I've lost count of how many locks I've unlocked and safes I've cracked in the game. Probably thousands. But unlocking locks and opening safes is usually accomplished in simplified little mini-games, and has little to do with the actual lock mechanism.

Sophie's Safe Cracking Simulator, on the other hand, not only allows you to crack safes, but also teaches you how combination locks actually work. Even if you have some idea of what's going on inside a lock, this simulator will make you an expert on levers, cams, wheel gates, pins, flies, contacts, etc., and will teach you the fun (and painstaking) process of finding the combination lock and getting the item inside! ...

Instead of looking straight at the lock with a bobby pin and screwdriver like in the Fallout games, here you can fiddle with the lock, swivel the camera around the lock in 3D, and see what actually happens in real time as you turn the dial. They start with a lock with one wheel, then practice with a lock with three wheels, and then with locks with different sized wheels. Eventually, they will get a chance to crack a safe for the first time and play with some of the fun safecracking tools they have seen in movies.

Of course, you can X-ray the safe while learning to see the wheels clearly, but once you get a grasp of things, you can limit yourself to a spectrogram that visually shows the sounds the lock makes while you are fiddling with it. With enough practice, you may be able to do this with sound alone. Otherwise, a number of tricks can be fitted into the safe to assure accurate rotation that gradually approaches safecracking.

And once you get the hang of it, you can generate locks with random combinations and different numbers of wheels to see how fast you can crack them. We hope that speedrunners will use this sim. Because I think it would be great to see would-be master thieves competing to open safes as fast as possible.

This is a really slick and cool sim, with a great tutorial explaining how it all works. Plus, Sophie's Safe Cracking Simulator is only $2 on Itch.io (but that's the minimum price, and you can pay a little more if you like). And this is just one of many projects by developer Sophie Hoden on Itch.io.