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Good entertainment value

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 80 / 80
Date: September 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The story line: you are an expert safecracker, the best of your kind, hired by Crabbe & Sons, the leading company in the field, to crack their latest safe in less than 12 hours. Your reward: heavy financial retribution, and perhaps... (no spoiler here :)

You start by breaking into the company (a nice old mansion in the London suburbs). From the beginning sequence onward, you just crack safes all night. It can get pretty addictive! My wife started cracking and couldn't stop until she was over. The puzzles are varied, a mix of ingenuity, mathematical skills, resourcefulness, and exploration (curiosity always rewarded). But you don't need to be a genius: all the hints are scattered in the game. Look at all the objects, take notes of the objects you cant't take with you, and walk around until you are stuck. it's then time to think about what you have, your next step, etc.

The game is very well done, despite a couple of bugs. the most annoying is actually common to other dreamcatcher games for the MAC PowerBook: they don't handle the trackpad very well, and you can't scroll your inventory (only beginning and end). Since it's in alphabetical order, and Key comes about in the middle, it's most annoying. But I discovered you can get around by clicking very shortly on the scroll buttons (tapping is hopeless; it always takes you to the beginning or the end).

The game is not that short, and you'll need to take a few pauses, and restart (unless you're a master safe cracker with an eagle eye). Most useful is to find the map of the house at the beginning of the game. Avoids to draw it by hand as you're walking along :) And since time is counted, you might want to save after each safe, and restore from there once you know how to crack the next one. Just avoids you to be short of time at the end. We did it loosely and had plenty of time still left at the end.

What I liked best, is that you can guess. Even if you have not seen all the clues, but guess how to crack the safe, you can go ahead. That means also you can redo the game without looking for all the clues (in case you forgot to save). And you can crack the final safe without having cracked all the other ones. Actually, we never got around to crack the jackpot safe (it's apparently random, and you can only try so many times). But we managed to guess the missing letter anyway. And some of the safes are really darlings: they'll make you laugh and feel good about yourself!

It's a great game, a great concept, and I'll definitely buy the sequel. So should you :)

short and sweet

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 20 / 20
Date: August 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

to get a contract to work for the crabb safe company, you must break into a house and crack about 30 safes within the space of 12 hours. That is about as long as the game takes, but you'll do it without stopping. This house has 2 floors, a basement, secret passages, and hidden rooms. The rooms are attractively and comfortably furnished and feature variations of famous paintings on the walls. almost every room has a safe, and some have up to four. most are evident but some are quite well hidden. even with the maps provided, it is difficult to get around to all the rooms and floors. seldom is trial and error needed to open a safe, although it is the easiest method in a few cases. clues, keys, parts, or information are generally needed. This may be hidden, inside other safes, or just lying around. The last safe requires 10 sequential letters, or about 100 trillion possibilities. (i couldnt program my imac to try every combination, but i will when i play this on my cray). generally this game is linear, but not completely. i remember cracking one of the more difficult safes only to find i already had the information inside. The safes do not necessarily get more difficult; one of the hardest for me was the one at the beginning which involved rearranging a picture. The ending is "cute", but not unexpected. The graphics are better that all other dreamcatchers i have done. though the picture is small, there is horizontal 360 panning at all points (vertical is restricted). the pictures are not grainy, even when panning; color saturation is good. you can cancel the opening credits by clicking the mouse, and you can turn off the music if you dont like it. this game froze twice around the one handed clock, but i lost no saves on the restart. in summary, short, but very addicting; a clever idea well done. easy to "get into", lots of fun, and very cheap. try it.

Entertaining and Addictive

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 19 / 19
Date: August 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

If you like puzzle games, especially games that have a sense of humour, you could do a lot worse than play _Safecracker_. The premise is a simple one: You're in line for a job at Crabb & Sons safe manufacturer, designer of elaborate safes for the well-to-do and eccentric. In order to get the job, you must break into the Crabb headquarters and retrieve bits of the combination of the "master safe" from safes located throughout the mansion's cluttered rooms. When you get the combination, you can crack the master safe and retrieve your job contract. You have twelve hours.

The game is played in real time -- you REALLY have twelve hours, and a convenient clock counts them down for you. I was afraid at first this would be a problem, but it didn't turn out that way; I actually finished the game in half the time allowed, cracking a few safes every night over the course of a week. None of the safes is particularly challenging to crack once you have all the pieces, and several are possible to crack without clues, using a combination of inspiration and educated guessing. (In fact, after cracking a certain safe, I was surprised to find almost the entire solution hidden in another part of the house, which I thought rather unnecessary). But the variety of safes is quite entertaining. You must do everything from math puzzles, to sliding tile puzzles, to win a game of poker to crack them.

The graphics are quite good. I was amused to see numerous reproductions of famous art masterpieces on the walls, with the heads and faces of the game programmers substituted for the real ones. There are several fun spots, like the computer that plays 30-second satires of real games. The music was simple enough and somewhat repetitious, but provided a nice background.

