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Review of Unlock! Escape Adventures
Blurb from the publisher: 'Three captivating adventures in a cooperative game inspired by escape rooms!
Escape rooms are places you must escape from in less than 60 minutes. With Unlock! experience the thrills of escape rooms without leaving the table.
Search the scenes! Combine objects! Solve puzzles!
The Formula: Enter a secret laboratory to recover a mysterious serum that has been developed by a scientist...
Squeek & Sausage: Thwart the plans of the despicable Professor Noside in this cartoon-style adventure!
The Island of Doctor Goorse: Visit the island of an eccentric antique collector billionaire and overcome its traps.'
What you get: Your EUR 29 or equivalent will buy you Unlock! Escape Adventures, the first game of the Unlock! game line of cooperative escape room simulations. The game includes three distinct, totally unrelated scenarios from different genres, without any continuity or links. It can accommodate from one to six players in an hour per scenario. Scenarios are timed. Each scenario in the present box lasts 60 minutes. The two first scenarios are of moderate difficulty, while the last one is of high difficulty.
In addition to the rulebook that can be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game contains the following: a 10-card Tutorial deck, and three adventures with a total of 186 cards. One also needs to download the game's app on his iOS or Android smartphone. The app does not need to be connected to the internet while you play. However, its Android version is some 164 MB big. Ensure that your phone can handle it. At its current iteration the app supports seventeen languages.
In the interest of full disclosure, all three current Unlock! products (Escape, Mystery, and Secret Adventures) were fully playtested before I started writing any of the three reviews. Playstests were run in different formats, from soloing some adventures, playtesting others with two players, and going through others still with four players. As expected by products that are a part of the same line, the reviews share many similarities and can be read autonomously.
Spoiler warning: like any RPG adventure, an escape room, and in this case the simulation of an escape room, can be played only once irrespective of success or not. As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the scenarios, parts of them might be revealed while discussing their strong and less strong points. This will not make the scenarios unplayable, it might however reveal some of the puzzles you will have to solve. If you enjoy surprises you might want to skip straight to the conclusion.
Gameplay: Unlock! is a puzzle emulating an escape room. True to genre, it is timed. In other words, in order to be fully successful, one needs to finish each scenario in less than 60 minutes. The Island of Doctor Gourse, the third scenario in this box, is the only scenario in the three boxes already released in which the players are separated and form two different teams. True to its cooperative nature, the players will at some point unite in order to tackle the remaining adventure together.
Using up the time does not lead to the game being aborted; it simply reduces the players' grading at the end of the game or alters the actual end by removing a puzzle. Effectively players can take days to finish a scenario if they so wish. The timer, part of the app, can be stopped if you wish to interrupt your game. The players' grading is not recorded anywhere, it is only indicative for your group's pleasure.
Each scenario is made up by a number of cards. When a scenario begins, players reveal usually one or more cards. Cards are mostly numbered from 1 to 99, even though not all numbers are represented and some letter-coded cards might also exist. They contain text, visual clues, or both, that the player must decipher in order to find the cards they lead to. As an example, card 57 might have hidden in its patterns the number 34. This might mean that the players must now find and reveal card 34. Cards may be combined, if they belong to one of two types, red and blue. To combine two cards one adds their numbers and searches for the appropriate card on the deck. The result might be positive (e.g. you open a cabinet) or negative (e.g. you lost your time, something for which the game penalizes you either directly or indirectly). Some cards are machines, and a player has to interact with them on the app, usually through problem solving, in order to get further hints or clues. Other cards require a code in order to provide additional hints. The codes can be found straightforwardly in other cards (albeit with searching in the text, on the images etc) or indirectly through problem solving. Other cards also include places, results of interactions with objects (e.g. failures or the successful conclusion of a scenario), penalties for when the players try something that is not working, modifiers for other cards etc.
Once a card has served its purpose, usually its successor card removes it from the game if it serves no later purpose.
If players get stuck, the app may offer hints either automatically or through a prompt. In more complex cards hints can be given in stages, e.g. the app will provide a minor hint, then a major one, and then will provide the actual solution. In order to avoid mistakes, each request for a hint has to be confirmed twice.
