What Lockpicking Minigames Get Right (& Wrong) About Picking Locks in Real Life ► Ludology Now!

Recently, I decided to teach myself how to pick locks. It’s something I’ve only sporadically enjoyed in video games, but a skill that fascinates me in real life. Thinking back, there were multiple situations when knowing how to pick a lock would have saved me time, money, and stress. There was the time my (locked) car keys fell out of my shirt pocket right as I was shutting the trunk lid – right after arriving at a Christmas party with an ex-girlfriend’s family. There was also the time I dropped my keyring down a sewer drain and couldn’t get back into my apartment.

Another time I was on a road trip and the person driving locked the keys to our car inside it during a rest stop. Such is life. Most recently, when I was doing some work in our backyard my two-year-old locked me out of the house by accident, so I had to climb back in through the window. That’s not even the first time one of the children has done that to me, but it’s definitely going to be the last, because now I know how lockpicking works.

Note: In this column, I will be using “lockpicking” as one word and never “lock picking” as two words. I will never hyphenate the words lock and pick. This is fine. Words are jazz.

I wasn’t coming to lockpicking completely cold, either. Thanks to games like Oblivion and Skyrim I know, basically, the general idea of what you are supposed to do. I’ve seen movies. I played 200 hours of Blue Prince over the past month, which means I’ve “used” lockpick sets hundreds, if not thousands of times in that one game alone. Surely at least some of those skills will translate to the real world, right?

Kinda. Sorta. Not really. But a little. Let me explain.

The Best Lockpicking Minigames in Video Games

Talk about an SEO title. The best lockpicking minigame is the one you enjoy playing the most, and anyone who says otherwise is unknowingly ignorant or willfully incorrect. Fun games media fact, H2 headers (that’s the title above this paragraph and image) can be pulled by some search engines the same way headlines can. That’s why you see titles like that one peppered throughout articles. It’s gotten so bad that Wordpress will literally give you an alert that’s basically, “Yo, this is 300 words in a row without another title. That’s dumb, brah. Google wants titles.” That being said, there are some lockpicking minigames that are more realistic than others.

Speaking of Google, I’m actively avoiding googling “best lockpicking minigames” while writing this. I know there’s probably 1000 lists, even more if you count non-[Editor’s Note: Stop trying to get us sued] websites. This is more of a thought experiment for me, because I know I’ve played hundreds of them, but I’m curious to see which ones I can conjure when considering the question: what video game lockpicking minigames are the most realistic? (also a good SEO title, FYI)

Note: Is it weird that I use “video games” and not “videogames” religiously, but I am advocating for “lockpicking” and not “lock picking” in this article? It's also ALWAYS going to be "minigames" instead of "mini-games" or "mini games". It’s all about how things flow, how they sound when you are reading them in your head, how they look when you scan them on the screen or in the paper. Words are jazz.

The earliest “lockpicking” I can remember playing was in Deus Ex, I think. You had a lockpick tool in your hand but you didn’t actually have to do anything but stand there and jab at the door or object with it. I’m sure I played dozens of other games before this that had some form of lockpicking minigame, but I always liked the way Deus Ex’s lockpicking was just kind of a weird, jerky hand movement. It was memorable in a way that the previous ones clearly weren’t, in any case, but it wasn’t a minigame, it was an action.

I also remember the first time I actively hated a lockpicking minigame. That happened in 2007, when my friend and I rented BioShock. If you don’t remember (or haven’t played it) this is more of a “hacking” complaint than a “lockpicking” one, but BioShock’s hacking method of forcing players to play Pipe Mania from 1989 every time they wanted to unlock a vending machine or hack a turret was God-awful. I’m not going to talk any further about hacking minigames here, but for further reference check out the timestamped area of this very short hbomberguy video on Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

For my money, the earliest example of a very realistic lockpicking minigame comes from 2002’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and every game in that series onward. The player has two long hook-shaped tools which both fit inside the lock (pictured at the top of this section). One pushes resistor pins out of the way, and the other tool is used to jiggle the locking pins up and down. The instructions in the first Splinter Cell’s tutorial state: “To release a pin, you must press the correct movement key (W or S or A or D by default). Once you hear and see the pin begin to move, press the same key repeatedly until it is released. Repeat until all pins are released.” Fairly basic, but somewhat close to real life.

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Of course, my memory is only my own, and I wasn’t playing games that featured lockpicks when I was younger because I was too busy ensuring King Graham and Roger Wilco completed their respective quests. The very first lockpicking minigame that I can find a concrete record of is from 1989’s Hillsfar, which I had never heard of and only played while doing research for this article. It’s actually pretty fun, so I might revisit it later down the line. The lockpicking here is somewhat realistic in a few ways, but it features one major issue we will discuss later in this article. For now, let’s talk about what most people think of when they think of lockpicking in video games.

Lockpicking in Skyrim, Fallout, and More

Obviously it’s Bethesda, which has had an up-and-down relationship with lockpicking minigames. Lockpicking in Morrowind is basically identical to the Deus Ex experience, where lockpicks are an equippable item (like a weapon) which you must jab into the object to unlock, but require no real tangible skill. Oblivion, on the other hand, provides a rather realistic cutaway of a lock with multiple pins that need to be moved out of the way one-by-one. After learning how to pick locks in real life, it’s clear that Oblivion does depict single-pin lockpicking effectively and fairly correctly.

It’s curious, then, that the company would abandon this system for something new. Fallouts 3, New Vegas, 4, and 76 all use the exact same lockpicking system as Skyrim, with the only difference being in Fallout you’re using bobby pins and a screwdriver instead of lockpicks. This appears to be more of a raking-tool system than single-pin picking, as evidenced by the bobby pins, but the whole “finding the proper angle to hold the lock” thing is a bit weird and off.

