Stealth Bastard Deluxe Review

I spotted this game whilst browsing through recent releases on Steam and it jumped out at me. I'm not sure if it's my childish nature or my mature disgust, but the game had the word bastard in it and I had to look further. A few seconds later, I realise its tagline was Tactical Espionage Arsehole and something inside me squealed and I was sold; I had to play this game.

I've always been a fan of stealth games, opting to take a longer but less dangerous route around an enemy in Splinter Cell or Far Cry and prefer to create confusion about my position, rather  than run in guns blazing. Stealth Bastard Deluxe takes this concept of shadowy wall-hugging and wraps a game around it, not giving you the choice of anything else. The concept of the game is very simple, get from the entrance of a level to the exit without being seen. Simple, right? Oh, I forgot to mention all of the puzzles, obstacles and enemies that are scattered around the level to stop you; my bad.

You avoid detection by moving obstacles and staying out of enemies sight which is viewable by a green cone starting at their "eyes". There is a simple detection system in place, if you can be seen, your eyes change from green to amber to red. Green is safe, amber is partially viewable and red is visible. Later on in the game, there are different unlockable suits to don which can aid in your espionage but you can only start to unlock these after completing the game once.

Much like other puzzle games of this nature, you won't be doing this without sacrificing yourself a bit in the name of science (or testing). It takes a lot of trial and error in some parts of the game to complete your objective but unlike other games where you die a lot, it's more about thinking and planning than it is about timing and chance. Much like how a child learns not to touch fire, you will learn what certain things do in this game and how to interact with them.

If you don't learn as fast as you may need to, you will be taunted, don't worry about that. Words appear on the walls guiding you along your journey out of the factory that housed you but don't worry, they will both congratulate and taunt you as you do good and bad respectively. I found myself committing suicide just to see what this mystical narrative would say at times.

As you can imagine, the game gets progressively more difficult as you progress through it and soon enough you'll be cursing and flailing at your screen as everything kills you over and over and over again. That's the sad truth that you will come to realise as you sit in your shadow, everything within this factory is tasked with killing you. There's no two ways about it. More than that, it is tasked with killing you and it will succeed, one way or another.

Luckily, there are a fair few checkpoints within every level so even if you die, it's not like you have to restart the entire level. This doesn't stop the misery when you die though. There were times that I would shut off the game to only return five minutes later after thinking through the puzzle in my head and realising it's not that hard to only shut it off again in rage a few minutes later. Then again, I would hate a puzzle game to be easy so this is a plus for Stealth Bastard Deluxe.

If you actually manage to complete the entire campaign, the story's not over there. You can create and share your own level designs so other users can sit and cry in front of their screen as your creation destroys their every hope.

Overall, Stealth Bastard Deluxe is a comical and challenging puzzler which will bring you to tears of both despair and joy, often at the same time as you realise you've completed a challenging level but you know there's an even more challenging one next. With the user created levels, it has a lot of replayability and is fairly easy to jump in and out of. It's definitely one for those of you who take the quiet and well thought-out approach to a task or those of you who like rude words.