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Casual Friday

I was intrigued by Lady K’s latest Saturday AGSOTD. It reminded me of a few things. The first is that I tried to play the later version of Safecracker, and bailed after about five minutes. I bought it sight unseen based on another player’s recommendation. The 1st-person, 3D perspective was sufficiently nausea- inducing that I said to myself “There is no way I am going to be able to finish this game, no matter how great the puzzles are.”

But Lady K’s post also reminded me of another game, VaultCracker, produced by the very same Gogii Games group that produced the other two Safecracker games.

The above screenshot is from VaultCracker. It was released in July, 2010. So it is going to be HO-scene heavy. But it has some very nice puzzles that might stump all but the more-experienced casual players.

Basic premise is that you, a safecracker, arrive at an airport and tell your son to stay where he is while you retrieve your luggage. In a heartbeat your son is kidnapped, and you receive a phone call telling you that certain things need to be done before your son will be returned.

Not being able to call the police, you contact an old co-conspiritor. He tells you that you must dust off your old safe-cracking skills and help him before he will help you. And so it goes.

The actual safe/vault cracking mini games start off being relatively easy. But they increase in type and complexity as the game progresses. By the end, they are quite difficult.

There is a Hint button for HO scenes and a Skip for puzzles. I remember using the former much more than the latter. In the average HO scene there are appoximately 30 objects to be found. This includes multiples of the same item, e.g. 3 Keys. I would go through the first 29, and hit Hint, just to be done with the scene. In several instances the items are well hidden.

There is an interesting and, to me. humorous thing about the HO scene objects. They are certainly period appropriate. But this game came out only seven years ago, and yet the use of floppy discs and CDs as portable storage devices seems anachronistic. Even today DVDs are almost passe. Flash drives and SSDs are the way to go. I just had to laugh at how much things have changed since I first played this game.

There is another HO scene style that you will recognize if you played Depths of Betrayal. It’s too difficult to describe. But you will understand it the moment you start to play the game.

I re-downloaded the game, and played for a bit until I arrived at the above screenshot. I was moderately surprised at how much fun the game was to play. Even seven years after I first gave it a go.

Edit: I didn’t stop at the above scene. I actually played it to the end. And, despite some minor problems, I enjoyed it every bit as much as I did the first time.

Maybe I should have tried harder to get through it. I managed to finish Pandora Directive. But I don’t remember PD being as sensitive. I don’t remember the title, but I do recall that one of the early Frogwares Sherlock Holmes games had me spinning.

I understand. The HO scenes do seem to come at you non-stop. However, there is at least some semblance of a story. Nevertheless, Amazing Adventures: Caribbean Secrets, a graphically beautiful game, with non-stop HO scenes, and NO story whatsoever also came out in 2010. So in some respects this title represents a considerable leap forward in casual game design.