Night Heist

What is Night Heist?

Night Heist is a short stealth maze game from developer Kozuma, built in Godot and playable in the browser through HTML5. The camera sits above a pixel-art museum at night, and the job is easy to state and fiddly to finish: take every piece of loot out of three rooms, then reach the exit before the guards close in.

The burglar has two tools that matter. Vents along the sides of the rooms form a route only the player can use, and smoke bombs stun nearby guards while covering the scent trail. Light is the real enemy; step into it and a guard has a reason to give chase.

Three guard archetypes work the space, each with its own logic, and per-room difficulty settings shift speed, eyesight, memory and how far a guard will call for help. The game is free and runs in a browser tab, so the cost of trying a run is close to nothing.

How to play

Each run asks for a clean sweep. Loot sits in three rooms, and the exit only matters once those rooms are empty; the door is the last thing to reach, not the first. Clearing a room hands over an extra life, and finishing one without being spotted pays a bigger bonus, which pushes toward patience over sprinting.

The vents on the sides of each room act as a shortcut that no guard can follow, and smoke bombs do double duty, freezing nearby guards and wiping the trail the Tracker reads. Stepping into a pool of light is what starts a chase in the first place, so route planning is mostly about which lamps to skirt.

Pause is always available, so a run can be stopped mid-sneak to think through the next room before committing to a line.

Controls

Movement runs on the arrow keys or WASD, and smoke bombs go out with Space or E. Esc or P pauses the run, and Tab opens the debug menu. One practical detail: click the game once before steering or typing so the browser passes keyboard input to the frame rather than the page around it.

The scheme is deliberately small — movement, a smoke bomb, pause and the debug menu. Everything is handled from the keyboard rather than a mouse-driven interface, so there are no menus to click through mid-heist.

Because a single key throws a smoke bomb, it pays to decide the escape line before pressing it. A stun that lands with no exit in mind only delays the problem by a few seconds, while the same bomb thrown at a doorway buys real space to walk through.

Tips for your first run

Reading the guards is most of the skill here. Each one behaves differently, so a route that works in one room can fall apart in the next, and the guard identities are worth learning before the first loot grab.

A few habits to build early: clear a room while unseen for the large bonus, keep one smoke bomb in reserve for the walk to the exit, and treat the side vents as your private hallway rather than a last resort.

• The blue Patroller walks a fixed route; step into the light and it chases, then searches the spot where the trail went cold.
• The green Tracker follows footprints step by step, and only a vent or a smoke bomb breaks that trail.
• The pink Warden stays near the richest part of a room, shifts as the loot disappears, and ends up watching the exit — so leave the final grab until the door is still open.
• Clearing a room at all grants an extra life; clearing it unseen adds a big bonus on top.
• Use the side vents freely, since no guard can follow you through them.

Content and replayability

Three rooms make up the heist, and the game is deliberately short. Replay value comes from two places: the bonus for clearing a room unseen, which rewards a second and third attempt at the same layout, and the debug menu, which is open to every player rather than hidden away.

Inside that menu, guards can be spawned on demand, walls can be walked through, time can be slowed, rooms can be jumped between, difficulty settings can be changed freely, and the guard paths and pathfinding grid can be switched on to watch the AI decide where to go.

That last option turns a compact stealth game into something to poke at: a chase can be watched from the first step, a search can be seen settling on the place where the trail was lost, and the difficulty can then be adjusted until the same room plays completely differently.

Presentation and performance

Visually the game is top-down 2D pixel art, with a museum laid out as rooms, walls, light pools and vents, and four screenshots accompany the build. It loads as an HTML5 frame inside the browser, so there is nothing to install before the first heist.

The most interesting presentation choice is the vision system. A cell counts as visible when it sits in front of a guard and a line drawn across the grid hits no wall, so the sightlines on screen match what the guard can actually perceive — nothing is hidden from the player that the AI can see.

Guards are built as Godot scenes assembled from small nodes: patrol, chase, search and stunned are separate nodes with short scripts, and only one runs at a time. Movement code is shared across everyone, pathfinding recalculates on each new tile, and a behavior usually just picks a target cell, which keeps the whole thing readable while it is moving.

Who should play it

Players who like a tight stealth puzzle and don't need a long campaign will get the most from this: three rooms, three guard types, and a limited bank of smoke bombs to spend wisely. The unseen-clear bonus gives the short structure something to chase after the first completion.

It also suits tinkerers. The debug menu lets anyone spawn guards, walk through walls, slow time, hop between rooms and switch on the guard paths and pathfinding grid, so a curious player can pull the AI apart on the spot. Per-room difficulty settings for speed, vision, memory and call-for-help range mean the same layout can be tuned until it fits.

Anyone who bounces off stealth, or who wants a fight, will find little here. The burglar cannot win a confrontation, only avoid one, and the whole game is played with a keyboard.