Sticky Hand Toy Meets Mission Impossible: Swindler

Swindler is an action puzzle game developed by Nitrome [previously, Steamlands]. The game combines the feel of a sticky hand toy from a capsule machine with the wire strung heist scene from Mission Impossible.

It makes for a great feeling game. The direction of gravity is always down and the entire level is rotated around to transverse it. The gooey player character has some spring and bounce to them, and a good feeling adhesion as one wraps their wire around objects in the environment. The reeling in or letting out of the wire is a little slower than I would’ve liked though.

Swindler takes these control mechanics and elaborates on them. The core method of play remains the same but it is continuously applied in different kinds of puzzle or actions situations. There are quite a few clever puzzles but the more action oriented parts aren’t so enjoyable because the enemies. They don’t really fit with the feel of the game, causing more annoying situations to occur than interesting ones.

Still, it is worth seeing its good ideas get explored, and worth remembering how rad those capsule toys were.

[Play Swindler in a browser here]