The Clue! disk, and then click an icon. So now I have to play THE ENTIRE GAME UP TO THIS POINT AGAIN.

I'm going to install it to the hard drive now, so it'll hopefully be faster.

The perfectly planned heist is executed masterfully. We use Briggs' car, and get away within two minutes of arriving at the scene.

There's no animation or interactivity on this screen. The green rectangle just moves from right to left.

Cut to the police station. The Chief Constable heads up the investigation into the theft we just executed. Did we get away with it?

This looks bad. Or does it? I don't honestly know how to read this.

If they're 8% toward identifying Matt from just this tiny shack robbery, it doesn't look likely we're going to be robbing jewellery shops any time soon. Maybe Matt should invest in a mask. Or perhaps he could just stop leaving massive piles of cigarette ends wherever he goes.

Matt's pleased with himself. If he's happy, I'm happy.

As I leave the hotel, a strange man approaches me, throws a screenful of broken French/English at me and offers to buy my 'loot'. Do I sell the oddball my stolen goodies? Sure, why not!

Oh, no! It's Inspector Gludo!

I suppose the big giveaway was that the police station theme started playing when the stranger started talking. And that he's clearly Inspector Gludo. Game over.

Nah, I knew that was going to happen. You're supposed to sell your stuff to the various shops in the city. Yeah, the ones right next to the police station. Y'know, the one with the guy standing right outside who, when asked what his occupation is, replies 'I'm a receiver of stolen goods'.

That deal is not ideal.

Justin and I are a two-person crime wave. We've moved up from robbing wooden shacks and moved up to shops in the posh district.

No shop is safe from our high-tech tactics of 'break down the door', 'break open all the locks' and 'steal all the stuff'. Between the two of us, we're fully loaded with lobsters and out the door long before anybody suspects a thing.

I don't seem to be able to select when these burglaries take place... we might be robbing them in the middle of the day for all I know!

Let's rob an old people's home!

Why? Because they've got stuff and I want it.

Matt's got phenomenal perceptive abilities. From simply standing outside the building for sixteen hours, we've got an accurate floorplan of the building, showing every door, wall, window and the position of every piece of furniture and detailed analyses of their contents, including value, volume and mass.

There's only one thing we didn't account for:

Karate-Grandpa!

The heist is immediately aborted; everybody runs for their life. We got some loot, but there's some dire news.

We had to ditch the car.

This time, we're going to rob a tiny curiosity shop that's hopefully full of expensive old knick-knacks.

As we continue to successfully pull off heists together, both mine and Justin's stats increase. As she trusts me more, she asks for less of a percentage, so I've just got enough to buy myself a replacement car. Hoorah!

When I saw that this shop had alarms in it, I was worried. It's not easy to work this interface out. When I first played a demo of The Clue!, I couldn't get out of the first room due to the odd controls.

I'm going to read through all the item descriptions and hopefully end up with the right tools to open and disarm an alarm box without setting it off.

Amazing! Matt's meagre electronic skills are more than enough to turn off the alarm while Justin smashes the display cases that weren't covered. We're a finely-tuned stealin' machine!

Aaaaand... we got away! The alarm was successfully disarmed, and we made off with hundreds of pounds in cash, a bronze statue and a signed photo of Oscar Wilde. Excellent!

I did not expect that at all. I thought it would be much harder!

Well, there you go. It passes the Super AIG test of holding my interest this far. There's enough information in the item descriptions to have a fair shot at planning sophisticated heists without using a walkthrough. The planning interface is simple enough to not hurt my head and cleanly presented enough to not make my eyes water. There seems to be plenty of different buildings to tackle and Old Matt tells a compelling tale. There's a lot of characters to talk to and hire, and they usually have something amusing to say. There's a daft sequence where you can set Gludo's tie on fire but I just can't remember how to trigger it.

The worst part of The Clue!, if you can train yourself to understand its slightly unusual interface, is the software itself. The loading times from disk are substantial, and having to quit the game to prepare a 'datadisk' was mighty frustrating. If you can install the game to hard disk and then make sure it works for saving both games and heist plans, you might find yourself enjoying this game.

There's a DOS version too apparently, but I haven't played it. It's got different heist graphics and different music, so it might not be As Good. Or it might be better! You should play it and find out!