Lockpicking games

It looks and sounds basic, but the amount of effort, knowledge and understanding of the topic and of game design and history more generally that has gone into this mini museum is abundantly evident, from both the exhibits and the text that accompanies them.

Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking — an interesting experiment for video game history buffs. Photograph: Dim Bulb Games. When all were raised, the lock would open. The elegance in this is that more difficult locks had more tumblers, but puzzle solvers would be able to unlock even the most difficult lock at the onset of the game, with no particular character skill necessary.

Oblivion's lock picking is more simulation than most of the others so far, and many of us undoubtedly remember breaking pick after pick trying to open a lock labeled very hard early in your adventures. Using the pin tumbler approach, you were required to lift the tumbler up, but it also required that you lock it in place when you lifted.

There are always five tumblers to lock in place, but the difficulty of the lock determined how many were already locked into place at the start of your burglary attempt. Fail, and the result was a broken pick and restarting from the beginning. With its sandbox-style gameplay and fast paced combat, the slower, more simulation-style lock picking in Sleeping Dogs was a nice change of pace. Despite its simplicity and accuracy to real lock picking, there was a certain tension created when you were trying to escape a dangerous situation or stay unnoticed and were forced to have a steady hand.

The world was enormous and most would take their time exploring, but because locked doors were more a slight hindrance than blockade, creating a difficult or elaborate lock picking system would have been detrimental to the overall flow that made the game so enjoyable.

Another trip in the wayback machine takes us to , where RPG Betrayal at Krondor decided to use riddles in place of lock picking. To make it a bit easier, you were given the number of letters to the answer, whether one word or multiple, and had the option of flipping through letters to piece together the words. Because of the RPG aspect of the game and the Tolkien aspect of each puzzle, it fit into the world perfectly. Instead of using force or character skill, instead it relied on your intuition, something few games have used since.

When it was rebooted earlier this year, Thief received mixed reviews, but the simulation-style lock picking is something it should be commended for. Initially, the lock picking requires that you simply use your pick and, depending on the number of tumblers, set it in the correct position for each one. Wolfenstein: The New Order featured another arcade mini-game. When you popped off the outer casing of the lock, it was up to you to line up an arrow with the tumblers at the top of the lock.

The difficulty was that the tumblers shifted back and forth, requiring you to rotate your thumbstick to match it.

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Ishraq is a freelance games journalist. His first ever console was the PlayStation, where he found his love of games through Ridge Racer. Everything in last night's PlayStation State of Play. The Banner Saga developer reportedly working on Xbox exclusive.

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