Gamertell

Title: Safecracker
System: Nintendo Wii
Price: $29.99
Release Date: December 2, 2008
Publisher (Developer): The Adventure Company (Kheops Studio)
ESRB Rating: “E”
Pros: Diverse puzzles, open exploration structure, attractive graphics
Cons: Awkward controls, pointless story, aimless in sections
Overall Score: One thumb up and one thumb down, 75/100, C, **1/2

The first time I played Safecracker from The Adventure Company was nearly nine years ago. Nine years ago! Just so you understand that, also reviewed at this time were Star Wars: Episode One: Racer, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six and Unreal Tournament. The first Unreal Tournament. Even before the GotY edition.

Yet, late 2008, The Adventure Company re-released an updated Safecracker for the Nintendo Wii. And why not? The game is well suited to the casual side of the Wii audience, puzzle interaction can be easily handled with the Wii Remote, and if you add a Z to the end of the name, the Safecracker(z) will fit in quite well with the other Wii games on the shelf at GameStop.

Here’s a Puzzle: Why Are Billionaires Always Freaks?

Safecracker opens with a brief movie in which it’s explained that you’re an ambiguous expert safecracker hired by an ambiguous family to find the will and testament of the late Duncan W. Adams. Duncan was an avid collector of safes, and was quite eccentric (because if you have a lot of money and are in a video game, you have to be either a freak or Lara Croft), and therefore hid his family’s inheritance in one of 35 safes in his mansion. Nice, Duncan. Way to provide for your family. Jerk.

Strangely, in the original Safecracker, the plot was quite different. There, you were just a guy looking for a security job with eccentric billionaire (see what I mean?) Jerry Crabb, and had to break into 35 safes to get the gig. Cripes. All I had to do when I applied for my first job was take a blood test to prove I wasn’t on crack.

Securely Locked Away Behind a Child’s Travel Game

The set-up movie is brief and basically pointless since the game is actually just about solving puzzles.

As far as safes go, after all, most of these don’t make any sense. They’re puzzles you play in a car on a long road trip, not methods of securing your money or private documents. For instance, one involves moving a ball around a game board to guide it to a hole. Another is a keypad where hitting the number you want doesn’t actually pull up that specific number. Or how about the safe that’s protected by one of those sliding tile picture puzzles? This one was actually kind of interesting, because the image you’re supposed to piece together isn’t shown to you first. Rather, after playing it a bit, you’re presented with a clue that you think you’ve seen an image like this before. Where? In the game’s options menu. Well played, Kheops!

And this is the kind of thinking you have to do throughout Safecracker. You’re not just solving puzzles to open safes, you also have to find the safes. And you have to find the clues provided to open the safes. And you have to know which safes you shouldn’t even bother with yet because you don’t have all the info you need to open them. This is good, because it makes the puzzles feel more connected than if you just automatically bounced to the next.

But it’s also bad, because it means you’ll sometimes be moving from room to room throughout the mansion desperately trying to remember where you saw that particular door lock that matches the key you just found.

Also, trying for fifteen minutes to open a safe only to find out you don’t have the proper information to complete the task is quite frustrating.

Harder to Navigate than the Winchester Mystery House

This is compounded by the fact that movement is dated and awkward.

You don’t just walk through the mansion, you click hot spots to bounce to specified points. Although this helps you know where you can interact with the environment, it makes Safecracker feel its age. Plus, the hot spots are often in odd places, and you’ll occasionally have to click through three or four of them just to get across a room.

Worse, the Wii controls are configured in an intuitive manner. The WiiMote is fine. You use that to point your cursor at the screen but you control the camera with the Nunchuck, which doesn’t make much sense. Why not just move the camera by pointing the cursor at the edge of the screen in the direction you want the camera to move?

Also, the C-stick on the Nunchuck is configured so that if you press it up, the camera moves up. With the bulk of the games I play, this is reversed, and I never quite got the hang of flipping this around. I imagine this won’t be an issue for some players, but Kheops should’ve at least offered gamers the option to flip the camera controls to a more natural setting.

Worth the Update, Worth the Price

Despite these issues, Safecracker succeeds at being a fun diversion for puzzle gamers. The puzzles are varied in both structure and difficulty (I defy any of you to get completely through this without help from a walkthrough), and the graphics are very attractive in a static/dated sort of way. You may spend more time exploring and less time puzzle-solving than you’d like, and there’s absolutely no replay value (unless you wait until you’ve forgotten the solutions), but you’ll constantly feel rewarded when you’ve finally cracked a puzzle.

If The Adventure Company is going to tap their PC back catalog for Wii releases, Safecracker was a good choice. But I’d rather see what they could do with a totally unique puzzle/adventure built specifically for the Wii.

Site [Safecracker]