Game Pile: The Swindle, Again

I'VE BEEN PLAYING A LOT OF THE SWINDLE LATELY, EP 14

Back in 2015 when I first reviewed The Swindle, I, at the time, thought that the game was fun, but I hadn’t actually any real place on it. I didn’t think of this game as part of my history or my place in the game’s history.

As of tonight, there is a tiny window of time in which I may have tied the world record for lowest number of days. I can’t find the proper world record – not a proper, real, big-boy speed run. I know I’m one of the players who’s played the most of The Swindle – 800 hours! – but I think there’s a non-zero chance here that I hold something of a record.

One last thing, for the video, is the game records dates a little weirdly. The game starts you on ‘day 101,’ so you have 100 days to go; whenever you finish a level, it subtracts one from that number, and then the final scroll subtracts another day, because of an unspecified bug. If you count down manually, you get a track of day 100, 99, 98, 97, 96,  95, 94, 93, 92, 91, 90, 89, 88, and then completing the Swindle on 87. That’s fourteen days.

This is not the absolute best possible run of the Swindle. It is hypothetically possible to have a run that goes in nine days. I don’t see that ever happening, but it’s hypothetically possible.