Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking – an interesting experiment for video game history buffs

PC; Dim Bulb Games
Though the intended audience is game developers, this is an enjoyable insight into the mechanics of an under-appreciated facet of game design

Museum of Mechanics is a fascinating concept - a virtual hall of exhibits, featuring faithfully recreated examples of one idea (in this case, lock-picking) from games throughout history, alongside the curator's explanation and analysis of each. The intended audience are game developers, but it's enjoyable for anyone interested in the history of video games, and how they can approach the same idea in so many different ways. I came away from it with a renewed appreciation for the thought that goes into these seemingly minor elements of game design.

When you reached a locked door in the original Fallout, your character's stats and abilities influenced a behind-the-scenes dice roll to determine whether you could unlock it and move past. Games such as Skyrim give you on-screen picks that must be rotated in virtual locks. And in Mass Effect, you gained access by playing a hacking mini-game (the distinction between lock-picking and hacking is something that designer Johnnemann Nordhagen is quite preoccupied with, incidentally). All of these are recreated here alongside some much more obscure approaches, such as that of cult-hit Russian plague-game Pathologic 2, or Alpha Protocol's timed lock-tumblers. There's a nostalgic interest here for anyone who's been playing games for a long time - I'd forgotten about all the time I'd spent tentatively feeling out locks in fantasy worlds. Now I know exactly how that little mechanic works, and why it felt so good to use.