Locks

It's a novel concept and well-crafted visual style but the puzzle mechanics struggle. It's often difficult to pick out the elements of the stage you're supposed to interact with and it's so dark and murky that when I got to the part near the start where you're supposed to pin one part of the stage in place and rotate the rest, there was a scream to suggest I'd stabbed the guy behind the stage but it was so dark and quick I didn't even really know he was there? It feels like there's not enough time to let the atmosphere sink in. Then I spent a few minutes hopelessly rotating the stage and experimenting with the only 2 available pin slots and it seemed utterly impossible to get the door lined up wih the gap in the stage, so I stopped playing.

Artistic style is excellent, and overall, puzzles are interesting. However, the swinging axes and spikes' moment where you play as a doll irritated me to the point that I have to "not recommend" this game. The fact is that this challenge is not only bound to music, but it is random at times, so even if you try to memories it, you'll still get random deaths. Please do not do that in future projects.

"Locks" is another one of those games that makes most indie developers look bad... demonstrating that just because you're an indie dev doesn't mean you need to compromise on graphics, or gameplay. First, of course, we need to know what this is, it's an indie puzzle "platformer" with a dark circus sideshow theme as you control a puppet in a twisted and uncomfortable, surreal puppet show environment. Puzzles involve gimmicks like room rotation, logic switch pulling and so on... controlling and changing the environment to hit the correct conditions to progress beyond each screen. The visuals here aren't bleeding edge but they are done properly, there's no pixelcrap... it's 3D, drawn decently enough that you're not immediately confronted by the inadequacy of the developer, as is the case with most amateur games on Steam. That's truly laudable and the developer is to be commended for that... but we also are left to wonder why they're not working as part of a professional game development company. The game itself isn't necessarily winning awards, given the richness of options gamers have on Steam. The puzzles are obtuse to say the least, and while good use of Unreals 2D side scrol…

The aesthetic, artstyle and music are all genuinely amazing, and it really is a very unique puzzle game. But unfortunately I think some of the minigames are tedious and are overall unfun to do, mainly due to the hitboxes and the momentum of the character which makes it feel like you're barely in control of it sometimes. Also even after beating some of these puzzles I still don't know what the reasoning behind their solutions were, especially some of the puzzles which used Roman numerals. Overall I still think it was worth playing and I really respect the developer for putting in so much effort into crafting such an intricate aesthetic like this one. You can definitely tell that a lot of passion went into this game. I first found about this game from a trailer of it on the Fran Bow subreddit, and it immediately grabbed my attention because of how interesting literally everything in the game looked. If you're into puzzle games, I definitely think you'd enjoy this one. 6/10

Confusion over a puzzle that has changed since release led me to belive the game was bugged. I have now talked to the dev and found out everything was working as intended. A few of the puzzles can be quite challenging, though many are simple. The main enjoyment of this game is it's surreal artstyle.

Physically cannot complete the game. I'm unsure whether it is my pc or a bug in the game but I am unable to get past a certain level with the lady puppet just after the ballroom dance spike-dodging minigame. I can see that there are platforms which are supposed to lift you up, however the character falls right through them. I was able to get around this before because the previous character could jump but now I am unable to I am stuck. This is a shame because I was really enjoying the game and loved the atmosphere. I hope it can be fixed or I can be notified that it is an issue on my end.