There is the germ of something really special here. The core of the game—infiltrating and stealing from increasingly well-guarded houses with roguelike progression giving you more tools and protections—is great, and at every step of the game I was expecting it to unfold into something really fun. But it's held back by a mountain of minor issues that all add up to make it really frustrating to put your all into.

Most of these are things that could be fixed with a few more rounds of in-depth playtesting. Why does the attack animation not match its hitbox when understanding its hitbox is crucial for safely engaging with enemies? Why can the starting level have loot you're guaranteed to be unable to access when getting all the loot on the first level gives you a bonus worth 4x the loot itself? Why does it go into slow motion every so often without rhyme or reason?

There is a class of media that hits a particular point on the quality spectrum where it fails to live up to its ambition, but the path to that ambition is so clear that it practically dares you to imagine a better version. The Swindle is in that class. I hope one day someone is inspired by it to make something that lives up to everything it could be.