In the first scenario the players enter a hidden base under the subway system trying to exit with a working truth-serum formula. The second features Dr Noside, the cartoonish villain of the franchise which also appears on Secret Adventures, in another of his escapades. The third follows a plane crash where the players are divided. For a large chunk of the adventure, the players will be playing in two different teams, unable to communicate or combine their cards, before finally pooling their resources and successfully trying to conclude the adventure.
The strong points: I am a very strong proponent of timed games (even though in the Unlock! series time mostly relates to achievement and not the game actualy ending), and this series easily proves why: adrenaline! No untimed coop game can compete with an experience where the players have to take decisions based on calculated risks at times, which might or might not be correct. The pressure, the thrill, the high fives around the table, it is all exhilarating!
The game engine is robust, even though the rulebook fails miserably when it comes to preparing the players on the types of riddles and puzzles that the game contains. All this red/blue card fluff is for newbies. In reality, practically everything goes when it comes to the content of the riddles. Some riddles might be solved by one card, other by a combindation of a handful of elements. A clear-cut number may be combined with an insinuation of a number; what you felt was text is in reality a number; a seemingly irrelevant card might provide a clue to a riddle far off; different colourations might in fact be numbers, as can be the tracing of an outline on a card. There are linear and easy riddles, and there are truly difficult and challenging ones, whose resolution is going to be a major reason for celebration. The variety is practically endless, not only within the same scenario but also from one scenario to another.
In order to dissuade the players from gaming the scenario as opposed to trying to solve riddles based on content, the card set up does not follow the order of the card numbers. Thus, players will have to search the deck again and again when searching for a new card to unveil. Unless one has a photographic memory, remembering where a card is on a seemingly randomized deck is nowhere near obvious. That is very clever design.
The fact that all codes are four digit codes and all of them are unique is also thoughtful. One doesn't need to fiddle with the app by inserting first a reference number and then a code. If you believe you have a code, just go in and insert it no matter at which part of the game your are at. This contrasts well with the machines, which need to be referenced before being put into use. The machines however are mini riddles themselves. You will need to draw hints from other cards in order to operate them, this time exclusively inside the app environment. The distinction works well, and adds texture to the game.
The scenarios are well balanced when it comes to theme. I appreciated how the game does not fall into a loop of becoming too serious or a constant save the world exercise, and instead opts for different genres. The Formula is what one would have expected from an escape room: this is practically a CRPG spy mission after all. Squeek & Sausage and The Island of Doctor Goorse however are anything but. The first is comedic in nature, something that is reflected on the nature of its riddles, with mice getting fast in no time and giant beans sprouting left and right. Were it not for the nerve-racking music and the disastrous final riddle (keep on reading) it would have been a perfect adventure. The Island of Doctor Goorse on the other hand offers a lot more. First the players are divided in teams, once they join forces however they'd better start tackling the scenario as cooperatively as they did the two previous ones. The difficulty of the puzzles here is admittedly higher, including ones relating to spacial positioning and audio cues of multiple combos. If you didn't use any hints in the previous two scenarios, and a good group shouldn't have any reason to use any, you will feel obliged to use them here.
When comparing the game to T.I.M.E. Stories, a series also by Space Cowboys, the differences become instantly apparent. The first is about proto-roleplaying and relies on deck exploration. A story will be run multiple times in order to be successfully concluded, something that is part of the mechanics like in the adventure PC games of yore where death or failure were part of the experience. The Unlock! series on the other hand is about solving puzzles without impersonating a character and without any random elements like dice rolling or what have you. This is about your brain power and nothing but that in your one and only effort to solve the riddles in less than the prescribed time. I could also compare it to the same publisher's Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, that is probably however the most different of the three. It is about problem solving, yet with unknown questions, an open end where the players decide when to stop, and continuous note-taking, it feels more like a sandboxy choose-your-own-adventure book. The style of the three games is very different indeed.
I liked the fact that the game supports a widely different number of players. Being able to solo a game is always a plus in my book, if the experience is as close to the game played in a group. Different numbers of players cause different issues. The more the players the more brainpower there is around the table and it makes an immediate, drastic difference to how fast the game progresses. On the other hand, the more the players the higher the chances for a mistake, like a card being omitted when it should have been drawn, players not having the same vantage points when it comes to looking at the cards, or a player feeling partially out of the game when the others are out there brainstorming simply because he holds the deck and he is searching for half a dozen cards that need to be put on the table immediately. Taking my nine-game experience into account experimenting with different formats, I would suggest going with a maximum of four players. Even though I did not playtest any of the Unlock! boxes with more, I simply fail to see how the game can be functional with six players sitting on the same side of a table.
