Video Game / Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine

"What's mine is yours... And Monaco is mine."

Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine is a class-based top-down retro action-stealth-puzzle-infiltration game made by Pocketwatch Games that pays homage to the heist movie genre. Each level is usually a break-in type scenario, where the player must infiltrate, collect loot, steal a specific object, and escape while remaining in one piece.

From September 1st to 15th, 2014, the game was free to download for Xbox Live Gold Members as part of the "Games with Gold" deal.

A sequel, Monaco 2, is confirmed to be in the works.

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This game provides examples of:

• Air-Vent Passageway: All over the place, and they are just as useful as you'd expect in a stealth game.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: NPC dialogue is frequently used across levels, so that a dozen or more club/casino patrons throughout the game are bragging about having just bought a fifth car or asking a fellow patron for an opinion on their new handbag. Even in levels set in prison.
• Because I'm Good At It: The Locksmith admits that the crew had all the money and means necessary to flee Monaco but kept committing crimes because it was in their nature.
• Big Damn Heroes: Trying to save your friends from guards can become one of these.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Guards and civilians speak French, which makes sense given the setting, and provides a nice bonus to Francophone gamers. Guards investigating a noise but finding no-one there will mutter, among other things, "It must have been a cat," club or casino patrons will boast about having bought a new handbag or a fifth car, and the radio and television news broadcasts are about the thieves' latest heists.
  • In the intro to the mission "Identity," the Pickpocket says to Inspector Voltaire "Ce qui est à toi est à moi," which translates to "What's yours is mine." This is another hint that the Gentleman and the Pickpocket are the same person.
• Bizarrchitecture: Delightfully averted. For the most part, the levels are laid out in a way that's logical for the building in question to be laid out. This adds a lot of variety to the levels and makes you actually feel like you are infiltrating a casino or nightclub.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows: The "Epilogue" PVP mission is a showdown in a church in which the four remaining thieves try to steal all the loot from each other and escape.
• Book Ends: The game's first and last levels are set in the same prison.
• The Caper: Obviously.
• Caper Crew:
  • The Locksmith is capable of opening doors, bank machines, and safes the fastest, making him the Safe-Cracker.
  • The Lookout provides an Enemy-Detecting Radar when she sneaks and which allies can see, making her the Coordinator. She also doubles as the Burglar, as she's capable of acrobatic skills like climbing ladders and getting through windows faster.
  • The Pickpocket is, naturally, the Pickpocket. Unlike an archetypical example however, he himself isn't more dextrous than his allies; instead, he has a monkey that can steal nearby items for him.
  • The Cleaner is the Muscle, and is the only one capable of some level of fighting when they don't have a weapon.
  • The Mole is also the Muscle, but unlike the Cleaner, the Mole's strength is used for non-combat utility: he can use a giant hammer to bash down walls, creating alternative entry options for his teammates.
  • The Gentleman is the Mastermind, as most of the team is working under his direction. For gameplay, he does double duty as the Conman, as his regenerating disguise allows him to infiltrate areas where other characters would be seen in plain sight, and the Getaway Driver, as he can open cars the fastest.
  • The Hacker is, of course, the Hacker. Not only does he hack normal electronic devices the fastest, he also has unique access to electrical outlets which allow him to inject viruses when other characters are unable to.
  • The Redhead is the Distraction, having the unique trait of charming one enemy at a time into not attacking.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Normally killing enemies leaves a skeleton other enemies can revive. Blowing them up with c4, on the other hand, doesn't leave a body and thus prevents them from being revived. Thankfully, this is averted for players, who always leave a revivable skeleton even if blown up. The Zonaco mode makes this happen to every enemy (except the exploding ones), regardless of how they're killed. Even if The Cleaner just comes up behind them.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Each member of the crew gets their own distinctive color. In multiplayer, chat color matches the color of the player's character to make it easy to tell who is saying what. Even the skeletons of dead characters match their color.
• Cutting the Knot: If you're willing to make a bit of noise, the Mole can make this a valid option to bypass a locked door — you simply smash through the wall next to it. Unless your party has a Locksmith, this is usually the fastest option, and it's almost always the most flexible.
• Death Course: Some of the later Laser Hallways double as this, as they are tied to automated weapons that will obliterate you if you trip a laser beam.
• Defog of War: The Lookout's role. She reveals all guards on the map for the team and can see the full layout of all rooms within a certain radius of her current position, whether or not anyone on the team has already been inside them.
