| 5 star: | | (15) | | 4 star: | | (40) | | 3 star: | | (10) | | 2 star: | | (6) | | 1 star: | | (3) |
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Number of Reviews: 8
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1-8 of 81 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Perfect puzzle. Not so perfect implementation., June 10, 2022I was a senior in college when this game was released and played it the moment it dropped. I took copious notes while playing and brought those notes to my classes, occasionally ignoring my professors to hammer out this puzzle. No regrets.
The conceit--building a dungeon worth of death traps as a contract to hire for a perverse king--is brilliant. Despite the dungeon having 16 rooms and there being 17 traps to purchase, there is only one solution to killing off the prisoner; as such, Lock & Key more than any interactive fiction feels like solving a logic grid puzzle from a games magazine. As the prisoner continually foils traps, you must determine what traps are completely worthless versus what traps slow him down (and in the best order they slow him down).
Naturally, there is much "learn by dying" as you take notes on why each traps fails and why. And, unfortunately, every time the prisoner escapes you have to start over from scratch. So every play through involves a tedious resetting of doors and resetting of traps. There are some shortcuts implemented to tackle this and if you are confident in your door layout or some of the trap layout you can create a save file to save you some time. But even while taking advantage of both, I was beginning to resent the game a little before I solved it, which in turn took some of the joy out of the triumph.
If you're a fan of dark, witty humor (which a game like this requires in order to be palatable) Cadre provides plenty with nearly every possible action. It certainly takes a little bit of the edge off the tedium.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Great reverse puzzle: You build the dungeon, your enemy tries to get out., February 3, 2016This is one of my favorite Cadre games, best known for Photopia and 9:05 (and my other favorite, Endless, Nameless).
In this fantasy game, you play a dungeon maker charged with building an inescapable dungeon. Unfortunately, your first test subject is extremely resourceful, producing items out of nowhere and charming all opponents.
You have to place traps on a path through a 4x4 grid. You have to get the right traps and in the right order. It is tedious, but each playthrough (besides a few cutscenes) is different, as the adventurer reacts to your challenges with new resources.
Buying each trap is also funny.
It got a little tedious after 3-4 times; I had the basic idea, but I knew it would take a lot more to get it down right, so I used the walkthroughs.
Wonderful game.
10 of
12 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent +1, June 10, 2010The game comes in 3 parts.
1) You must escape an existing dungeon. This part is pretty quick.
2) You must perfect the dungeon so it isn't easy to escape. This is the bulk of the interactivity, as you buy numerous traps to kill escapees.
3) You watch the adventurer get through your traps.
The writing here is great, but because of the numerous tricks the adventurer has, you'll be playing this game over and over to find the combination of traps that will kill him. It doesn't help that he has access to items you don't know about.
First, they annoying parts: You will play this game over and over, and it can be tedius watching the same scenes over and over (such as the capture of the adventurer). Some parts of the game should be more interactive. (Spoiler - click to show) It would be nice if you could suggest to the king or guards that they search the adventurer before throwing him in the dungeon . Some of the tedium is averted by giving you the "qbuy all" command, allowing you to confirm all your dungeon traps at once.
That being said, the game is brilliant. The characters are fleshed out a bit, and the combination of traps needed is quite ingenious, though it definately relies on out of world knowledge to complete. (Seeing how the adventurer handles a trap helps you learn how to prevent him from doing so later). There is a bit of interactivity while he's escaping, but not too much, mostly you just watch him get through each area. (Spoiler - click to show) Unless you need to manipulate some levers in the main room- depending on what traps you bought .
I enjoyed this game tremendously, and it has great replay potential, as you try to get to the end. It also kept my attention and excitement more than many IF I've seen in the past. A+!
3 of
26 people found the following review helpful:
Another Boring One-Room Game, December 18, 2009Reading the other reviews of this game make me believe that the game you can download up and to the right is not the same game that is being reviewed. Here are my reasons: there is no graphical component anywhere in the game (at least not under any Glux interpreter for Mac OS X); you do not place any puzzles in this game -- instead you are someone trying to escape an inescapable cell; others mention a "help manual", but there is no help manual in any of the links above and the game provides no help. So, I'm quite puzzled about what exactly is going on here, but for all intents and purposes, it seems that Lock & Key is just another boring one-room escape game. Maybe if I spent another 2-3 hours I might figure out how to do the impossible, but such challenges always leave me cold. In any case, it gets one star for decent writing, because two stars would be a bit excessive for such an unoriginal concept.
2 of
22 people found the following review helpful:
Unplayable, December 17, 2009There's something wrong with the part where you have to place doors or exits (can't remember, it's been a while since I "played" this. It just doesn't work at all, so the game is over right there. Obviously there is no explanation how to do it either.
Pure frustration -> 1/5
4 of
9 people found the following review helpful:
A cute puzzle, July 28, 2008This 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.
10 of
13 people found the following review helpful:
Frustrating, but rewarding, January 29, 2008I 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-".
13 of
15 people found the following review helpful:
Innovative & Flawed, January 1, 2008If 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.
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