My Life In Crime Novel

How to Play My Life In Crime Novel — A Practical Guide

I picked this up last winter when I had a couple of evenings that needed filling. What I found was a text-based life simulation that tracks every choice you make through a criminal underworld. It is not complicated, but it has some quirks that the manual does not really explain. I am going to walk you through how it actually works, what to watch out for, and where the common traps are. The game launches on iOS and Android as a free download. The app is roughly 180 megabytes, which is larger than most text games because it includes the voice work for the main characters. Once you open it, you create a character. The name does not matter much, but the background you choose at the start sets your initial stats and the first few story branches. I picked the street-level runner route because it gave me a decent starting cash pool and an early contact in the drug trade. That turned out to be the right call for most players. From there the game drops you into a series of text scenes. Each scene presents a situation and two or three choices. The choices are not always obvious. The narrative writes itself based on what you pick, and it tracks reputation, money, health, and heat from the police. Those four numbers are the real engine of the game. Everything else is decoration.

Here is something I learned after about thirty hours of play. Most people focus on stacking cash early on. That is a mistake. If your heat number gets too high too fast, the police will raid your operations before you have a chance to spend the money. I lost two separate playthroughs to that exact problem. After that, I started keeping heat below forty until I had at least three escape routes unlocked in the underworld tree. It makes the middle game much less stressful.

The Stat System Explained

Reputation controls which criminal organizations will talk to you. At reputation ten and below, you are basically ignored by everyone except the local thugs. At twenty-five, the mid-tier crews start offering contracts. At forty, you can negotiate with the syndicates directly. The trick is that reputation goes both ways. Good deeds do not always raise it, and neither do bad ones automatically. It depends on who witnesses the action. I found that completing a heist in front of a rival crew member raises reputation faster than doing it alone, even if you fail. The rival still reports back that you survived. Heat is your police attention score. Every illegal act adds to it. Every bribe or lawyer payment subtracts. The game does not tell you the exact threshold for a raid, but from my testing it lands somewhere between seventy and eighty depending on how many witnesses the police have. Once you cross it, random events start appearing where officers show up at your safehouses. I keep a running ledger of my heat after each major decision because the game itself does not highlight when you are close to the line. Health works the normal way. You can get shot, stabbed, or sick from bad supplies. The pharmacy mechanic is where most new players waste money. The game sells two types of health items. The cheap ones restore a small amount but add a sickness debuff that lasts a few in-game days. The expensive ones are clean but cost about four times as much. I stopped buying the cheap version after my first infection event killed a run I had invested eight hours in. It was not worth saving twenty in-game dollars.

Money is the easiest stat to understand but the hardest to manage. Income comes from contracts, scams, and selling stolen goods. Expenses come from bribes, medical bills, upgrades, and the occasional kidnapping ransom you have to pay your own captors. The game simulates inflation quietly. As your reputation rises, prices in the black market go up roughly ten percent per reputation tier. That is not written anywhere. I noticed it by comparing prices across three separate save files.

Story Progression and Branching

The narrative runs through several arcs. The first arc covers your entry into the life and usually ends with your first major crew conflict. The second arc involves building territory. The third arc is where the story either escalates into a war or winds down into retirement, depending on your choices. There is no single ending. I have completed the game four times and got three different conclusions. The branching is more meaningful than it looks. Early choices lock or unlock entire story paths. If you refuse to work for a particular boss in chapter two, you will never get the insider contract that appears in chapter five. That contract is one of the fastest ways to generate income without raising heat. I missed it on my second playthrough and spent six hours grinding side gigs to catch up. Not fun. One counter-intuitive thing about the story: the game rewards caution more than aggression. Players who try to take over the city in the first twenty hours usually get killed by a coalition of rivals. Players who build slowly and let the rival gangs fight each other tend to inherit territory for free. I watched three separate playthroughs end with the protagonist surviving purely because they stayed out of conflicts until their reputation hit sixty.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

The biggest trap is the greed loop. The game gives you opportunities to take high-reward jobs that also raise heat significantly. Taking them all in a row will trigger a police crackdown event within about four in-game weeks. I used to ignore the heat warnings because the payouts looked good. Now I treat any job that adds more than fifteen heat as a red flag unless I have already paid off a lawyer or bribed a captain. Another trap is the relationship system. You can form alliances with other characters, but relationships decay if you do not check in regularly. I neglected a key ally for too long and lost access to his weapon supplier. That supplier was the only one selling untraceable firearms in the game. After that, I started keeping a reminder note for the three most important relationships and checking in every few days. The third trap is assuming the game is fair. It is not always fair. Random events can destroy months of progress in a single scene. A drug deal can go bad. A partner can betray you. A witness can identify you. The game uses a hidden probability table for these events, and it tilts against you as your reputation grows. I have accepted that some runs will end badly regardless of what I do. The goal is to minimize the impact, not eliminate it.