• Disco: The "Discotheque Rouge" and "Red Carpet" missions take place in a discotheque.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Mole trivializes some early heists. For example, Banque Albert can be completed in about 30 seconds by just digging into the back of the vault from the parking lot you start in. Later levels take the Mole's abilities into account and introduce walls he cannot tunnel through, which brings him down from a Game-Breaker to merely a useful character.
• Dressing as the Enemy: One of the disguises available on some levels is a police uniform.
• Easter Egg: Many levels feature large blocks of solid wall which, if the team has a Mole and a lot of patience, can be mined away to reveal hidden messages from the programmers.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: In the final mission of The Pickpocket's Story, the characters reveal their true identities and unlock their full potential in a very surprising twist. Each character combines the power of both their identities, so the Redhead has her charm enemies ability and the Lookout's enemy scan, the Hacker can hack from electric outlets and also knock out unaware enemies, etc.
• El Spanish "-o": Pierre's e-mails in Zonaco now consist solely of writing "Brains" repeatedly, with various mixtures of capital and lowercase letters; this trope comes into play when he "signs off" with "le brains".
• EMP: One of the pieces of equipment the crew can use, this temporarily disables security systems.
• Every 10,000 Points: With every ten coins, you will get an extra use of your tools/weapons.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: Added in October 2013, the Halloween mode Zonaco changes all enemies to faster-running (and exploding) zombies.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: An evil version, the Epilogue mission is a multiplayer-only mission where the players kill each other and escape with money.
• Fog of War: Players cannot see around corners or through walls. In multiplayer, the thieves have shared vision.
• Foreshadowing: When the Pickpocket is relating his account of the thieves' crime spree to Inspector Voltaire, the only characters seen speaking in the flashbacks are the Mole, the Gentleman, the Redhead, and the Hacker. In the final mission, we learn the reason for this: they were the only four thieves, and were the same people as, respectively, the Locksmith, the Pickpocket, the Lookout, and the Cleaner.
• For Science!: When Pierre gets sacked from the police force and gets a job at the hospital, the player can "eavesdrop" on him writing an e-mail to his parents talking about the tranquiliser crossbows the doctors use on the psych ward patients. He says that on his next visit to his parents' dairy farm, he'd like to use the crossbow on the bull... FOR SCIENCE!
• Gentleman Thief: The Gentleman.
• Gratuitous French: The NPC dialogue is in French; since the game takes place in Monaco, this is to be expected. The criminals all speak English to each other, but since the nationalities of all but three are never revealed (the Lookout is from Haiti, then became a refugee in the USA where she met the Locksmith, and the Gentleman is Lebanese), this sort of makes sense as well.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • The AI isn't exactly dumb, but it has the standard stealth game limitations that the game would be impossible without. Still, guard dogs that can't tell you are hiding in a potted plant 2 feet in front of them?
  • Even more pronounced in Zonaco, since zombies are more characterised by eating brains than having them. If the zombies start chasing you and you jump into a potted plant right in front of their eyes, they'll give up and go back to what they were doing. They also can't open locked doors, so you can walk right up to the computer at a reception desk and install a virus in full view of the Wretch on the other side, and the Wretch will just stand there in total confusion if the only way to get out involves unlocking a door.
• Healing Hands: Both players and guards can revive their friends by rapidly wiggling their hands over the corpse.
• Hilarity Ensues: The main reason the game is so fun is that unlike other stealth games, you are expected to be caught. The game is more about advancing despite being caught and then escaping back to safety. As result, it's nearly impossible in later levels to actually go without being seen. This means games usually degenerate into 4 thieves scurrying around trying to grab loot, not die, and resurrect each other at a frantic pace.
• Hollywood Hacking: Hacking in this game is provided in the form of computers, which the players must do some Rapid-Fire Typing on to create a virus; this virus takes the form of a little blip that follows its creator around and disables technology they're near. And by that, we mean any computer, and any form of technology: on one level it's possible to have the Pickpocket, who is a beggar with a pet monkey, take over the DJ's soundsystem at a nightclub and in three seconds install a virus that allows him to hack an ATM at the entrance of the nightclub.
• Honey Trap: The Cleaner and the Redhead can arrange this. The Redhead charms a guard and lures it to an isolated area and then hides in a bush or vent. This breaks the charm, allowing the Cleaner to take them out.
• Informed Attractiveness: The Redhead is supposedly attractive, but that can only ever be seen in promotional artwork. The game itself portrays her with the same blocky pixel art that it does with everyone else, which makes it hard to tell.