Two things keep me from giving _Safecracker_ a five-star rating. One is that the play area/screen size is very small -- only about four by six inches. I would have liked it to have been bigger. However, I still had the sense of being immersed in the environment, so it was not a major concern. The second is that there are numerous red herrings in this game -- hot spots where nothing happens, inventory items that are never used and the like. So you can waste a lot of time trying to do something where no action is possible.

All in all, however, I really enjoyed this game. I'd play another like it in a minute.

It's fun breaking and entering!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 31 / 38
Date: July 31, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I couldn't tell you if the game was short because it was short, or whether I got so addicted to it that I *had* to solve it as quickly as possible. Most of the safes had a different type of problem to solve; those that were similar had at least a variant or twist to it. I didn't need a walkthrough at all for this one. Clues were in the game IF you could find them. I liked that I could solve the final safe without having to solve all the safes. There were only 2 drawbacks: you couldn't

click through the opening or the final credits, even if you'd already been in the game, and a couple of the scenes were very dark.

I hope Daydream Software is working on another set of safes!

Good puzzles, a few bugs though

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 18 / 19
Date: March 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game has some good puzzles, but none are too hard. It's possible to guess if you aren't too sure on something and there are no penalties for the wrong guess (big plus if you want to try a safe by trial and error).

I had to use a walkthrough though and restart a few times. For some reason the game kept hanging on me. The other problem that kept this from being a 5 star for me was there were two problems which were difficult or impossible to solve without a walkthrough. In one case I had figured out the idea, but couldn't get it (and thus thought I was off on how to solve) because you needed to move something to a precise position. The other major bug was a place where audio was necessary to solve the puzzle, but the audio didn't play for me.

(Oh, and for those who want to get through the intro on future tries you can skip it by pressing escape. I found it through trial and error. I hate going through intros everytime, especially when the game hangs.)

It Really Depends on the Types of Games You Like

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 13
Date: January 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I recently purchased "Safecracker" because I love to play mystery games - but I have to say that I was a bit disappointed when I began playing it, as it wound up being merely a game of puzzles, without all the intrigue & finding of inventory items along the way.

Having said that, I do realize that some people really like the "logic puzzles" that are generally a part of most mystery games, and I do too, but this was just one puzzle after another, without all of the other "stuff" I've come to enjoy.

In "Safecracker", you play an expert safecracker whose been hired by the family of an extremely wealthy deceased man (Duncan Adams) to find his will. It turns out that Duncan was quite eccentric, and his hobby was buying & building unique safes to house his valuables. Your job is to solve the puzzles & figure out how to open more than 30 safes in a quest to find the will.

The difficulty level for these puzzles ranges greatly, with some being really easy, and others being extremely difficult. I had to reference a "hints" site several times, and found UHS Hints to be the most comprehensive & easiest to understand.

Overall, I found this game to be a bit tedious. However, I would highly recommend it to anyone who really enjoys solving these types of puzzles. How much you like this game really all comes down to personal preference...

An interesting mystery/puzzle game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: November 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Unlike the two reviews before mine I actually enjoyed this game.

This is an mystery/puzzle game that revolves around your safe cracking abilities; abilities that depend on your skills in mathematics, logic and observation.

Most of the puzzles (with a little bit of thought) were fairly easy to solve; however, I had to refer to a walk through for a couple of answers (only to say "of course" when shown the way to proceed).

All in all, a fun game that was about worth the asking price. 3 1/2 -4 Stars.

Fun, but only for slower systems

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 23
Date: August 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

It really is amazingly fun to wander around an abandoned house cracking safes. The only problem is that this game is really only possible with an older, slower system, say a 486 or so. My 4-year-old computer was too fast to make it possible to scroll through the inventory list slow enough to actually select items in the middle rather than on one end or the other. Quite frustrating, since by the time I discovered this I was about halfway through -- and now I can't finish. Oh well; that's the price of having up-to-date technology, I guess.

UPDATE: If you like the idea of this game, check out its updated version, called "Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventurer." Same general premise, but it works on newer machines.

obsolete

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: April 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

i'm running WinXP pro, i can't get this thing to run at all-- it uses an ancient version of quicktime that you are required to install, as well as DirectX 7.0A.

unless you're running win 95, or you like installing old software and reconfiguring your whole system for one game, i'd save your money and get something a bit more modern.

Don't Bother...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: September 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I finished this game in about 2 hours. More than a handful of the 'safes' you have to crack have no more than a key to be found elsewhere (Ooh! Locked in a different safe! HOW CHALLENGING!). Some of the 35 'safes' advertised are actually just a DOOR (as in a barrier between two rooms, not the door to a real safe) to unlock (granted some are a wee bit more challenging than with a simple key, but not much).

I would say that this would be a good warmup for the game by the SAME name by the SAME company that is about 5 or 6 years OLDER (maybe not quite that old, but it's been awhile). All in all though, wait until it's in the bargain bin.

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