You read that right: the game collapses when players are sited on opposite sides since they cannot possibly read the cards. The game also collapses if you don't have access to a number of flashlights (see: multiple mobile phones with a flashlight function). Frankly, flashlights are the only way to detect patterns or minuscule hidden numbers on those cards, no matter how good the light conditions are in your gaming area. There is simply no way to play without them.
Just because the game can only be played once by a particular group (twice or even more over longer period of time if you tend to forget stuff and you play with different people) does not mean that the game has to be thrown into the recycling bin. On the contrary; unlike games like the Pandemic Legacy series where destroying the game's components is part of the experience, there is absolutely nothing to be destroyed in any game of Unlock! You play it, you enjoy it, you pass it on. The game can be enjoyed as much as the first time by another group.
The game's components are of a high quality. The cards are of the right size, the art fits the genre of each scenario perfectly, and so do the riddles. Expect some whimsical stuff on Squeek & Sausage, and riddles reminiscent of Lost the TV series on The Island of Doctor Goorse. Bring true to theme earns the game points; scenarios shouldn't be simple thematic rehashes of the same riddles.
The weak points: The Unlock! Series, and not just this item, unfortunately suffers from structural issues. The most serious for them is that the players have zero way of confirming that the card they just revealed is indeed the card that the previous card or combination of cards leads to. There are patterns, shades and whatever have you in the cards that might be mistaken for numbers leading to other cards. The cards have continuity, and one can understand more or less whether the card he just got is linked to the previous one through its content. Yet, that is not always fully the case. In reality, every time you flip a card as a solution to a riddle, you must be prepared to skim it visually. With experience, it will be obvious whether that card is indeed the right one, or whether you revealed a card that should not have been revealed in the first place.
Another very serious issue is that the game constantly cheats on itself. The rulebook does not prepare you for the myriad ways that a card might be referenced on its predecessor card or cards. Depending on the story, you will keep on falling upon new mechanics, new ways of referencing, new symbols, new everything. I am not suggesting that all these should have been covered in the rulebook. Had I written the rulebook however, I would have written in bold neon letters on the first page already that a card may lead to more cards through any imaginable way: it might be a number, a letter, a combination of colours, on the front of the card, on the back of the card, anything and anywhere. Instead, one believes that the resolution methods are the ones already described. This might not look like a serious thing until you realize that you can play each scenario only once, at least for a year or two, and under the assumption that your memory does not retain that many details in order to try it again. Playing a scenario which will grind to a standstill simply because you don't understand neither what your are searching for nor how, means that the scenario, the mechanics and the way they are presented needed further elaboration and refinement. Easy example: in The Formula we had found the solution to the planetary/filing riddle quite early. Yet, even though we knew that this was letter [redacted], it didn't even cross our minds to search the deck for that letter. We thought we had to combine this with something else. Hence, we missed the countdown, and ended almost 20 minutes on the red while having solved the riddle. Frankly, that sucks.
The way the timer works is a problem. Penalizing the players for inserting the wrong code is asinine. What the game should have done would have been to not allow the players to insert a new code for the same amount of minutes. At least in such a situation the players could have focused on other riddles, using their time constructively. Here, you allegedly have 60 minutes, yet in reality you do not. Even worse, the adventures do not give the impression that a good group could actually solve all of them in the prescribed amount of time. I playtested all the adventures in this box with hardened roleplayers and problem-solvers; we only managed to solve one adventure out of the three within the 60 minute time frame. If nobody however can finish an adventure in 60', shouldn't the period be longer? Extending the time is obviously better than forcing the players to restart the game, in reality however this is a lose-lose situation. It took almost 20 minutes over time to solve The Formula, yet at the end the grading was almost perfect. We were left wondering why.
Games with apps always cause questions as to the level of support one will be able to find in a couple of years when technology moves on. I am optimistic, I must however be very clear: without the app, the game is totally unplayable. There is no way to bypass this, at least for the time being.