• Instant Sedation: The Cleaner uses chloroform to do this to anyone instantly. Even dogs. But not cats or seagulls. Also, the Crossbows do this as well.
• Instant Seduction: The Redhead instantly charms anyone who sees her, provided she doesn't already have someone charmed. Even dogs. But not Cats.
• It's Probably Nothing: A particularly egregious example; guards will turn and look at the noise created by the Mole breaking a hole in the wall, then shrug and assume it's nothing, despite half the wall now being gone.
• Jail Bake: Parodied in Pierre's final e-mail to his parents from prison. Frustrated at the fact that they don't serve cheese in the prison canteen, he asks his parents if they could smuggle a wedge of cheese into the prison baked into a cake.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: So, if the Locksmith, the Pickpocket, and the Lookout all tell such wildly differing stories— what actually went down after the gang escaped from prison?
• Made of Explodium: The Bloaters in Zonaco explode if you hit them, doing the same damage to anything in range as a C4 charge. You can use this to your advantage by shooting them from a distance if they are surrounded by Wretches or standing near inconvenient security cameras or safes.
• Magic Tool: The Wrench completes any action instantly. That means you can use it to open a safe, steal from an ATM, bypass security scanner doors, disable laser beams, break into cars, or even hack computers. In a pinch, you can also bludgeon guards with it.
• The Medic: The Redhead revives allies twice as quickly as any other class. Also in multiplayer, whoever picks up the Trauma Kit equipment becomes this for the team, as it allows them to both heal allies and revive dead players instantly.
• The Mole:
  • No, not that Mole. In the final level of the final act, "Paris, Forever", it turns out that Constable Candide, Inspector Voltaire's assistant, is actually the Cleaner (and probably the Hacker as well), and after getting rid of all evidence against the criminals, he leads Voltaire to the Gentleman, silently confirms that their plan has gone off without a hitch, then knocks out Voltaire for the Mole to finish off.
  • The Pickpocket tells Inspector Voltaire that he is actually working for INTERPOL to gather enough evidence to allow them to arrest the thieves, but the Gentleman sensed there was a mole in the ranks (no, not that Mole) and kept staging ever more ambitious robberies to get the mole to lose his nerve. This turns out to be a ruse, as the Pickpocket and the Gentleman are (probably) the same person.
• No Name Given: Everyone. Justified since the crew are all professional criminals who probably wouldn't even want to know each other's names even if they were willing to give them. Except that the Cleaner turns out to be the Gentleman's nephew. Also, it is implied that the "small time" crooks who the bodies at the nightclub are identified as are the thieves, who swapped their dental records for Davide and crew's. Between this and each crook's dual identity - see Tomato Surprise - any names they had at the beginning are meaningless by the end anyway.
• No One Gets Left Behind: In multiplayer, you must have everyone alive and on the same staircase to change levels. You also must have everyone alive and in the getaway vehicle to escape. In Single-player, however, you get 4 lives so you can leave 3 characters dead and still win.
• No Peripheral Vision: Guards and civilians have a 90 degree cone of vision. Thankfully averted for the players who have 360 degree vision.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: The Cleaner will only put enemies to sleep temporarily. Using the shotgun, machine gun, or wrench will kill an NPCs (they turn into a skeleton), but other NPCs can revive these skeletons. However, it is possible to permanently kill NPCs using C4. Just be sure to vacate the area ASAP.
• One Last Job: Or so the Gentleman promises. The main crew end up being roped into "last job" after "last job," until they give up the idea of stopping entirely. The Pickpocket's account of the casino heist is even called "One Last Job". Although this proves to be a straight example of the trope since this is the last story the Pickpocket tells of the team stealing back the Gentleman's confiscated wealth; the remaining two levels have the team fleeing the hotel as the police close in, followed by breaking out of prison.
• Playful Hacker: The Hacker.
• Plethora of Mistakes: Guaranteed to happen at least once per mission.
• Psycho for Hire: At one point, the Locksmith says he thinks the Cleaner was coming along on the heists just for an excuse to hurt people.
• "Rashomon"-Style: The Locksmith and the Pickpocket recount the same events, but tell wildly different stories.
• Running Gag:
  • In the first level, the guard outside the four thieves' cells, Pierre, is writing an e-mail to his parents about how boring his job is. He re-appears in most of the other levels in the Locksmith's Story writing further e-mails to his parents about how the thieves' actions have caused him to lose whatever job he had at the time and telling them about the perks of his new job, as well as revealing his obsession with cheese (his parents are dairy farmers) and his ambition to build a koi pond. The art gallery level has one of his female co-workers writing to her friend Fiona about the weird new guy who has been hitting on her and talking endlessly about fish and cheese. In the final level of the Pickpocket's Story, he's writing his parents from prison — since he was at the site of every single theft, the judge thought he was in league with the crew!
