In this point and click game, you move from room to room unlocking safes and solving more puzzles to get more clues (and pieces of other puzzles) to solve more puzzles until you finally solve them all and say "oh good, I solved all the puzzles.'
For the first time in aaaaaaages I found myself using a sheet of paper to solve puzzles in a video game. This was a pleasant surprise - I found myself noting things I'd never need, as well as making notes that really helped me solve puzzles without having to backtrack to look at something again. Don't be fooled - the game does give you some clues you can take with you, but some things have to be carried in your memory only. My memory is awful, so I used paper. I am only writing this review so that I don't buy this game again by mistake. That's how bad my memory is.
Do you like solving puzzles? This game has some neat puzzles, and I don't think a single answer annoyed me, which is rare.
Do you hate sliding tile puzzles? I do! But this game only has 1, and you can cheat (like I did. I have no shame. I hate sliding puzzles).
The game is linear in the sense that you will need to solve some puzzles before you can solve others, but it is also not linear in that you don't need to unlock a clue before you can solve a puzzle. I solved one early puzzle by writing a simple script. Later I found a clue that was useless to me at that point, because I'd already solved the puzzle. The game didn't make me wait until I'd found the clue, which was great. It's awful to play a game like this and know that even if you're entering the right code, it won't work because you didn't pick up a porcelain pig with the number 7 scratched on its ♥♥♥.
There are no porcelain pigs in this game. Porcelain pigs are not playable characters. If you like pigs this might still be the game for you, but don't go into this expecting pigs. There are 100% more pigs in this review than there are in the game.
For the first time in aaaaaaages I found myself using a sheet of paper to solve puzzles in a video game. This was a pleasant surprise - I found myself noting things I'd never need, as well as making notes that really helped me solve puzzles without having to backtrack to look at something again. Don't be fooled - the game does give you some clues you can take with you, but some things have to be carried in your memory only. My memory is awful, so I used paper. I am only writing this review so that I don't buy this game again by mistake. That's how bad my memory is.
The game is kind of short, but it's stable enough that you can tab in and out, so you can play it when you're supposed to be working and then tab out to pull up notepad++ or whatever it is you use at work. I don't know - I've probably never even seen you before, so how would I know what you use. Maybe you are unemployed. Maybe you made a ton of money lawyering and retired ridiculously early to rule an Internet Space Empire and have a cute dog. It's all good here, we're just talking about a little game about solving puzzles. I'm not judging you. I'm judging this game, and it is pretty good. Is it $5 good? Yeah, it's worth the price of a sandwich. Even if its a sandwich you have to cram resistors in before you can eat it.
The game might be a bit of a puzzle to get started. That happened to me but I edited my config files. If you have a problem making this run, go to your Steam directory and go to /steamapps/common/Safecracker2 and open config.ini and STEAM_config.ini and change bFullScreen=1 to bFullScreen=0 in both of them. If you have notepad++ you can do it there.
The ending is a bit bland and I don't think I will be replaying to get all the different endings. It might be my imagination but at the end the narrator seemed to start talking as fast as the people at the end of financial product advertisements where they cram in all the stuff about how you will probably go bankrupt and lose your house and the respect of all but the lowest of bums. This actually made the ending better, especially as I looked away for a moment because my printer started working.
That's the biggest mystery. WHY DID MY PRINTER START WORKING.
I'll tell you why. At the end, the game says "do you want to print the will?" and I said "Yes, sure," thinking I'd be able to read it on the screen. Of course it really tried to print the will, and I stopped it by hammering the big red x button until the printer stopped making noise.
If you are the kind of person who is married and likes to play games at night while your spouse is sleeping in the same room and you have a loud printer and you are likely to just click in the affirmative on a button that says "DO YOU WANT TO MAKE A NUCLEAR-DETONATION LEVEL OF NOISE RIGHT NOW?" then this might not be the game for you.
It's not bedtime yet so I got away with this. I'm wondering if I should print the will, though. I don't have that recent a save file. If I don't print the will, I will miss out on the game's REAL final puzzle. If I do print the will it will all be white text on black and it will cost me an extra $30 to have played this game. It's like the cat in the box but all the outcomes are bad, like if you were allergic to cats but also terrified of cat corpses.
I liked playing this game, it was a pretty good time for $2.50. If you want a pretty good time and you have $2.50 then I HEAR YOUR MOM MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP YOU OUT.