Plan Z — Twenty Levels of Break-Out Stealth

What is Plan Z — Twenty Levels of Break-Out Stealth

Plan Z is a top-down stealth game about getting out of a walled compound. You start each of its twenty levels in one corner and have to reach the pulsing gate on the far side. Between the two stand patrolling guards, locked doors, wire fences, rubble and rotating searchlights. Every guard drags a visible cone of sight about a hundred and twenty degrees wide, and that cone stops dead at walls; staying outside it is the whole game. You get four hearts, a stamina bar that empties in three seconds of sprinting, and one shove that stuns a guard. There is no weapon.

The four opening levels are drawn by hand and never change: a cell block with a brass key behind a locked door, a floodlit compound where cutters open the fence, a blackout in the tunnels where a lantern is the only way to see, and a river crossing where three gears power the mechanism that calls the train. From level five a generator widens the ground and adds a locked door and two patrols every few levels, until eight guards move at nearly your running speed. The tally above all rewards patience: clearing a whole level unseen is worth five hundred points on its own.

How to play

1. Move with the arrow keys, with WASD, or with the floating stick on the lower left of the board; hold SHIFT or the RUN button to sprint while stamina lasts.
2. Press SPACE or the ACT button to use what is in front of you: unlock a coloured door, pull a lever, cut a fence, dig through rubble, or shove a guard standing too close.
3. Watch the yellow cones on the floor. Step into one and the guard needs about a third of a second to react; the ALM bar climbs, and at full alarm every guard runs at you.
4. Walk onto a green bush to hide. It cuts a guard's sight to about a quarter of its range and lets searchlight beams pass over you. Reach the gate tile to clear the level.

Strategies that work

• The tally pays five hundred points for finishing a level without being spotted once, and only five points per second under par. Par on level one is seventy-five seconds, so the bonus is worth a hundred seconds of hurrying. Wait for a patrol to turn its back.
• Walking moves you at a hundred and twenty-five pixels a second; a guard chasing you moves at a hundred and fifty. On foot you never escape. Sprinting reaches two hundred and five but empties the bar in three seconds, so sprint in short bursts to a corner, then stop and let stamina refill.
• A bush is the strongest tool here. Inside one, a guard's detection range drops from about a hundred and seventy pixels to forty-five, and searchlights ignore you entirely; guards walk right past a bush you are sitting in. Plan routes bush to bush, above all on the floodlit compound levels.
• Once seen, stop running in a straight line. Break line of sight behind a wall and the guard gives up after four and a half seconds, but only while the alarm sits under forty. Alarm drains six a second and a sighting adds thirty, so one slip costs roughly ten quiet seconds.
• Searchlights beat guards for danger: a beam on you adds forty-five alarm a second, but it is narrow and predictable, so watch one full sweep before committing. On the dark tunnel levels, three, seven, eleven, fifteen and nineteen, fetch the lantern first; it stretches your own view from ninety-five pixels to a hundred and seventy-five.

A little history

Plan Z was written for puzzle-me.com and adapts no existing game. It sits in the top-down stealth line Konami's Metal Gear opened on the MSX2 in 1987, where a guard's field of view is a shape you read, not an enemy you fight. The cone here spans about a hundred and twenty degrees and is blocked by walls, which makes doors, corners and bushes the real equipment. The first four levels are hand-drawn; the sixteen after them come from a generator that widens the map and adds patrols as the number rises. Nothing that shapes a level uses unseeded randomness.

Frequently asked questions