I am extremely dissatisfied by the nature of the hints and the solutions in the app. Sometimes they are not helpful at all, while other times they give everything away. The most dissatisfying of all is when the app provides staggered hints and at the end provides the solution, without however analyzing the full thought process. In some cases we were left deconstructing puzzles way after the game ended, in order to understand why the solution that we were to request (because we were woefully stuck) was the one that was offered. This was catastrophic. The app should have provided the option of fully analyzing how a result is obtained. It might not happen in this box, yet in a couple of cases in the other two boxes I had trouble reverse-engineering the process even though I had both the question and the answer! In fact, I would have also expected the app to offer walkthroughs (after many prompts and confirmations) of every single scenario. Nothing of the sort exists.
The game is rather lacklustre when it comes to eliminating cards that have already served their purpose. Allegedly all cards that have been fully used should be taken out, as per the instructions of the cards that succeed them. Yet, it is extremely common to finish a game with a number of pointless cards on the table, busting your brains trying to find links and permutations where none can be found. Increasing the difficulty in this way is counterintuitive, if not pointless.
Squeek & Sausage would have been an excellent scenario. Many interesting riddles, some linear, some not, many tricky ones (hEhE, and yes, that is a clue right here), and overall a nice story even though it is a bit goofy in nature. Yet, it ended with all of us enraged, even though we finished the scenario well on time. The final riddle in the game eliminates almost all preceding cards, and you are left with just the one. It is not hard to understand what it alludes to, it is a barcode of sorts. You might search frantically in the deck in case you missed a drawing, yet all this will be for naught. The puzzle actually sends you outside of the scenario's deck, to the game's box. That is cheating and lazy game design of the highest magnitude. The game is supposed to be played through the deck only, without any knowledge or use of any extraneous material. What if one just carried the deck to his friends' place without the box because he didn't have place in the back pack? What if you bought the game on discount, with the game's barcode covered or disfigured? What kind of a lame-ass design breaks its rules in such a blatant way? I mean, up to then, the scenario was perfect. This says a lot about the psychology that the whole line overall creates: one lame riddle (and unfortunately there are many of them in these adventures) will seriously harm your enjoyment and sour the mood around the table even the adventure is otherwise well designed.
The Island of Doctor Goorse has an enormous structural problem: only one side can initiate communication with the other. If that side drags, the scenario drags. The sides have no idea how long they should continue without contact, and whether the riddles they are facing are solved autonomously (answer: they mostly do not). Thus, the scenario breeds navel-gazing and suggestions for solutions that get more surreal by the minute, while one side has to absolutely solve certain puzzles and start operating the walkie talkie. From there on, and until the teams are united, the scenario depends on human communication. Both teams hold a riddle that only the other can help them solve. If one of them stalls in that, precious time will be lost. Again, without any alternatives on this, the design comes out as woefully linear. What however again infuriated everybody around the table was how the adventure ended. A riddle is solved, the adventure ends (woefully late and with the use of 3 or 4 hints but let's set that aside), all is good... ...at least until the meticulous playtesters confirm the cards that were not already used in order to see what other failures the game had in hand for them. There it was discovered that the scenario actually had an additional final riddle, one that it did not present to us. Reverse engineering on how the cards should have been obtained, and realizing that there was absolutely no way of obtaining one of the two on offer, we reset the timer and inserted the code of what we initially faced as our final riddle. This time the app instructed us to take the 'missing' card instead of ending the game like it did before. Why? Because now we were 'on time', while before we were not. The words utter shit do not describe accurately the amount of disillusionment that such a revelation creates. People will pay for this game, and they are going to play it once only. The app penalizes them by taking a difficult and engaging riddle out, just because they didn't solve the rest of the puzzles in time? I don't know who designed this, but it is dreadful. Different endings are one thing. Different endings through omission of content are trash.
In other situations I would have cried foul for the plastic insert that does not leave any margin for sleeving the cards. With a game that cane be played only once though and where flashlights are needed to highlight every single card, I doubt that anybody will actually bother to sleeve them.
Conclusion: Unlock! Escape Adventures is a genuinely entertaining game. It has all the adrenaline and sense of accomplishment that one would expect from an escape room with an immersion level that the vast majority of other games would find hard to reach . It however also has a really poor rulebook that under no circumstances prepares the players for what they are up against, not to mention puzzles which cause overall annoyance due to the game cheating against itself. With just a bit of elaboration and tinkering it could have easily transcended to a 5/4.
For more info on Unlock! Escape Adventures visit Space Cowboys at http://www.spacecowboys.fr.
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