In and Out slot by NetEnt, from the first cascade to the last coin

Theme, visuals and a museum after closing time

The game follows a thief called Chloe through a collection of things that are not hers. NetEnt's own page for the title introduces her as a cool thief on a high-end heist, and the British reviews that have written the game up describe the setting in more detail than the studio does: a museum after hours, moonlight through tall windows, the reels framed like a feed from a security camera, and a soundtrack with more Paris in it than menace.

None of that is decoration bolted onto a maths model. The symbol set is split the way the story is: the low-paying side is the kit — gloves, lock picks, a crowbar, a grappling hook — and the high-paying side is what the kit is for, a necklace, a ring, a pair of earrings, a tiara. The four tiers that positions can climb are named after metals and a stone, so a glance at the screen tells a player how far a sequence has got without reading a number.

It matters because this is a game with a lot of parts, and the theme is doing the work of a legend on a map. A position that has paid once looks different from one that has not. An area that has been upgraded twice looks different again. By the time the collection round opens, the screen has already explained itself.

Gameplay and mechanics: a grid that pays without paylines

A round opens on 6x5 — six reels, five rows. There are no lines to cover and no line count to choose, so the stake is a single figure and every multiple quoted for this game is a multiple of that whole stake. Symbols pay by appearing in sufficient numbers anywhere on the screen rather than in a particular order across it, which is the reason the grid is allowed to change shape mid-round without any of the paying rules changing with it.

Every paid win then starts a cascade. The symbols that formed the win disappear, the empty positions are filled, and the new screen is judged again. That continues until a screen pays nothing. One paid round can therefore contain several separate evaluations, and that is the single most important thing to understand about the game: a long sequence is one bet with several results, never several bets.

The grid grows through a bomb symbol. A bomb removes itself and the symbols immediately around it, which clears room for another cascade, and if it lands against an edge it adds a reel or a row in that direction first. In a corner it can add both. Each direction expands only once, so the ceiling on the shape is 8x7, and the enlarged area lasts to the end of the round and no further — the next spin starts back at 6x5.

Bonus features, in the order a round meets them

The cascade comes first and is not a bonus at all: it is the base behaviour of every paid win. What it leaves behind is the part that counts. Positions used by a win become marked, and a marked position climbs through Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond each time a later win uses it again. Diamond is the top, after which a position cannot be improved further.

The wild lands anywhere and stands in for the paying symbols, but not for the bonus symbol, not for the bomb and not for the collection-round symbols. One wild can serve more than one scattered win at the same time, and the substitution is read in favour of the best combination the paytable allows. On a grid where the cascade keeps rearranging what is next to what, that overlap is less of an edge case than it sounds.

Three bonus symbols left standing after the cascades finish open the free spins, which start at 5 and inherit the grid size and the marked positions from the spin that earned them. And if Chloe herself is still on the screen alongside a marked area when the cascades stop, the collection round opens instead, starting at 3 spins. The two are not alternatives in any strict sense — the free spins keep every base mechanic running, so the collection round can open inside them.

Return, ceiling and the part an operator decides

The published return is 96.08%. That is the figure this site has recorded for the game and it is also the figure the studio puts on its own page for the title, which is as close to settled as a number of this kind gets. The ceiling is 12,086x the stake, and it is the one number about this game that every source checked gives identically. The hit frequency recorded here is 24.97%; no outside listing publishes it, so it is ours and is marked as ours.

There is a qualification on the return that is worth more than the number. Two British listings state that this title is supplied in more than one build and that the operator chooses which one to install — one of them puts the word "varies" directly beside the percentage. That does not make 96.08% wrong; it is the published figure and the highest of the set. It does mean that the only reliable answer for a particular copy of the game is the information panel inside that copy, and that a site printing one percentage flat for every operator is telling a reader less than it appears to.

Volatility is the other figure that gets printed with more confidence than it deserves. This site has never recorded one for the game, and the British write-ups do not agree: some call it medium, others high. Rather than pick the one that sounds better, the honest statement is that the game has long cascading sequences and a very distant ceiling, and that those two facts describe the shape of it better than a one-word label either way.

Playing for free: what a demo is, and what it is not

A demo of this title exists as a property of the game and of the places that host it. The studio runs a library where its own games can be tried, and several operators and games listings carry a free version of this one. There is no demo on this site, and there never will be: no game runs here, no account exists here and no stake is taken here.

A free round is genuinely useful for this particular game, because the sequence is complicated and the first one is confusing. It is worth watching a cascade run three or four stages, watching a bomb add a reel, and watching the collection round fill and stop, before any of it costs anything. What a free round cannot show is the only thing that changes when money is involved, which is how a losing run feels. The mathematics is the same; the person is not.