Download and Setup Details

The official app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Search for "My Life In Crime Novel" and make sure you are downloading the version by Midnight Script Studios. There are a few clone apps that look similar but are not the real game. The official version costs nothing to download and offers in-app purchases for cosmetic items and a stat reset service. I do not recommend the reset service. It is overpriced and you can just start a new save file instead. If you are playing on a phone, I suggest enabling Do Not Disturb during sessions. The text moves fast and notifications will make you miss critical choices. The game autosaves after every major decision, so you do not need to worry about losing progress. Battery drain is moderate. I average about twelve percent per hour on a iPhone 14.

Advanced Tactics for Experienced Players

Once you have beaten the main story once, there are techniques that make the game feel completely different. One of the most effective is the dual-identity strategy. You maintain a public reputation as a legitimate business owner while running criminal operations under a different name. The game allows you to register a shell company around reputation thirty. From there you can funnel money through legal channels and reduce your effective heat by about twenty percent. This is not stated in the tutorial. I discovered it by accident after noticing that my taxed income was being reported separately from my illegal earnings. Another advanced technique is the loyalty trade. Certain characters will perform favors for you if you help them first. The game does not make this explicit, but the favors are tracked in a hidden loyalty counter. If you complete three favors for the same person, they will occasionally offer you information about upcoming police raids or rival movements. That information is worth more than any contract in the game. I built an entire playthrough around helping a single fixer character and then using his intel to stay one step ahead of everyone else. The economy hack is less of a hack and more of a pattern recognition skill. Black market prices fluctuate daily. Weapons are cheapest on Mondays. Drugs are cheapest on Fridays. Information brokers charge more on weekends. If you plan your major purchases around these patterns, you can save roughly fifteen percent of your total spending over a full run. It sounds small, but it adds up when you are buying equipment every few days.

When the Game Fails You

I want to be clear about one thing. My Life In Crime Novel has a save scumming problem. The game autosaves, but it does not give you manual save slots. If you make a terrible choice and commit it to the save file, you are stuck with the consequences unless you start over. There is a workaround. You can delete the app and reinstall it to wipe your progress, but that deletes everything. Some players keep multiple phones or use cloud saves on separate accounts to maintain different story branches. I keep a secondary Google account for this purpose. The game also struggles on older devices. If you are playing on a phone made before 2019, you may experience text rendering lag during busy scenes. This is especially noticeable during the gang war events where multiple text boxes appear simultaneously. I found that lowering the text speed in settings helps, but it does not eliminate the lag. If you have an older device, consider playing on a tablet or PC emulator instead. There is no multiplayer mode. The game is strictly single-player. Some reviews complain about this, but I do not think it matters. The story is designed for one person making choices. Adding multiplayer would break the reputation and heat systems because those numbers are tied to individual save files. I prefer it this way.

Is It Worth Your Time

My Life In Crime Novel is a solid entry in the crime life simulation genre. It is not perfect. The story can be repetitive after the third playthrough. The graphics are minimal. The interface feels dated compared to newer releases. But the stat system is deep enough that you will find yourself optimizing choices even after you know how the game works. That is the sign of a good design. If you like reading about criminal careers and making tradeoffs between short-term gain and long-term survival, this game will keep you busy for twenty to thirty hours. If you want constant action and flashy visuals, look elsewhere. The game is about decisions, not about spectacle. I have been playing it for about six months now and I am still finding new interactions. That is unusual for a text game. Most of them run out of content after ten hours. This one did not. I think it is because the stat interdependencies create emergent situations that the writers did not explicitly script. The economy simulation alone generates enough variety to keep things interesting.

Download it. Start a new game. Keep your heat low. Trust nobody completely. And do not take the high-reward job just because the payout looks good. The money is not the point. Survival is.