Shear line

About the Game

A lockpicking simulator that does not roll dice.

You know the minigame. Stop the bar, wiggle the stick, pass a roll you never see. This is not that.

Here the lock is real - a cutaway cylinder with springs, drivers, and one line where the plug meets the shell, simulated 120 times a second. A pin sets because you held it still in a window a fraction of a millimetre wide. When a spool shoves your pick back out, that is a wedge sliding on a bevel - worked out, not faked. Nothing in this game pretends.

Listen to what the lock is telling you

Hold the wrench. Push each pin and read the answer: the free ones ride up easy, the bound one refuses. Lift it, hold it still - click. The plug turns a hair. Now the lock leans on another pin, and lies about it.

And the locks do lie. A spool catches halfway and the plug swings most of the way round - it feels exactly like an open, and it is not one. Serrated pins lie four times on the way up. Mushrooms punish a heavy hand harder than anything else in the game. Push too hard anyway and your pick bends, then snaps.

Twenty-two locks across four tiers. The last ones will make you sweat.

Break out of the labyrinth

Then take your picks somewhere they matter. A prison, dealt fresh every run: a maze of corridors braided around twenty kinds of room - chapel, forge, library, treasury. Every door and every chest is a lock from the same simulation, some of them wheel padlocks with false gates lying under your fingers. Picking takes real seconds, and the guards keep walking while you kneel.

A warden carries the keys and locks doors behind itself. A sentry sees ten cells down a straight corridor. A listener is blind - it hears your footsteps through the walls. Snap a pick and everything with ears comes looking.

Nobody fights here. Two picks, a lamp, and a locked gate on the far wall. Caught is caught. Score is the clock.

Pick blind

Four difficulty levels never touch the physics - they only take away what you see, down to nothing: no cutaway, no meters, just the lock's face and what you can hear. Blind pays: the same open is a C on Easy and an S on Hard.

The first time you open a lock you cannot see into, on sound and feel alone, you will know why this game exists.

What is in the box

• Eight driver profiles - spools, serrations, mushrooms and worse. Every lie falls out of the shapes; none of it is scripted.

• The labyrinth - a stealth prison break where every door is a pickable lock and the guards do not pause while you kneel.

• Lock streak - how much locks you can unlock in 5 minutes?

• A lock editor, one chamber to sixteen, with share codes short enough to read down a phone - a mistyped code fails instead of decoding into the wrong lock.