Search
Review of Unlock! Exotic Adventures
Blurb from the publisher: 'Three frantic 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 Night of the Boogeymen: The Boogeymen have invaded William's dreams! Unite your forces to chase them and soothe the little boy.
Scheherazade's Last Tale: The ultimate tale of the Arabian Nights. The sultan is going to sentence Scheherazade to death. Fly to her rescue!
Expedition: Challenger: Explore a valley full of dinosaurs and save the members of Professor Challenger's latest expedition!'
What you get: Your EUR 29 or equivalent will buy you Unlock! Exotic Adventures, the fourth 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. The present box can accommodate from one to six players in an hour per scenario. The first scenario is easy, the second of moderate difficulty, while the third 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, three adventures with a total of 180 cards, and one sheet of paper. 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. At its current iteration it supports eighteen languages.
Seeing how we have already reviewed all the previously released Unlock! products, you will notice similarities between this review and the previous ones. That is the price to pay for keeping each of them autonomous, without needing to read all of them to buy just one independent product.
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 the prescribed time.
Using up the time does not lead to the game being aborted; it simply reduces the players' grading at the end of the game. Effectively players can take days to finish a scenario if they so wish. The timer, a part of the app, can be paused if you wish to interrupt your game. The players' grading is not recorded anywhere, it is only indicated 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.
The first scenario is a about destroying monstrous creatures which do not allow a child to sleep, and which will, upon revelation, impose real-life restrictions to the players. Scheherazade's Last Tale falls squarely in the genre of Arabian tales, with players travelling to different locations with a magical carpet in order to find all the elements necessary to save the princess. Expedition: Challenger is a map exploration adventure through the help of a guide, with the app playing a much more prominent role in the card revelation.
The strong points: A bit of the same yet different enough to be entertaining is the motto that Unlock! has been systematically following up to now. The dexterity feats required in previous adventures are only partially repeated here in Scheherazade's Tale, where one card will be thrown in the air with the players trying to catch it before it hits the ground, as well as the paper-handling skills in The Night of the Boogeymen where you will have to fold a single sheet in order to create a monster's mouth. What is more novel however are the restrictions The Night of the Boogeymen imposes: don't have more than four cards up at any time, keep your good hand behind your back, don't talk amongst yourselves! These can make for quite an intense experience, if the players do not manage to eliminate at least one of the monsters fast enough. I actively caught myself keeping my hand on my back numerous times after the relevant monster was defeated, simply because it stayed on the table for a long time. That's the kind of conditioning that good design can cause! The innovation of Expedition: Challenger on the other hand lies in the map. When exploring it, the app instructs the players to pick this card or the other, something that leads to numerous autonomous beginnings of puzzles and side-quests. Furthermore, since the app knows where you are on the map, it will allow you to temper with machines which are located in your area. Clever.
I have written time and again that the game engine is robust, even though the rulebook fails miserably when it comes to preparing the players for 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 puzzles might be solved by one card, others by a combination 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.
Unlock!'s deck before the game has the cards in a seemingly random, static order. Thus, players will have to search the deck every time they need to unveil a new card. Unless one has a photographic memory, remembering where a card is on a seemingly randomized deck is not obvious.
Once again, all codes are four digit codes and all of them are unique. 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 might be mini riddles or they might simply require your interaction. Sometimes touching one is the only thing you need to do in order to activate it and receive a hint. Other times a more forceful approach might be needed, like frantically wiping your screen, or even blowing air on your device's mic.
The scenarios are very different. The difficulty indicators are rather fair; we all felt that this was one of the easiest boxes so far, this however might be the case because we are used to the game's logic by now. Expedition: Challenger and its map exploration is probably the most memorable adventure. It requires more dedication than any other Unlock! adventure since at least one player must be able to sort out information out of the guide really fast. The more one aimlessly wanders through the map the more likely it is some of the mission's member might die, so moves must be fairly targeted. I enjoyed how at time the story branched out only to remerge only two to three card revelations later,. Some of its puzzles were really clever (like the chalk colour and shape combination), on the other hand however that was also the case in Scheherazade's tale. In that scenario there are at least three situations were one needs to persist, be it through using the app or via deck exploration. There is a clever little puzzle where you need to sort out how to insist, and what card to pick next, as well as an arithmetic exercise where knowing in what order mathematical operations are executed is crucial to solving it. The Night of the Boogeymen on the other hand is a nice introductory challenge, even though the story is not phenomenal. Many of the puzzles depend on the acute observation of William's toys (clever thing, that), with the culmination coming with the last, hard puzzle.
In case you are interested in different story exploration games but you don't know where to invest, here is a fast recap. T.I.M.E. Stories, a series also by Space Cowboys, 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 was 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 these three games is very different indeed.
Just like every game in the series, Exotic Adventures supports a widely different number of players. Being able to solo a game is always a plus in my book. Different numbers of players cause different issues. The more the players the more brainpower around the table. That 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 twelve-game experience into account, I would suggest going with a maximum of four players. In the playtest of this particular item we were three altogether; keep on reading about the issues that this caused. In any event, even though I have not playtested any of the Unlock! boxes with more players than four, I 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 seated on opposite sides since they cannot possibly read the cards. Make also sure that you have access to flashlights (see: multiple mobile phones with a flashlight function). They 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. I don't see how one can 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, consistent with the series' previous publications. That was kind of expected to be honest.
