Lock & Key

Baf's Guide

A neat one-big-puzzle game about dungeon design. Basically, the player lays out doors and deathtraps according to various constraints and then watches an Adventurer try to escape. Highly enjoyable, reasonably deep simulation with a well-thought-out user interface and a good sense of humor (including quite a few references to other games.) Varicella-style gameplay: a repeated fail-and-restart cycle, with each play-through being fairly short. Contains graphical elements that, although not strictly necessary for winning the game, help enormously in keeping track of what you've put where.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

IF-Review
Death Becomes You
After a while, the requirement to match the PC's knowledge with the player's can begin to feel like a bit of a cage, and the most common contortions an IF game goes through to live inside it (such as amnesia) have long since lost their appeal. Even the freshest ones can still feel a bit tired and gimmicky unless done exactly right. The accretive PC is one key to this cage -- it's wonderfully refreshing to play a character who's really good at something, and even better to become good at it yourself. Of all the jail-breaks that happen in Lock & Key, this one is the most satisfying.
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Play This Thing!
While the constraints and challenges are theoretically similar to the ones you'll find in traditional tower defense games, the feel is entirely different. Each kind of trap can be placed only once, and the sequence matters. There's a graphical component to the interface, so that you have some visual feedback when laying out the dungeon, but most of the interaction is through text commands, because Lock & Key is primarily a text adventure in form. And much of the game's entertainment value comes not from figuring out where to place traps -- though that makes a solid and rewarding puzzle -- but from the characters and their reactions.
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5 star: (7) 4 star: (13) 3 star: (5) 2 star: (1) 1 star: (3)

Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 5 Write a review

Most Helpful Member Reviews

Frustrating, but rewarding, January 28, 2008
I went through several stages while playing this game.
Stage 1: Wow! This is a very clever puzzle.
Stage 2: Man, this is frustrating. This puzzle is hard. It's tedious to type these things in over and over. Any second now, I'm going to give up and look at the answer. It's just not worth the effort.
Stage 3: I feel so close. I'm going to stick with this a bit longer.
Stage 4: I solved it! I feel great!

So yes, this game is irritating at times, but if you stick with it, it's solvable, and very rewarding to solve. All in all, it probably took me about 3-4 hours to solve, and I feel the game is well worth that kind of time investment. If you like puzzles that are tough but fair (solvable with no hints or walkthroughs), then give this game a try.

Most reviews don't bother to mention whether a game is appropriate for kids, but this is an important factor to me when playing a game, so I try to include a bit of info about this in my reviews. I would give this game a PG rating for: violent (but funny) theme, harem reference, and several instances of the partial curse word "motherf-".

Innovative & Flawed, January 1, 2008
If you are interested in designing Interactive Fiction, Lock & Key is a game you should play: the role of the player character in this game is so different from that in every other piece that it is well worth exploring. Unfortunately, this exploration is made less fun because the central puzzle is frustratingly obscure and you can only interact wiht it through a tiresome interface.

In Lock & Key, you play a dungeon designer. You will be spending most of your time placing traps in a 16-room dungeon. Once you are satisfied with your efforts, the dungeon will be built and you can sit back and watch while Boldo the Hero attempts to escape from his cell. If he does--well, you'd better try again.

This idea is original and fun. Instead of being a static environment for you to explore, the game world becomes yours to design and someone else's to explore. Watching Boldo walk through the traps you have laid out in advance is a real treat, especially with all the humorous commentary that the different characters give.

Of course, it becomes less fun when you are reading the same description for the tenth time--and you will read them more than that, because solving the puzzle of optimal dungeon design is a frustratingly slow process based entirely on trial & error and the discover of often very non-obvious chains of causation. Bring whatever mental powers you have to the task: solving the puzzle will still be 80% brute force and luck, as traps that seemed to do nothing turn out to be essential to the final result.

If there were an easy mechanism to tweak one setting of your dungeon and replay the corresponding part of Boldo's journey, this would be a forgivable problem; but since every redesign is followed by at least fifteen intervening turns of background story, this is not the case. This makes solving the puzzle a slow and boring process, and though there is nothing wrong with some brute-forcing as such, slow and boring brute-forcing is not to be recommended.

Should you play this game? Certainly. The writing and the innovative design make it well worth your time. But unless you are a hardcore puzzle addict, you might want to save yourself some frustration and grab a solution once you've seen your first ten designs come to nought.

A cute puzzle, July 28, 2008
This is not really IF (in the sense of an adventure or story) but rather an inversion of the usual cave crawl into a single, elaborately coded dungeon design puzzle with some droll atmospheric text.

I found the game slightly marred by a quirky interface and a lack of systematicity in the puzzle, which seemed to demand a large number of trial-and-error restarts to reach the "magic" configuration to end the game. As such, this might have been stronger if the player had been exposed to a more logical system over a series of stages.

However, it is perfectly good for an hour or so of light entertainment as-is, just don't expect anything other than a find-the-configuration puzzle.

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