Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure

I bought this who knows how many years ago, I was probably still on Windows XP or Windows 7 at the time. Either way, I never ran into any issues running the game then or now, when I finally got around to actually playing through it to the end. Perhaps I was merely lucky. What I can tell is that Safecracker is a rather barebones puzzle game where any and all dialogue is coming from the safe-cracking protagonist here to find the late Duncan Adams' missing will and testament. It is from an era where the games frequently leave you completely in the dark, and if there's a clue somewhere you have to keep your eyes peeled in order to find them. It could be a letter on a sofa arm, it could be something the player character says - and they [i]won't[/i] repeat it - during the middle of a puzzle. The puzzles will frequently fall into two categories: relatively simple or otherwise straightforward, and absurdly obtuse where you'll either beat your head against the wall until you look it up or have a miraculous serendipity moment of revelation at something you overlooked. There's really no in between. Depending on how much that terrifies or excites you is probably a good indication of whether this is for you or not. Personally speaking, I doubtless got it on sale and would suggest the same of a potential buyer; it's 20 years old and the original devs are unlikely to see much (if any) of this money now. I openly admit to looking a few answers up, either they were puzzles I didn't want to deal with outright (there was at least two) or I had absolutely no idea what the game was even asking me to look for. The snooker one falls into the latter, although the answer makes sense in hindsight. So I'll give it a recommendation, but hesitant one. It is an [b]old[/b] game and it shows, but I still found it oddly charming and do not regret the roughly 3 hours it took to complete.