Plans for The Brilliant Coup well underway

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

SCUMM-styled point-and-click British crime comedy adventure coming to Steam in 2024

Adventure game protagonists are notorious for picking up anything that isn't nailed down, even if it doesn't belong to them. Most such items, however, aren't nearly as valuable as the titular gem in solo developer Markus Creative's upcoming point-and-click heist adventure, The Brilliant Coup.

It's 1987, and somewhere in a big city in England, a young man named Matt finds himself in dire financial straights. He's managed to resist stooping to illegal means for money so far, but his days of making an honest living come to an end when his "petty criminal fatherly friend 'Uncle Briggs' offers him a promising job." Briggs intends to score a huge payday by stealing the renowned Arctic Star jewel from the the Trustman Bank. The problem is, Trustman is the "best-guarded bank in the country," so he's going to need Matt's help to plan and prepare the perfect theft.

The Brilliant Coup is described as a "crime comedy that shines with hours of fun, unforeseen twists, dozens of puzzles, black humor and witty dialogues with quirky characters." The late-eighties setting seems appropriate, as in many ways it is a throwback to that era of graphic adventures, though updated for modern sensibilities. Presented in a charming pixel art aesthetic with a SCUMM-style command interface, the game will feature 30 different locations across the city to explore, filled with 100 items to interact with and combine, and 25 chatty NPCs to talk to via multiple choice dialogue trees. To succeed, players must "take photos of the construction plans, scout out the bank, uncover the weak spots and find a way in," along with helping Uncle Briggs plan the operation and hire a team to carrry it out. But beware the police, as there are three potential endings: the "good, bad and ugly."

No firm target release date has been announced yet, but The Brilliant Coup is due to be launched on Steam for Windows PC sometime in 2024.