Safecracker

by Dreamcatcher

Product Features

• The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure! Product Information Your resume as an elite security expert is flawless.  And now, you haveonce-in-a-lifetime opportunity to land the job of your dreams: as the head ofsecurity development at the world famous firm of Crabb and Sons Safe andSecurity Systems.  Your mission is to break into your eccentric employer'sheavily secured headquarters and crack

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00004SV21
• Item Weight: 5 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: April 12, 2000
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #32,633 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Your resumé as an elite security expert is flawless. Now you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to land the job of your dreams. To demonstrate your skills, you must break into your potential employer's heavily secured offices and master over 35 unique and challenging safes, each holding vital clues to the combination of your ultimate challenge, the Master Safe.

If you can do it, the job is yours.

Product Description

The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure!Product InformationYour resume as an elite security expert is flawless.  And now you haveonce-in-a-lifetime opportunity to land the job of your dreams: as the head ofsecurity development at the world famous firm of Crabb and Sons Safe andSecurity Systems.  Your mission is to break into your eccentric employer'sheavily secured headquarters and crack the puzzle-based combinations on over 35safes within 12 hours each containing a clue to your ultimate goal - the MasterSafe.  Crack it and the job is yours.You think you can do it...now your challenge is to prove it! Product Features Explore a massive 50 room mansion as you attempt to crack puzzle after puzzle An array of tantalizing and complex puzzles that will challenge your skills to the limit. Intuitive interface and addictive gameplay Beautifully rendered 3D environments Complete 360 degree camera movementMinimum Requirements Windows 95/98 (Not XP compatible) Pentium 100MHz processor 24MB of RAM 15MB of Hard Disk Space minimum 4X CD-ROM Drive or faster 

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good entertainment value, September 4, 2000

By 

Herve Bronnimann (New York City, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Safecracker (CD-ROM)

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 :)

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars short and sweet, August 1, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Safecracker (CD-ROM)

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.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining and Addictive, August 26, 2002

By 

wysewomon "wysewomon" (Paonia, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Safecracker (CD-ROM)

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.