PHPM

About This Game

Welcome to the Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, an interactive,
meticulously recreated selection of lockpicking minigames from a variety
of genres across the history of games.

FEATURES

• Challenge yourself against locks from dozens of game worlds
• Compare your skills with other players via Steam leaderboards
• Unlock the complete set of Steam achievements for mastering all the minigames
• Beat “The Door,” a fiendish set of ever-changing locks from every exhibit in the Museum
• Read analysis on each minigame from a professional game designer
• Go deeper into the design of each game with our archived source code, and even implement them yourself, should you catch the lockpicking bug!

This isn’t a game with a story, or an ending; it’s not possible to ‘win’. It is also not a long experience, but one you will hopefully want to return to.

A Word from Designer Johnnemann Nordhagen

As a game designer, you often find yourself doing research on how other games do things – it’s a good way to get ideas, see what works and what doesn’t, and build an understanding of the space you’re solving problems in. Usually this research involves buying a lot of games and playing until you get to the part you want to see, if you can remember the games that have it!

How nice it would be, I thought, if someone collected all the reference for particular ways of doing things in one place. Thus was born the Museum of Mechanics, and the first entry: Lockpicking. Many genres and types of games include lockpicking minigames, so I thought I would do an exploration of a broad swathe of them and gather them together in a single place. This is the result. I hope you’ll join me in exploring the different ways this has been done through the history of games.

Reviews

“The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking is a playable exhibition of a common gaming interaction and, well, it’s an experience like visiting the Derwent Pencil Museum. Before you go in you’re thinking pencils are the most boring thing on Earth, let’s get this over with, then you come out toting a gift shop bag ready to fight anyone who dares besmirch one of humanity’s greatest tools… if you enjoy seeing the evolution of something apparently simple laid out, thinking about why it is the way it is, and just fiddling with different minigames trying to ‘recreate’ the same thing, this is a bitesized, interesting and well-curated experience.”
PC Gamer