Say this for Adam Cadre: he doesn't repeat himself. There are darn few substantive themes that tie any two of his games together, and even those are pretty abstract (a dash of misanthropy and cruelty here, a smidgen of mental instability there, etc.). Lock and Key, Adam's latest, is very much a case in point: the gonzo humor and the queasy feeling that you're not entirely aligned with the forces of light are familiar, but the context, namely One Big Puzzle, is new in the Adam oeuvre. It works quite well, though, particularly if you like that sort of thing but even, to some extent, if you don't.

You're head of a security company hired to build a better dungeon for a fairly unpleasant king -- the king's portrayal is largely comic with a dash of brutality tossed in now and again. You arrange a series of traps in the dungeon, then stand by and watch as an adventurer overcomes all of them and lose your job and your head as he escapes. So you try it again, and again, and again, eventually noting that different traps have different effects, and at long last, after several dozen repetitions at least, the adventurer's escape is foiled and you brag to the king that no one escapes your dungeon (reminiscent of Varicella, of course, where similar massive repetition was necessary; your character makes a comment at the end about no one having the chance to go back and try it over again).

Adam made a comment in his competition reviews this past year about "participatory comedy" in Fine Tuned, and Lock and Key strives for some of the same thing. That is, some of the humor here derives from the player's cluelessness, meaning unfamiliarity with the logistics of the game. It turns out, for example, that you need to make a path into and out of the dungeon in a specific way, but you have no way of knowing what the game has in mind beforehand. Rather than dropping a message in brackets along the lines of "[You need more doors, dummy.]," the puzzle does its correcting through the game itself -- sometimes via a trusty assistant who helpfully points out when you're being stupid, and sometimes by actually letting you try out your defective dungeon (from which the adventurer promptly escapes, of course). This is all very well, and often it is funny, so I shouldn't complain too much -- but I'm not sure I think it's a great concept (particularly when the mistakes are beyond the reach of UNDO). It's actually not intrinsically different from rooms-of-instant-death in Detective and such -- i.e., stumble into comical suboptimal ending because you have no idea what the game has around the corner -- and while the writing here is good enough to make the suboptimal endings amusing rather than simply a drag, not everyone writes as well as Adam does. This is an idea, in short, that worked okay for Adam because he actually got me to laugh along at my own/my character's stupidity (and likewise for Dennis G. Jerz in Fine Tuned) but the chances aren't that good that the next person to try it will carry it off with the same flair. (And even so the figure-out-how-the-world-works section of Lock and Key was not the highlight.)

The puzzle -- hmmm. It works well, I suppose; there's a certain element of "why does this work and not that? and why doesn't this affect that?," but some degree of that is inevitable and my logical objections were few. What makes it hard is that the relevant hints are often dropped relatively unobtrusively into the text, so it's easy to miss them -- all the more so when you appear to be getting the same old failure message. This is participatory comedy of another sort, I guess -- you've seen the adventurer escape from your dungeon so many times that you no longer pay attention to the details -- but it's not all that howlingly funny. Still, it's a good puzzle on a lot of levels; it combines resource allocation, logic, and detail-spotting in a way that goes well beyond most IF. There are also a lot of technical tricks that serve the game well -- there's a diagram of the puzzle that helps keep track of what's where, and a record/replay command that lessens the tedium somewhat.

There are a lot of good puzzles on the IF archive, though, and I'm not sure I would have kept this one on my hard drive if it hadn't been written by Adam. There are lots of funny snippets, and some priceless ones -- the sequence involving the gladiator whom you install in one of the dungeon rooms to kill the adventurer, and who turns out to be a long-lost friend, is funny enough in itself, but the adventurer's rage at the king ("YOU'LL PAY FOR THIS!") when the gladiator meets an untimely demise is hilarious. A significant chunk of the gameplay is there solely for humor value; for instance, you need to order each trap individually, which means calling the trap's vendor (in a manner of speaking). Think about the comic possibilities of deathtrap vendors (each specializing in a particular kind of deathtrap) -- okay, humor potential, but trust me, Adam appears to have thought about those possibilities a LOT. Lots of familiar fantasy tropes -- evil king, mean guards, etc. -- come in for their share of mockery, of course (vain and impulsive king, bumbling guards), which isn't new in itself, but Adam has given the mockery such breadth -- so many ways the guards can bumble, so many funny lines for the king -- that it goes well beyond the usual fantasy-parody tropes. As in Varicella (along with other Adam efforts, but that one in particular), there's an element of misanthropy to the humor; it's not gentle stuff. And here, as there, your character is hardly an unequivocal force for good -- getting into the game means acclimating to the role of aider-and-abetter of evil tyrant, though it's an evil tyrant with funny one-liners. But for those who can wrap their minds around the game's worldview, there's fun to be had outside the puzzle-solving.

Lock and Key works well, in short -- it's not revolutionary, and those who profess themselves unable to solve puzzles may find themselves stumped -- but as a puzzle and as another line in Adam's list of achievements, it's worth experiencing.