Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain

In Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain, you play the eponymous character (although you can choose a different name and customize your appearance). You are a minor supervillain, living in a slummy apartment and barely able to make the rent, but you are signed up with Crimr, which is kind of like TaskRabbit for scoundrels. You browse and select crimes to do for four different supervillains. Oh, and you have an intelligent hacker-cat who can help you out.

Or to put it another way, it’s a fairly conventional visual novel with heist mechanics, but also a dating sim: each of the four different supervillains (and one superhero) can be romanced, but choices do matter, so you have to choose a particular route to land one of them. There is replayability if you want to go back, and say, entice the evil AI who wants to destroy humanity. (Which is kind of a sweet story path actually; at one point it prints out ASCII art with a heart to indicate it loves you, and you can persuade it to not actually destroy humanity… because, after all, you’re a human.) I guess you could also call the game LGBT+ friendly – you can beguile three women and one man, and maybe the AI counts as “+”. 

As is typical in this kind of game, a romance path is exclusive, but you can reload from an earlier save and pursue a different path, with a skip system to jump past dialog you’ve seen and get you to the next important choice. Saves can be anywhere, which is important when you’re making a decision during a heist and are worried that it may be the wrong one, so the game is pretty forgiving in that regard. Romances are totally mellow; a kiss is about as steamy as you get.

There is some hugger-mugger about how the universe is on the verge of destruction, which is mainly a motivation to get you to replay. Romancing all five characters and making the right choices saves the universe, earning accomplishments. I got at least 10 hours of gameplay while pursuing all routes.

Graphically, the game features typical visual novel static illustrations that change with each advance through the dialog. Images are often repeated and are very much comic-book-style, which dovetails with the theme, and are highly colored and well done. The music is fantastic; there’s a light jazz ambient background most of the time, and the theme song is an amazing techno-swing tune by Alice Knows Karate. 

Heists require you to choose where to go and in what order, and can fail (but there's a save system, remember?). Almost everything else in the game is handled with dialog choices. But okay, there is a little bit of gameplay in terms of figuring out how to bring off a heist.

In general, Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain reminds me of two novels: Walschots’ Hench and Maehrer’s Assistant to the Villain, both of which I can recommend.

The Good

• Good writing
• Cheerful and entertaining comic-book-style graphics
• Outstanding music
• Interesting theme
• Heist mechanics are well done
• Reasonable value for the money.

The Bad

• It is a dating game, admittedly with heists, which may not be to everyone’s liking
• The only puzzle element is in choosing what actions to take during a heist.

Our Verdict

Good

A solid adventure that is generally enjoyable, though it lacks enough polish or ambition to recommend without caution.

Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain is an undeniably enjoyable and remarkably well-written visual novel, with music of high quality.