Thanks to series of games like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, it has become one of the most famous springs of video games. The virtual lock picking is now a necessary step, appearing, depending on the game, in the form of more or less inspired puzzles that must be solved to open a safe here, there a double-locked door.
To pay tribute to this mechanism, the independent studio Dim Bulb Games, already responsible for the game Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, dedicated a virtual museum to him, called Museum of Mechanics : Lockpicking. An interactive gallery in which are exposed twenty different systems, used in so many famous games, showing the diversity of the choices made by the developers when it comes to staging the delicate art of opening a door.
This “game”, released on the Steam platform (PC, Mac and Linux) Thursday, January 13, is above all the opportunity to dive back into a brief history of video games.
We walk around in a fairly crude 3D environment, where we can go from one exhibition to another, and click on an explanatory panel or on a lock to try out the corresponding lockpicking mini-game. The mechanics of each title are reproduced, playable, and each time accompanied by analytical notes written in English.
The first two Fallout, for example, strongly inspired by traditional role-playing games, relied on rolls of virtual dice, with which, to resolve a given situation, it was necessary to achieve a higher or lower score depending on the skills of the character. In the section of the museum devoted to these games from the 1990s, to open the associated padlock, you simply have to choose your Agility and Perception scores before clicking on the “roll” button: this it is mathematics and chance that determine the chances of success.
A little bit of history
The transition from the series to 3D (from Fallout 3) made the opening of the doors the pretext for interactive actions, during which the player must delicately imitate with his mouse the movement of a lock picking kit inside the lock. A system that
Bethesda Game Studios, developer of Fallout 3, also resumed in The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim, his most famous fantasy role-playing game.
Other well-known games are represented: we find for example Gothic, role-playing game released in 2001, and which asked players, to open doors, to enter a combination of keys in the correct order. We also meet more unexpected games, like King’s Heir : Rise to the Throne, a game for consoles and smartphones released in 2018 where lock picking is done through a puzzle, very suitable for mobile.
On the Steam store page dedicated to Museum of Mechanics : Lockpicking, the Dim Bulb Games studio explains that this project is above all intended for developers, who can thus explore the evolution of a game mechanic. But it is also of nostalgic interest, or simply academic, for the curious interested in the way their favorite games were thought out and created. The studio has also announced that it wanted to reproduce the experience by creating other virtual museums devoted to video game mechanics.