April Abandonment #1

Well, this was bound to happen eventually. I'm officially writing here about a game I've abandoned. Damn :(

Consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

Picklock is a game …. is almost good. The vibe, the music, the setting, the graphics - they are all charming and quite honestly, good. I enjoyed all these aspects of the game for all the time I spent with it. But then …

First, the story. This game would have been much better had it been an arcade collection of levels for you to pilfer and loot. Trying to weave in a story here is a distraction that takes away from the charm of the game, mostly because you're forced to read very poor dialogue. The writing is so shallow that it brings the game down.

Something else that really brings the game down is the camera. Half of your playtime will be rotating, angling, and switching your camera perspective to allow you to open that one door or to step on that specific spot on the floor. Had the game committed to an isometric perspective, or a top-down perspective, or any other perspective, it would have benefitted immensely, but giving you the freedom to change the perspective not only is terrible from a gameplay perspective, but also from a controls perspective - it forces the game to be playable only on mouse and keyboard, and requires precision inputs. I'm not fighting the cops here - I'm fighting the controls, and that's just poor design,

The worst part rides on top of the bad camera - and that's the poor gameplay. The game is little more than watching guards, and timing your button presses. It's hard to feel that you have any skill or intelligence when you play this game. Guard left the door locked and came back to see it unlocked? No problem, he won't notice it. Guard leaves a door closed and comes back to it being open? He won't suspect anything. It's so dull. I get the need to script the AI to some extent, but without some reactivity to the player's actions, this goes from a stealth game to a rhythm game with poor camera and point-and-click skills are the only thing you need to succeed. Later in the game, when the level starts giving you fail states near the end of levels that can take up to 5 minutes to beat, and you start wasting these 5 minutes because of a single mistake in the last seconds of a level, is when it goes from jolly fun to rage quit.

I really tried to give it a fair shot, but the problems very quickly overwhelmed the nice setting and music that the game opened with. Just don't bother with this.