  • In the second level, the four convicts meet a fellow prisoner named Seth who had his teeth knocked out during the hijack that allowed the team to pick up the Mole. He re-appears in most Locksmith's Story levels to deliver advice or funny comments to the team, nearly all involving words with "S" that highlight his Speech Impediment. In an Easter egg in the "Fin" level "From Whence He Came", the Mole can tunnel to a room in the lower left of the lowest floor to see that Seth came to an unfortunate demise.
• Smoke Out: The smoke bomb pickup can cover your escape or blind guards while you access key objects.
• Speech Impediment: Most heists on the Locksmith's Path feature an appearance by a fellow convict named Seth - or Theth, as he pronounces his own name after having his teeth knocked out during the hijack which leads to the team recruiting the Mole.
• Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack: Almost every song uses the motif of the main theme.
• There Was a Door: Making unnecessary holes is part of the fun of playing the Mole. On the other hand, if the door is locked or alarmed, making a hole right next to it to bypass it is sound strategy.
• Tomato Surprise: There's really only 4 thieves all along. The Locksmith is the Mole, the Lookout is the Redhead, the Cleaner is the Hacker, and the Pickpocket is the Gentleman. Probably.
• Tranquillizer Dart: Crossbow fired ones, at that. They aren't as good for actual combat as a real gun, but have the advantage of being silent. Unfortunately, some enemies get them too, and even some security systems fire them.
• Two Girls to a Team: Lookout and Redhead are the only two female classes. Could also be The Smurfette Principle, as they're possibly the same person.
• Unreliable Narrator: All the thieves, to an extent.
  • The Locksmith is the most obvious, and even changes the Redhead's dialogue to make it seem like she's interested in him.
  • The Pickpocket openly outs the Locksmith as a liar to make his own story seem more reliable. He claims to be an undercover policeman, but "Identity" reveals that he is really the Gentleman.
  • According to the Lookout in the Prologue chapters, the Pickpocket has a tendency to embellish on facts for the sake of a more dramatic story, "but the facts are still there." She does call the Locksmith too dumb to lie, though. Her campaign seems to be mostly truthful. That she discusses the group as if they were eight thieves instead of four is explained if you look at the parallels in each story. The Mole's origin was when his friends left him to take the rap for a heist...and when the Locksmith got caught, the Lookout went free. The Lookout felt she was owed a karmic debt - and the Redhead/Blonde felt the debt was repaid. The Pickpocket used to be a rich man; the Gentleman, a wealthy banker. The Cleaner has a "brother" who is out of control, much like the Hacker is described as.
• Variable Mix: The more urgent the background music is, the more trouble you're in.
• Verbal Tic: The Gentleman uses French phrases in his dialogue more than any other character. When the Pickpocket starts using it in his campaign, it's to hint that they're the same person.
• V-Formation Team Shot: As demonstrated by the cover above.
• The Voiceless: The Cleaner usually doesn't have much to say besides "...". Except when he is pretending to be someone else.
• Wham Line:
  • A brilliant one comes from the Gentleman and his crew at the start of Hotel de Monaco.
    The Gentleman: Mes amis? Gather on the balcony for me. I'd like to offer a toast. A toast... and an apology. I must admit that my offer to help you escape the country was a bit dishonest... For that I apologise. But I also must thank you. For retrieving four passports from the embassy... For clearing our names at the museum... For placing yourselves at the murder of my rival...
    The Redhead: And for making us filthy rich...
    The Hacker: whatsyoursismine
    The Gentleman: Above all, thank you for being four petty thieves on whom the authorities will pin all the blame.
  • And again in "Identity", the final level of the Pickpocket's story. The Pickpocket briefly lapses into French, a Verbal Tic used only by the Gentleman. They're the same person.
    The Pickpocket: Good night, Inspector. Ce qui est à toi est à moi.
• Worst Aid: Incapacitation turns any character or NPC into a skeleton on the floor, which can be revived by an ally over a slow amount of time, as a slurpy, gurgling sound plays that can only be described as "putting organs back in place."
• Wrench Whack: The Wrench is both a tool and a weapon.
• You All Meet in a Cell: The first four thieves meet in prison where they team up to escape.