Back in the 1820s at Brixton Prison in London, prisoners were forced to rotate a hand-crank connected to paddles that pointlessly shifted sand. If Brixton kept that same attitude toward correction today, inmates would be forced to play "Sam Stoat: Safebreaker" instead. In an age of endless entertainment, voluntarily playing this game is a self-inflicted punishment.
The game is bad. It isn’t fun to play. That fact is only obscured by the confusion into which the game plunges the player. Judging by reviews from contemporary magazines, most reviewers got stuck at the very beginning, praised the graphics, and moved on, giving it a somewhat favorable score. A few managed to orient themselves enough within the game to realize it wasn’t actually that good.
I, a man from the future, a gaming archaeologist and game design enthusiast, have managed to figure out how this game works and plays. And I am not proud of it. Because I basically wasted my time playing with a turd.
There is no manual; the mechanics are never explained. What is the "Bloodmeter," and why does it sometimes deplete on its own and sometimes not? How do the platforms that rise and lower into the water work? Why do some enemies deal damage and others don’t? Luckily, the game does the bare minimum and states the goals: find a bomb, place it next to a safe, light the bomb fuse with a match, and get the diamond from the blown-up safe. The game description is even generous enough to mention that there is "the Bottle of Sam Stoat Healing Elixir in each house [that] replenishes your blood level." I will leave no mysteries, because no one should be tempted to uncover them on their own.
At the beginning, the player can select one of four houses. It’s the same level each time, but enemy speed increases with every house. The developer’s way of "increasing difficulty."
After the selection, the player appears in the first location. That’s where the mysteries begin: sometimes, when the player spawns, the "Bloodmeter" immediately starts to decrease. Sometimes it doesn’t. Is it random? What causes it? It’s kind of important, since the Bloodmeter represents HEALTH in this game. Having constantly depleting health creates a very tight time limit. In fact, time limit so tight, it is factually a delayed, yet certain game-over!
Here’s the answer: depending on where the player stood when selecting the house, he may have spawned touching an enemy. That enemy causes bleeding. And this bleeding drains health fast. The only way to stop bleeding is to find and touch the elixir. The elixir is deep into the house. You physically cannot reach it in time. That's why bleeding means a certain "game over". So, if the player chose the first house on its right side and not the left side, it's an instant, yet disguised-with-a-delay, game over. But the player does not realize it. "Maybe it is supposed to be this way?", he thinks.
No. The fact is, there are four types of enemies: damage dealers, stoppers, pushers, and bleeders. Most of the enemies are bleeders, meaning the player can walk past them freely but will begin to bleed unstoppably. Enemies have predetermined positions, and the player spawns at the exact screen position where he selected the house. This means he can spawn directly touching a bleeder, the enemy placed RIGHT AT THE HOUSE'S ENTRANCE.
That's just the beginning. Bad game design is around every corner. Unavoidable damage is part and parcel of this game, while providing healing at only one location. Worse yet, enemies have hitboxes much bigger than their visual sprites, reaching out to the sides and top (to cover all animation frames). So, the player may not touch an enemy visually, yet receive damage or, worse, the bleeding effect. I know it, because due to the game's graphical limitations, enemy hitboxes can actually be seen. And when you see it, you will feel disgusted. And if you remember that touching one of those implies bleeding, you will get righteously furious.
Just to complete the game at the easiest difficulty, you must master EVERY screen. That means mastering timings, patterns, and hitboxes of every enemy in the game. Keep in mind, timings in this game are just as disgusting as the hitboxes.
The game gives you clunky controls, yet demands near-perfect timing. This is most apparent during its "jump three pipes" sub-game. In this game, there are mouseholes that the player must enter to traverse to another location. Each mousehole has a gameplay segment where the player must jump over three rising and lowering pipes. If the player jumps in water, he loses health. If the player jumps on a moving pipe, he falls into water and loses health. The pipes move up and down pretty fast and the jumping ability is pathetic.
When the main character jumps, he flies a few pixels forward and then abruptly stops mid-air and falls directly down. Instead of a smooth curve /‾\ the jump looks like an abruptly cut slope /|.
As if the pathetic jump and tight timing weren’t enough, pipes move in cycles, meaning they don’t just rise one after another, but they change the order they rise in. Meaning, pipes don’t just rise "1", "2", "3" all the time, but rather "1", "3", "2", "2", "3", "1", "2", "3". The key to jumping over is to identify the cycle’s pattern and catch "1", "2", "3". Luckily, pipe movement is not random and there are about 3 or 4 cycles, each having 8 steps. Yeah, it caused much confusion for those who attempted to play the game. No, don’t try to waste your time and understand it. Just keep this in mind: the game demands you to wait for the right pattern and then jump on three pipes in perfect succession. It is not as difficult as it is mind-numbingly tedious. And the player has to do it many, many times. It's half of the damn game! And it sucks! And the other part sucks! So why bother?
When I realized the game has nothing to offer, yet requires full mastery just to complete it, I gave up and used save states. I reached the safe, placed the bomb, lit the match. What happened next made me quit the game.
After the fuse is lit, the player has to leave the room as soon as possible. The timing is extremely tight. Yet the genius developers decided to put a hard-to-avoid stopper enemy there, flanked by a bleeder and a damage dealer. I got stuck, the bomb went off, and I was back at the difficulty selection screen. Skill issue? Definitely. If someone wants to master every screen in this clunky mess, they’re welcome to. I have better things to do.
Once I cooled off, I reloaded the save and, after many attempts, barely made it out in time. Then came yet another round of mind-numbing pipe jumping before I could return to the safe room and finally see the diamond. I didn’t even bother trying to take it out of the house. I was done wasting my time.
When exploring retro games, there’s always a chance to stumble upon a hidden gem. But if Sam Stoat: Safebreaker teaches anything, it’s that there’s also the risk of digging up a forgotten turd. In such cases, it’s best to just leave it buried.
