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On April 26 2026, indie game developer No Goblin released their photography puzzle game Snap & Grab. This title sees players take control of the master thief and fashion photographer Nifty Nevada as they infiltrate high society locations to steal whatever treasures catch their eye. This title promises the player a great deal of freedom, as their photographs will determine how they approach the heist and what their crew will even steal. Is Snap & Grab worth playing, or should gamers infiltrate another title? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make that decision for ourselves. Although this game will be an episodic title, for now we shall cover just the first episode, as it gives a clear picture of what the full game will be like.
High-Quality Heists
The gameplay loop of Snap & Grab can fittingly be separated into two sections: The Snapping and the Grabbing. When walking around as Nifty, the player won’t be able to steal anything, but at the same time, they won’t be suspected of being a criminal and thus will be able to snap photos of the treasure they want to steal and any other objects in the area.
Each heist will consist of the player walking around a location to take photographs of objects that they will be using as part of their heist plan. Finding what you need to steal and the obstacles that stand in your path are just as important as actually grabbing it. Walking around each area, taking note of interactable objects like chandelier levers or toilets, which could potentially be used later, is exciting in its own way as you start thinking about how each item can be used in the actual heist.
Once the player feels they have taken enough photos, they can take out their heist planner to begin the grabbing segment of their heist. When planning, the player can order their two crewmates to use anything in said photos to steal the desired treasure. These actions your crewmates can take can range from having one of them talk to a guard to cause a distraction to running across the map to bring an item to a specific location so it can be used to grab the treasure you want.
If you successfully formulate a plan that allows your crew to sneak by security, grab the treasure you want, and reach the exit, then you’ll successfully complete the heist and be transported back to Nifty’s apartment in order to select their next heist target.
Failure is not punished as if a heist plan doesn’t work; the player is immediately sent back to where they were before they began their plan. This lack of consequences gives the game a sandbox feel that encourages people to continuously experiment and try new plans until they find one that works, instead of meticulously crafting the potential perfect plan with a fear of failure hanging over their head.
This creates an incredibly fun gameplay loop where every time a heist fails, the player will want to look around the location again, as Nifty, to see if they missed anything that could potentially be used to succeed, or maybe just switch around some steps of their plan to account for a guard they didn’t notice the first time they tried.
As the player continues through the episode’s available heists, they’ll slowly unlock extra features such as the ability to throw food items, extra locations that they can spawn in at the start of a heist, and the ability to have their two crewmates perform an action simultaneously in order to perform more complex actions during a heist. These added mechanics help make later heists in the episode stand out from the earlier ones.
While the game does have the risk of becoming repetitive as the player will find themselves repeating some basic steps, such as distracting a few specific guards during nearly every heist, I personally found the puzzle-solving experience of figuring out the specifics of each heist to be engaging from start to finish.
Hours of Replay Value
Snap & Grab has perhaps the most replay value that I have ever seen from an episodic game. While going through the main story moments and each major heist of the chapter will only take gamers a few hours at most, the game has no shortage of optional challenges for the player to partake in to truly get bang for their buck with this purchase.
For me personally, the real fun begins the first time you complete a heist. Once you have figured out the basic blueprint for a successful heist, you can’t help but look at the challenges section of your notebook and wonder how many other methods can be used to steal the same item.
Sure, I got the giant Apartment Key by smashing the ice sculpture it was attached to with a chandelier, but what other ways could I have gotten it? Could I have melted it? Thrown it? Heck, could I disregard the part of the plan that involves freeing it from the sculpture entirely and instead make a new plan that involves escaping the Penthouse with the entire ice sculpture in hand?
Reloading into the same heist over and over again and slightly changing my plan in order to gain extra challenge stars that could be used to decorate Nifty’s apartment or seeing how many ways the game would let me steal one item was downright addicting and one of my favorite parts of the Snap & Grab experience.
This first episode of the game is also filled with subtle hints toward what kind of mechanics the player can expect in later parts of the game. Spotting a small vent that could be used by the currently-not-implemented cat crewmate or an alarm that could be instantly disabled by the granny crewmate makes me excited to revisit these early game heists yet again to see what other ways they can be broken apart.
If going for specific challenges on a heist you’ve already done isn’t your cup of tea, then perhaps greed and completionism will bring you back to the Penthouse. While the game has several main heists that it centers challenges around, there is nothing stopping you from grabbing everything in the Penthouse that isn’t nailed down and bringing it back to Nifty’s apartment.
Players who want to steal everything or even just dog lovers who want to collect every corgi will be able to pour hours into the game as you keep robbing Erik Pop blind and making your own apartment more personalized to your playthrough.
I absolutely loved the amount of replay value available in Snap & Grab’s first episode, which has the potential to hold over fans until the second episode of the game releases later this year.
Poor Performance
While I love the gameplay loop and concept of Snap & Grab, there are a few glaring issues with this title that can easily turn off potential fans, and these issues all have to do with the game’s performance and other technical issues.
On a technical level, the framerate in Snap & Grab was at best inconsistent. Entering areas with plenty of character models, such as the dance floor, would almost always cause frame drops. Similarly, the volume of music would often seem to be inconsistent. Whenever I loaded into the Penthouse stage, it felt like I was rolling a dice on whether or not the music for the dance floor would actually be audible.
These are the types of issues that I can often overlook in a game, as although I have a decent computer that can run games well now, I grew up with less-than-adequate hardware, which often struggled to run PC games. This is the kind of video game performance I’m used to, but it can easily become a problem for other people, which can ruin their experience.
The other major issues the game has come in the form of glitches and how often the game feels like it’s breaking as the player performs a heist. On some level, I can forgive a lot of the game’s issues because there is an intentional level of jank in the design for the sake of comedy. Aspects of heists, like how dogs become stiff as statues when you hand them to someone, aren’t an oversight but the game working as intended.
I could even forgive some obvious glitches, like if a character model were to glitch out after planning a very complex heist that would involve two objects that the devs couldn’t imagine interacting with each other. When designing a game where theoretically any object in the environment can be picked up and used on another, it’s easy to sympathize when some combinations slip through the cracks of playtesting.
The game’s technical issues, however, become a major problem when interacting with a heist in what appears to be the intended way, as it will completely break the heist. Several times during my playthrough, in particular during the Bejeweled Burger and Toilet Shark heists, I was faced with issues that could potentially ruin the entire heist. The camera would either completely glitch out for the entire heist replay, the heist music would stop as if I failed despite the plan working, temp dialogue would play instead of a voice actor’s actual lines, and sometimes entire objects like alarm lasers would simply not function.
As I said before, I can sympathize with a lot of the game’s issues, as this style of game is very ambitious (especially for an indie developer), but the problems I faced during my playthrough can easily turn off a lot of players. Thankfully, No Goblin has been diligent and has released several patches in the week since the game’s release to fix issues pointed out by the playerbase. While the game is still marred with issues, this is at least a sign that the developers care enough to fix the biggest problems with the game.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I quite enjoyed the ten hours I spent playing through the first episode of Snap & Grab. While the game’s technical issues have a large potential of ruining the experience for many, the gameplay loop and creativity on display are a sight to behold. Planning a heist and seeing it succeed will continuously leave the player with a feeling of satisfaction, and I am certainly going to pick up the game’s future episodes to feel that same feeling again myself.
Snap & Grab Episode 1 - The Penthouse
Bottom Line
Snap & Grab's first episode offers a very promising puzzle solving experience as the player is given full freedom to handle heists via any method they deem feasible. The enjoyment of these puzzles and the hours of replay value that can be gained from trying the game's various challenges is only held back by heavy performance issues which threaten to lessen the entire experience.