In real life, to pick most locks you need two things: a tension wrench and your preferred picking tool. For single-pin picking like in Oblivion, this tool is called a “hook” or a “short hook”, but in that game the tension wrench is assumed off-screen, or perhaps supplied by internal gears. Fallout and Skyrim do show the tension wrench (or screwdriver) but allow you to place it in impossible locations. Basically, you only have so much space in a keyhole, so depending on the type of lock you will need to put your tension wrench either at the top or the bottom of the keyhole. There’s not really anywhere else it can go, and you should only turn it slightly while picking.

When “raking” a lock, you apply a small amount of pressure on the tension wrench and then move the tool (pictured above, called a “rake” or “city rake”) back and forth rapidly inside the keyhole. The purpose of this is to quickly (but randomly) set as many pins as possible, and if you know how to do it you can efficiently pick most normal store-bought locks with ease. Since the ridges on bobby pins can effectively work as rakes in real life, I assume that’s what’s happening in Fallout 3, but the visuals don’t line up. It’s just two weird turning angles.

Starfield’s lockpicking is tedious and digipicks are uninteresting. I wouldn’t call it bad, but I would call it if I was making phone calls to lockpicking minigames that I didn’t ever want to play again.

Lockpicking Minigames Will Never Be Perfect

I don’t think there’s any video game currently on the market that could perfectly represent real lockpicking, because it’s so reliant on multiple senses. You need to be able to feel each pin in the tumbler. You need to be able to listen to hear whether or not a pin has been set. You need to know the pressure difference between anchor pins and springy pins.

More than anything else, there’s one common thread that ties nearly all instances of lockpicking in video games together – the need for lockpicks to break. This is something games like Skyrim, Fallout, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and many, many others – including Hillsfar, told you we’d bring it back around – lean on heavily. Because of this, when I first started learning how to pick locks in real life I was quite gentle with my tools. That was a mistake, and it wasn’t until I was able to get this “lockpicks are fragile and must be treated with care” mentality out of my brain that I was able to properly pick locks consistently.

Now, I’m sure that it’s possible to break a lockpick. I’m sure I will do that very thing myself at some point. However, a good lockpicking set can (and needs to be able to) take a much stronger amount of pressure and force than you would expect, especially if you’ve broken as many lockpicks in video games as I have. Few and far between are the games where a “lockpick set” is an actual item, one that doesn’t need to be replaced the instant it’s used. Additionally, how you use lockpick kits varies from game to day.

To return to some of our earlier examples, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Blue Prince both have lockpick kits, but they both function differently. In Splinter Cell, Sam Fisher always has his lockpicks as part of his gear when he goes out on a mission. They aren’t going to break or get lost, and it’s up to the player to decide when to use them and when to just break down a door instead.

In Blue Prince a lockpick kit can be found or purchased, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to open every door. Instead, you have an invisible “lockpick skill” and “lock difficulty,” and the chance of you opening the lock is always random but can be weighed in one direction or the other depending on whether or not you have improved your skill (via Lab experiments) AND what Rank of the house you are currently on, as higher ranks feature higher difficulty locks. It’s basically random chance with extra steps, and there’s no skill involved. There’s not even a lockpicking minigame.

Note: This is not meant as a knock against Blue Prince, which is currently tied with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for Ludology Now!'s Best Game of 2025 award. You can feel one way about a particular mechanic when comparing it to other games without that meaning you are condemning the game for using said mechanic in the way that it did. Mechanics are jazz.

Lots of games use randomness when determining whether or not a door or a chest can be picked open. In theory, this is fine. Real-life lockpicking, if you are using the rake method, is all about random chance. However, failing once doesn’t mean a lockpick instantly breaks, and there’s nothing wrong with trying again. Games that only give you one chance to pick a lock before taking your lockpick forever (cough, Bethesda, cough) are only doing that because the developers knew if they gave players one set of real-world lockpicks everyone would turn into item hoarding goblins in ten minutes – even moreso than they do already, I mean.

There are few minigames more ubiquitous than lockpicking in video games. Fishing is surely high on the list, and the act of cooking as a minigame seems to be growing more and more popular. It’s interesting to look at what everyday activities pop up in games more often than others – why is fishing so common but something like mini-golf rarely shows up? Why is RGG (Yakuza, Like a Dragon) the only studio that wants to innovate in the minigame space? I don’t know. This was supposed to just be about lockpicking.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. Fallout 3. Oblivion. All of these have lockpicking minigames that are similar to, but not quite like, actual lockpicking in the real world. Play them if you want a taste of what it’s like, but I would also recommend getting a lockpick set for yourself. Check your local laws first (some places are a bit weird on this) but I can honestly say that owning a lockpick set has helped me make my home a safer place, and I’m just a little bit more prepared in case anything happens. There are many, many excellent YouTube videos and easy-to-understand tutorials to follow, and lockpicks are both relatively cheap and easy to make by hand. It’s a good skill, and if you just read all 2,400 words of this, you would probably enjoy it too.

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA:

Watch “I Captained a £4,000,000 Starship Filled with Actors” by People Make Games, a fantastic feature about one of the coolest-looking live gaming experiences I’ve ever seen… since the last People Make Games feature on a live gaming experience.
Read “Happy Birthday Bob Seger: 80 Years of Waiting on the Thunder” by Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone.
Listen to this interview of Steve from Blues Clues by Rainn Wilson for the Soul Boom podcast. It made me cry, in a good way. It’s absolutely excellent.