‘Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’

After hundreds of hours of playing this – and other Mimimi titles, I thought I’d put down some thoughts about general gameplay. This isn’t a guide on how to get specific badges or do a speedrun. There’s plenty of advice out there to help you. This is designed to pull out some general gameplay guidelines that will help you finish a mission, quite possibly with an outrageous body count, but get it done, nonetheless. Very well, let us begin.

1.Be Tidy. Always try and hide the bodies in a bush, drop them in a well or throw them into any open water. If the natives get restless and diverge from their patrol patterns, then coming across a dead body you’ve left in your murderous wake is going to cause an alarm.

2. Doc and Kate are tidy people. There’s nothing more annoying than executing a wonderful bit of mayhem to be caught out by trying to dump the body with Cooper, Hector or Isabelle. They must stand up straight as they move the corpse to its final resting place. If you are caught in the peripheral view cone (that’s the stripey bit) of a bad guy that’s almost certainly going to cause an alarm. Doc and Kate can drag bodies through those peripheral cones and not be caught doing so. Yes, it’s slow, but it’s worth the extra time.

3. Kill everyone you meet. I often like to clear the map completely. In fact, unless there’s a reason not to - that includes those poor innocent civilians - If you can’t kill them (such as at the DeVitt party scenario, “A Captain of Industry”), knock them out and throw them into bushes where the outcome is the same - just don’t dump them into water. Civilians are little rats who will run to the nearest bad guy and snitch on you. Expect an alarm to quickly follow. Show no mercy.

4. Alarms are bad. If you like a challenge, then let the bells ring out. The garrison of guards will begin to empty, and you’ll be faced with new patrols to kill. That said, most of the time they’ll probably zero right in and kill you. Game over. Just reload and try again.

5. It’s all a big puzzle. It’s systemic murderous fun. Guards follow predetermined sequences of activity unless roused to action by an “accident” occurring or an alarm being raised. If you are faced with what seems to be an impossible situation say killing guard A will alert B and C or any combination therein. There are two ways to get out of this situation. The first is: pull on a thread. The maps are really well designed but there’s nearly always an individual that you can take out that will break the deadlock. Once you pull on that thread the whole thing begins to unravel. The second is kill everyone at once. Go into showdown mode and set up a multi-character action that will slaughter all the bad guys with a synchronous elegance that would make a ballet dancer blush. There are variations on this theme, especially by distracting someone and killing everyone else, but I’ll let you explore them yourselves.

6. Accidents will happen. I can’t stress this enough. Be environmentally unfriendly. That rock wants to fall on top of the Longcoat, that crane is destined to squash that patrol of three guys. The enemy will buzz around talking about how ridiculously unlikely said accident was, but they won’t raise the alarm unless you were untidy, and they find a corpse elsewhere. After a while they will go back to what they were doing before, as if nothing had happened. To maximize this damage, watch the scene unfold for a while, sometimes the bad guys will congregate under that rock or crane to talk about the weather as they walk around. Then you can squash more of them. As the enemy will look around investigating the scene the quick player can often use this movement to kill a few extra bad guys. The systemic pattern of the puzzle has been temporarily broken so take murderous advantage. That said, it’s risky, they are moving around randomly and if they see you, it’s alarm time. You have been warned.

7. Chickens. Part of the environment but very useful in a pinch. Enemies will often come to investigate chicken squawks. If you are prepared for such an encounter, because you made them squawk, then you can kill the poor saps that come to see if there’s a fox in the coop.

8. Guns. It’s a Western. Guns are endemic to the genre. Don’t be scared to use them if you have a chance. Chances present themselves when anyone who isn’t getting a bullet is out of earshot. Otherwise, you guessed it. It’s alarm time. With Cooper stand him off at a distance and kill stragglers at maximum range. Two, if possible, as even a single shot will drop the ammo by one in both pistols. Hector’s shotgun is fantastic at taking out whole patrols and the sound doesn’t travel far. Kate’s Derringer is a wonderful weapon for low-noise kills. With Doc? Well, you can clear out all those lonely watchtowers with vigilant guards from a distance, just make sure no-one else is watching them at the same time (usually guards in other watchtowers or on higher elevations).

9. It’s all in the timing. You’ll notice that attacks and distractions have a Duration. That’s something that you should always be aware of. Cooper throwing a knife takes the victim longer to die than sneaking up and just stabbing them. Hector using “the Axe” is much quicker than the hungry jaws of Bianca when she kills some poor sucker. Why is this important? If you can distract an enemy or civilian long enough to move their peripheral view cone away from your act of murder, then when they look back, they won’t be able to see the fresh corpse on the floor. There’s a couple of things here that must happen. First: the said act of violence must take place in an enemy’s peripheral view cone (again the stripey part). Second: the duration for the distraction must be longer than the time to kill. Third: there’s often a very very, very short duration of time before the distraction kicks in, so it needs to happen just a teensy bit of time before the kill. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), when the enemy looks back both killer and victim need to be crouched and dead respectively. To make all this happen requires showdown mode, but I’d start the distraction just before the kill with individual key presses. Classic combos here are Cooper/Hector with the Knife/Axe and Kate’s perfume. With Isabelle and her adorable cat, the cat must cover the distance to the victim before the distraction kicks in (if you are playing in Desperado mode the cat will preposition itself in real-time as the action isn’t frozen). All good clean fun… Except for the blood. With long duration kills like Hector battling a Longcoat, knocking out and tying someone up or Bianca closing her slavering iron jaws, this maneuver isn’t going to work unless you really distract the viewer (like dropping a nearby rock on their best friend).

10. Confidence is key. When I first started playing this genre, I found myself being risk averse. This is a game that expects you to reload and reload frequently. So now I’ll happily run Kate in a dress past a Longcoat while they are looking the other way or stick Isabelle into plain view for a millisecond or so to put a pin in a guard. As you rack up more hours this feeling of vulnerability will go away. Things that will help - remap the SAVE key to “.”- and hit it just before you do something risky. There’s nothing more irritating than going back a couple of minutes because you forgot to hit SAVE. It encourages you NOT to push the sneaky aspect of the game to its limits by taking risks.