Lock and Key – For Love and for Murder

I have to love any story that comes with a self-descriptive title.

Lock and Key: A Magical Girl Mystery already gives you every clue as to whether it'll be your cup of tea. It's very explicitly a crossover between the genres of Magical Girl shows – specifically the earnest-hearted '90s class of Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon – and murder-mystery thrillers – like the works of Agatha Christie or a police prodedural.

But it's more than a crossover just in which story conventions it's riffing on. It's also playing into a few educated conjectures about the kind of reader who's famiiar with both those genres. The kind of person who is now or was recently entering their third decade of life, who yearns for better representation, and who has perhaps lost their patience with the systems around them.

And if you fall into (or are willing to fall into) that certain sort of stereotype, then Lock and Key is oh-so-very much for you.

Love and Fear in Equal Measure

Part of that is a cheeky tone that's part-and-parcel to Studio Élan's house style, as I've come to expect from from their previous outings. It's not quite irrevenent in the same way as a Scott Pilgrim, but the characters are definitely predominantly adults who are comfortable being sarcastic with each other, swearing quite candidly throughout the script, and exclusively using the term “cop”.

But part of that is that I don't recall older protagonists in an Élan story so far – a few exceptions like Juliet the charming vampire aside. Previous titles have featured characters around college-student age, but a “key” factor in this narrative is in our viewpoint characters thinking ahead toward their 30th birthdays. The titular Lock and Key themselves are a bit beyond the “young professional” stage; in fact, the first scene of the game features the perpetually-tired-looking Sherri dealing with inter-departmental cattiness at work, something perfectly relatable for many over twenty-five or so, but much more rarely before then.

Put together, the titular pair prove to be well-developed people, offering a stable rapport with each other as spouses and peers. That given trust proves a welcome anchor and even serves to make something of a safe space even within a story centering around a homocide case.

And this game is full of those safeties. Not just in its persistent placement of a wide range of LGBTQ characters in center frame, but in its goofier moments where local mother-hen Kealey will bandy about phrases like “kick ass” and “tubular”. In its little acknowledgements of past struggles leading to present comforts. And in regular reminders that, yes, stories about literally empowering young women should be fun, at least a lot of the time.

A Great First Step

Lock and Key is doing a fair bit to provide as much comfort in its mechanical affordances as it is in its script, at that. While visual novels tend to be somewhere between light on and averse to interactive elements depending on the title, Lock and Key likes to fill in some nice extras around the edges for those who care to look.

For one, it provides a few accessibility options to those who need them in the form of an OpenDyslexic typeface option and a text-to-speech “Self-Voicing” option. But there's also a little in-game codex for anyone who needs a refresher before diving into the game – or just wants to read ahead on some context that you've forgotten between play sessions.

Of note, the in-game photo mode is delightfully robust compared to others in the genre, allowing plenty of control to pan around and see more of the game's character art as it pans in turn before the oil-paint-like backgrounds. Even without entering the photo mode, when a more elaborate image spread shows up, any text narration can be click-and-dragged out of the way, exposing more of the scene on the fly in case it covers up some detail. All in all, the game is definitely doing everything it can to highlight its own art, and I wish we saw more of this approach in other visual novels.

Filling out even more of the setting are little notes on the pause screen, written by the current viewpoint character. Each little excerpt provides both a sense of the story's time-scale and just a bit of their internalities – their coffee orders, intended battle tactics, anything that's on their mind at the moment. A small delight, sure, it adds so much that I would actively pause the game in each new scene for a little vibe check.

A Touch of Grief

That said, this belies the fact that it's not always clear when the game does shift its viewpoint character; in fact, I was a few minutes into the first scene from Kealey's perspective before realizing that the narration had ever moved away from where it started with Sherri. A shame, considering that it seems easy to add in a little note to the pause screen indicating the speaker.

The storytelling as a whole does encounter a few hiccups that could tend to take me out of the action when they did pop up. For example, the game features no voice acting – which, on its own, isn't an issue. But it also doesn't include any sound effect at all when text fills in, which makes the game feel eerily quiet during many otherwise-calm stretches when the background music drops out.

And when the music is present, it's occasionally… mismatched. I love this soundtrack in a vacuum, and it can be a great mood-setter, but I distinctly remember a passage or two when our leads were going toe-to-toe with a monster, but the tempo and tenor of the music was more of a relaxed, casual-conversation piece.

For that matter, during the game's action scenes, much of the heavy lifting is left up to the text. It's rare that the artist provides us their depiction of the Monster of the Week, and when they do, it's often only in a single wide shot or a pair of broad eyes. I was hoping to see the game better employ the visual element of the visual novel moniker here, but knowing how stilted action scenes can play out even in visual novels from major studios, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that this works best narratively.

Mage-Life Crisis

All said, it's hard to not enjoy Lock and Key when it's firing on all cylinders. For the nits I might pick with it, many tend to slide away in the face of a script that's as hokey as it is completely earnest – exactly the tone you'd expect from the a Saturday-morning cartoon, but carried forward into something where the subject matter is a bit more mature.

And I mean “mature” in the “having-conversations-about-taxes” way, not in the “too-hot-for-cable” way. It's no Buried Giant with its elderly protagonists, sure, but the specifics of the magic in Lock and Key mark it as a “passing of the torch” milestone for its bearers. And with that comes all manner of self-awareness – seeing your own abilities wane, getting another ever-present reminder that time keeps slipping away, and being able to look back and see a canyon of distance between your past and present selves.

We don't have a whole lot of these “coming-of-middle-age” stories in games that I'm aware of. It's a topic that has to come with a sort of sincerity to it and has to come from a pair of deeply relatable and personable cast. And as a pair of people with a long history that holds them up through present troubles, Sherri and Kealey are the right pair for the job.

Lock and Key rides or dies on how well it demonstrates its underlying mission statement: that people can continue to grow in their love together and use it to face the ever-oncoming years. I'm happy to say that, for me, it rides.