The story of Safecracker puts you in the role of a brilliant safecracker. The late and extremely wealthy oil tycoon, Duncan W. Adams, has died and left a will. He was a big fan of safes, however, and left a bit of a puzzle for those trying to find his will. You see, Mr. Adams thought it would be clever to leave a little bit of a puzzle and left his will, and many clues to its location, buried inside a number of safes. This is why the family has called you in—to find the will and to give them their money that they feel they rightly deserve.

That’s the basic conceit to explain why you’re in a house, rummaging from room to room trying to crack all these different puzzles that are locking all these many different safes. Now, sometimes this sort of concept can be rather bland and, like some other adventure games, ends up being a pixel hunter where you have to search for the smallest little scrap or hint. Other times, the puzzles are so completely obtuse that even when you do solve them, you still don’t understand how you did it. I am extremely happy to say that neither is the case with Safecracker. Yes, some of the puzzles are difficult, but they all make sense (or at least did to me.) The puzzles, which essentially mean the many different safes in this game, are all very easy to spot as well since they’re usually a large chunk of steel in the middle of a room or built into a wall.

The game does follow a slightly linear path and while you usually have the option of 3 or 4 safes to try to open at a time, you will invariably end up stuck at one that will simply not let you proceed until you solve it. While this is aggravatingly frustrating, the adventure community I’ve found is always very helpful when it comes to hints, much to the relief of my sanity! I found that the ones I really got stuck on however, I still understood how to solve them. It was just a question of actually doing it. For example, the one that really gave me fits involved five dials that would turn different bolts in a lock. Certain dials would turn certain bolts, and they all overlapped and would rotate between pulling in the bolts and pushing them back into the lack. The concept is very straight-forward, but still really required a lot of thought. The best tip for many of these safes, I found, was to simply keep a sheet of paper handy and scribble down notes and numbers!

Sadly, the game itself was not overly long. I found that I flew through the game and as the credits rolled, it informed me that it had taken only five and a half hours of time for full completion. Now, I must admit there were several games where I did not save as I made no progress, but that is still a disappointingly short amount of gameplay. However, with the suggested price being only $20, it’s still a good buy.

I really enjoyed Safecracker and I found that it is one of the better adventure games that French developer Kheops Studio has made lately, and that is saying something as they have quite the impressive lineup. The puzzles made sense and were logical—with a bit of a thought—and were all easy to find. In fact, the entire game was presented very logically which was a very nice change from many of the nonsensical adventure game offerings out there. While a tad short, the game is fairly priced. And hey, even if you don’t like the game, it comes in a neat little tin box that looks like a safe!