The safe-cracker is that most skilled of burglars. To become one you need an ear as trained as a classical musician's, fingers as nimble as a surgeon's and the patience of a saint. Well, it's either that or three pounds of dynamite, a box of matches and a complete disregard for your own personal safety.

However, in this adventure/puzzle game you're not actually stealing or doing anything illegal. Rather, you've been hired by a wealthy family to explore their deceased father's mansion and find his will, which is hidden away somewhere inside one of the multitude of safes scattered throughout his home. And, being ultra-posh and probably inbred, they're obviously far too thick to locate it themselves.

Before we go any further, it should be made clear that the adventure game element of Safecracker is entirely superficial. You point and click to move around the smartly-rendered 3D mansion and there is the odd object to pick up, but really it's a completely linear progression throughout. Essentially, the game is a series of set puzzles for the various safes and locked doors which must be solved in order.

The puzzles themselves are quite diverse by nature, although many are drawn from traditional favourites that are easily recognised. There's the old sliding square tile puzzle, for example, except the one in Safecracker has a slight twist - instead of a blank space you use to shuffle the tiles around, this one has dials that rotate four squares at once. It's pretty much the same principle when it comes to solving it, however.

Many of the puzzles are Mensa-style affairs that require dollops of logic or lateral thinking to solve. To give some further examples, without giving too much away in terms of spoilers, there's a puzzle that requires you to decipher a code wheel, some that test your maths skills, and several that involve working out sequences of button pushes.

While these brain-teasers are generally quite well designed, the odd one verges on the overly frustrating. There's one particular dastardly fellow that features a magnetic maze, and this had us scratching our head for bloody ages (and no, we didn't get splinters). Eventually we triumphed, but it was more annoying than rewarding in the end.

Still, we can't moan too much about the overall quality of the puzzles. However, we can whinge a little about the adventure side of the game being essentially non-existent. What you're getting here is a fancy interactive puzzle book with an aesthetically pleasing 3D mansion setting.

We were a tad disappointed to find out the adventure element was basically a fancy 3D setting for the puzzles, but as long as you realise this is the case, Safecracker is a decent little brain-teaser for the fifteen quid price tag.