Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is a heist game about not being able to see. That sounds like a contradiction, and for the first hour it plays like one. Pocketwatch Games built a top-down stealth game where the map is swallowed by fog of war, where you only see what your character sees, and where the whole thing falls apart or comes together depending on who else is on the crew.
It came together. The 2013 release holds up, and the 8.6/10 aggregate it earned across nine outlets reads right.
Trailer, via Pocketwatch Games.
Eight Characters, One Skill Apiece
Monaco gives you eight characters, and each one does exactly one thing. The Locksmith opens doors faster than anyone else. The Lookout sees enemies outside your line of sight. The Pickpocket brings a coin-collecting monkey. The Cleaner puts guards to sleep. The Mole digs through walls and opens vents fast. The Gentleman changes his appearance temporarily, which makes him harder to detect. The Hacker uploads viruses into security systems to shut them off for a while. The Redhead rounds out the list.
Four of them — the Locksmith, the Cleaner, the Lookout, the Pickpocket — are available from the start. The Mole, the Gentleman, the Redhead and the Hacker unlock as the campaign moves.
That structure is the whole game. Nobody is good at everything. A solo run means picking one skill and living with the holes in it. A four-player run means someone is always covering the thing you cannot do.
Four Acts, Four Narrators, One Bad Night
The single-player story runs in four acts, each told from a different character’s perspective. It opens with the Locksmith under questioning by Inspector Voltaire about his recent work with the Pickpocket, the Cleaner and the Lookout. He describes a prison escape in Monaco alongside another inmate, the Mole. The group meets the Gentleman while stealing passports and money meant to be smuggled out of the country. They board his booby-trapped yacht and try to leave the harbor. The Gentleman takes an anonymous call from a man he later names as Davide. Then the boat explodes.
After treatment at a hospital, the thieves help the Gentleman get rid of evidence from an earlier heist and rescue his girlfriend, the Redhead. They steal valuables, hire the Hacker, and try to rob a casino. The police catch them and send them back to prison.
The Pickpocket Tells It Differently
Then the Pickpocket sits down with Voltaire and tells a different version. In his account, the Hacker, the Redhead and the Gentleman escaped with them. He says the Gentleman had legal trouble in his financial affairs, which pushed the crew to break out and recover the money. That detail interests Voltaire, who thought the money was for smuggling the thieves out of the country. The Pickpocket says it was for smuggling weapons. He also says the crew blew up the boat on purpose to distract Interpol.
Davide is believed murdered at a nightclub until Voltaire gets a call: the DNA does not match any of the bodies. The thieves had planted evidence with Davide’s fingerprints at a different crime scene to confuse the police. The Pickpocket then confesses he was a spy sent by Interpol.
That is a lot of story for a game about crawling through nightclubs and yachts in the dark, and it is told almost entirely in interview framing. The four narrators do not agree. The game never settles it for you.
Classic, Enhanced, and the Other Modes
The campaign ships in two forms. “Classic” is the original, full-length story. “Enhanced” is a condensed version added in a later update. Outside the campaign there is a zombie mode and player-versus-player maps.
Missions move between locations — nightclubs, yachts — and each one asks you to solve a different set of obstacles. Because you only see what is in direct line of sight, every map is a negotiation with the fog. You cannot plan around what you have not looked at yet. If a player dies, someone else has to revive them before the mission can end. That rule does more work than any other: it turns four people moving separately into four people who have to stay close enough to save each other.
Why the Co-op Carries It
The cooperative mode supports up to four players, and it is where Monaco earns its reputation. The characters are designed to interlock, not to stand alone, and the fog makes communication the actual skill. You are not just playing a stealth game. You are describing a room to someone who cannot see it.
The single-player campaign is the weaker half, and the criticism on that point is fair. One character, one skill, no one to cover the gap. The story gives you four perspectives, but the levels do not give you four bodies, and the content thins out accordingly. The game is not hiding this. It is built for a crew.
Frequently compared to heist films, Monaco wears the comparison lightly. The art style is minimal and the minimalism is the point — clean shapes, readable silhouettes, nothing on screen that does not tell you something. Austin Wintory’s soundtrack drew praise on release and it holds. It knows when to stay out of the way.
Before and After Pocketwatch
Lead developer Andy Schatz started Monaco while working at TKO Software. He later founded Pocketwatch and kept going, planning at one point to ship it as an Xbox Live Indie Game. While hunting for playtesters he met Andy Nguyen, who became the game’s level designer, producer and promoter.
Monaco won two awards at the 2010 Independent Games Festival, before it was even out. Majesco handled the Xbox 360 release after Microsoft Game Studios rejected the game twice. Pocketwatch shipped it in 2013 for Windows, OS X and Linux. Humble Games released a Nintendo Switch version, Monaco: Complete Edition, in 2019. A sequel was announced.
What the Fog Is Actually For
The fog of war is the whole idea, and it is the reason Monaco still plays. Strip it out and you have a competent top-down stealth game with eight gimmick characters. Keep it, and every room becomes a conversation. The game’s best moments are not the heists. They are the two seconds before one, when nobody on the crew knows what is behind the door.
The single-player campaign is thin next to the co-op, and that gap is real. But the co-op is not a mode bolted onto a solo game. It is the game, and the solo run is the compromise. Four narrators telling four versions of the same night is a smarter frame than most stealth games bother with, and the fact that Monaco never resolves the contradictions is a feature, not a loose end.
This is the part worth watching: Pocketwatch built a game about limited information and then refused to give the player a clean answer about what happened. That is not a gimmick. That is design.
Hard Numbers
- Game: Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine
- Developer: Pocketwatch Games
- Publishers: Pocketwatch Games, Majesco Entertainment, Humble Games
- Released: April 24, 2013 on Windows, via Steam; Mac and Xbox Live Arcade versions followed later in 2013
- Platforms: Linux, PC (Microsoft Windows), Mac, Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch
- Switch version: Monaco: Complete Edition, 2019, Humble Games
- Modes: Single player, multiplayer, co-operative (up to four players)
- Characters: Eight — Locksmith, Cleaner, Lookout, Pickpocket, Mole, Gentleman, Redhead, Hacker
- Critic aggregate: 8.6/10, across nine outlets
- Awards: Two, 2010 Independent Games Festival
- Score: 8.6/10
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