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Review
Reading the other reviews of this game make me believe that the game you can download up and to the right is not the same game that is being reviewed. Here are my reasons: there is no graphical component anywhere in the game (at least not under any Glux interpreter for Mac OS X); you do not place any puzzles in this game -- instead you are someone trying to escape an inescapable cell; others mention a "help manual", but there is no help manual in any of the links above and the game provides no help. So, I'm quite puzzled about what exactly is going on here, but for all intents and purposes, it seems that Lock & Key is just another boring one-room escape game. Maybe if I spent another 2-3 hours I might figure out how to do the impossible, but such challenges always leave me cold. In any case, it gets one star for decent writing, because two stars would be a bit excessive for such an unoriginal concept.
Comments on this review
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You never progressed beyond the (very short) introduction. This may not be the best basis for writing a review.
The very idea that you feel it necessary to try to correct my opinion says it all.
Whether or not this is a one room game or not is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of verifiable facts. You are wrong on the facts.
What does it say? That I take reviewing seriously, and believe that a review ought to be written only once one is in the position to make an informed judgement about a game?
If you believe that Lock & Key is a one-room escape game, you haven't progressed beyond the prologue. You haven't seen any of the things that make the game distinctive. This makes your review quite literally worthless: prospective players cannot learn anything useful about the game from you, since you don't know anything useful about the game and hence are not in a position to teach.
A review is not a twitter message or livejournal post saying "I thought it sucked", where your own experience is what is important and interesting to your readers and needs to be described. People reading a review of Lock & Key are not interested in your experience, they are interested in the game. They want to learn something about the game. Your experience is interesting to them only in so far as it tells them something about the game. Since you have not played this game (to any significant extent), your experience tells them nothing about the game.
In all fairness, on such a basis you should not even be rating Lock & Key, let alone reviewing it.
I'm not sure about playing on a Mac, but I went ahead and added the playable Java version from the author's site, which should be cross-platform. I've tested it on my PC, and it seems to work okay.
I suspect, though, that you might not have progressed far enough to view the graphical elements. In that case, I urge you to keep playing. It is indeed possible to escape, it just requires a little tenacity in figuring out what to do.
Also, the HELP command is only accessible in the next stage of the game.