The weak points: I have discussed in the past how the Unlock! series suffers from structural issues. The most serious is that the players have no way to confirm that the card they just revealed is indeed the card that the previous card or combination of cards leads to. The revealed cards might hold patterns, shades and whatever have you which might be mistaken for numbers leading to other, yet unrevealed 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. Having said that, this is the first product in the series where I felt the publisher tried hard to eliminate this occurrence. It only happened once in three adventures, something that was not the case in the series' previous games.
When you play Unlock! you have to accept that the game cheats. The rulebook does not prepare you for the myriads of 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 you are searching for nor how, means that the scenario, the mechanics and the way they are presented needed further elaboration and refinement. In this particular box the issue manifested itself through poorly phrased questions in the cards ('which [monkey] do you want to give chase to?'), implying that your can only chase one, while you should definitely chase all of them to receive all the clues. There were also numerous other instances of pointlessly prompting the players to get a card which is a time-penalizing dead end. This might work well if it is well-integrated into the story, in the vast majority of cases however it is not. In any event, be forewarned: when you are asked to do something, always try everything possible.
The way the timer works is rather problematic. 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. If nobody however can finish an adventure in 60', shouldn't the period be longer in the first place? Extending the time is obviously better than forcing the players to restart the game, in reality however this is a lose-lose situation. Expect a lot of two stars out of five, the lowest grading the app gives to groups as far as I have experienced no matter how pitifully they perform.
In a twist that hadn't been previously encountered, the app will not even show you the time during Expedition: Challenger after you teleport yourself to the island that is to be explored. This isn't just about evaluating your progress; your penalties for wrong use and wasteful use of machines will only become visible at the game's end. Who thought of this, honestly?
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 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. Things didn't go so poorly like they did in previous boxes (where we were left deconstructing puzzles way after the game ended, in order to understand why the solution that we were to request was the one that was offered), yet things should have been tackled differently from the get-go. The app should have provided the option of fully analyzing how a result is obtained. I would have also wished for the app to offer walkthroughs (after prompts and confirmations) of every single scenario. Nothing of the sort exists.
The series is lackluster 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, and may lead to other mistakes, like discarding cards which were not supposed to leave the table just yet. Scheherazade's Last Tale and Expedition: Challenger finish with more than twelve cards open on the table when you solve the last riddle. This might be relatively normal for the last adventure seeing how it is about exploring the land which keeps being there even after you interact with it, it shouldn't however been the case for the second one.
I don't see how The Night of the Boogeymen can be played solo. With three players on the table the restrictions were fun and we were all collectively following them. If a solo player however had to a) use his non-writing hand only, while b) keeping only four cards on the table face up, time would fly without really achieving anything. Pay also attention to when the Horrors appear, seeing how they need to be resolved as soon as they come out. At some point a bunch of cards came out, and a player suggested to immediately combine some of them in a particular way. This immediately killed the Horror that we haven't realized had appeared on the board because we hadn't thoroughly looked at all the newly revealed cards yet. It wasn't a big deal and we would have been penalized with silence for around 20 seconds. It is however bizarre, and a conceptual design fault, to solve a puzzle whose existence you were not yet aware of.
The plot in Scheherazade's Last Tale is initially rather trite (use a magic carpet, save the princess), near the end however it becomes vomit-worthy. The Sultan has locked the princess in, and will kill her if she doesn't tell him an entertaining tale. Four fifths in the adventure she is in love with him; insert facepalm here. Solve the adventure correctly, and you will get the final card where 'they lived happily ever after and had many children', replete with the sultan unceremoniously lying flat on a bed smoking a shisha with his legs high up while the woman sits next to him. Seriously? Arabian (or other elder) tales are impossibly sexist for today's standards, and that's why they usually get a facelift. How out of tune is a company creates a new story about a character heavily struck by Stockholm-syndrome at the time of #MeToo? I am at loss for words here.
One of the machines in Expedition: Challenger requires the players to do something with the mic of the device where they have the app installed. We figured that much out, and started trying out things. None of them worked, not because they were wrong, but because the mic did not operate well with the app. I applaud the concept, but when one creates puzzles which rely on the technical aspects of the device the players use, he needs to ensure that technically speaking things will work. There was also one puzzle which we solved by brute force without ever finding out what needed to be done. That left a weird taste in the mouth.
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 can 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: Either I am getting heavily accustomed to the Unlock! series or the current Exotic Adventures is a click better than its predecessors. Scenarios will cater to different tastes, the difficulty is not unsurmountable and eases new players into the game, while the adventures will provide quite the sense of accomplishment even when fighting cartoonish boogeymen. The end of Scheherazade's Last Tale though is abysmally discordant to both the spirit of the game, as well as how much human society has progressed since substantially darker times. Don't say I didn't warn you.
For more info on Unlock! Exotic Adventures visit Space Cowboys at http://www.spacecowboys.fr.
Shameless plug: for more gaming news and content (including, for example, pictures of Unlock! Exotic Adventures that I am unfortunately not able to upload on RPG.net for the time being), and to better keep track of my reviews, subscribe to my Antonios S facebook and twitter page.
