The articlegameplay, story, development, reception
Gameplay
Monaco is a stealth video game played through a top-down perspective. It features single-player and cooperative modes, allowing up to four players to partake in heists and robberies. The game has four main campaigns for the player to complete, each through the perspective of a different character. Each campaign is split into individual missions.
Missions take place in locations varying from nightclubs to yachts, with different obstacles and problems to solve. As players only have vision of areas within direct line of sight, they must traverse each mission strategically to navigate the fog of war shrouding the map. Players work together to complete the missions; if one player dies, another must revive them before finishing the mission. The campaign is offered in two modes: "Classic", which is the original and full-length story, and "Enhanced", which is a condensed version released in a later update.
Story
The Locksmith is questioned by Inspector Voltaire about his recent actions with the Pickpocket, the Cleaner, and Lookout. The Locksmith describes the criminals' prison escape in Monaco alongside another inmate, the Mole. They meet the Gentleman while stealing passports and money to be smuggled out of the country. They board the Gentleman's booby-trapped yacht and try to leave the harbor; while doing so, the Gentleman receives an anonymous telephone call from a man he later identifies as Davide, after which the boat explodes.
After receiving medical care at a hospital, the thieves help the Gentleman dispose of evidence from a previous heist and rescue his girlfriend, the Redhead. The group proceeds to steal valuables and hire the Hacker. While attempting to steal from a casino, they are caught by the police and taken back to prison.
Development
Developer Andy Schatz first prototyped Monaco while working for TKO Software, a video game development company based in Santa Cruz, California. The prototype was a house-robbing game, where players would steal from others' homes while defending their own with traps. Schatz described it as a combination of The Sims, Diablo meets Hitman, and that the later indie game The Castle Doctrine had many similarities to this prototype. His original plan was to develop and release Monaco as an Xbox Live Indie Games game.
The development at TKO was done in three weeks while the company searched for solicited paid work, although Monaco's development was ultimately shelved before TKO shut down. Schatz retained the contractual rights to the concept, and founded his own independent company, Pocketwatch Games. After Pocketwatch Games had experimented with simulation games, such as the 2006 Independent Games Festival finalist Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, Schatz returned to Monaco's concept in 2009 and developed an early version of the game using Microsoft XNA to see if it worked on the Xbox 360, with the possibility of releasing the game onto the Xbox Live Indie Games portion of the Xbox Games Store. After only fifteen weeks of development, the game won the 2010 IGF award for "Excellence in Design" alongside the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
Reception
The PC and Xbox 360 versions of Monaco received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. The Nintendo Switch version also received favorable reviews. , and Payday 2. Despite praise, the Xbox 360 release sold poorly and Andy Schatz believed this was because of the weak demonstration version, the delayed release, and the bugs in the multiplayer mode.
After its inclusion in a Humble Bundle, by March 2014, the game surpassed 750,000 sales and by that September, it had sold over a million. Overall, Monaco sold enough copies for Andy Schatz to have "no complaints".
