Review Summary: Unlock! improved its main mechanics? Standing ovation!

Blurb from the publisher: 'Three breathtaking adventures in a cooperative game inspired by escape rooms!

Real life escape rooms challenge you to literally escape a room within 60 minutes. With Unlock! experience the thrills of escape rooms without setting a foot outside.

Search the scenes! Combine objects! Solve puzzles!

The Noside Show: The Diosen Circus is coming to town but Professor Noside has prepared a great sabotage act. Stop him. The show must go on!

Arsène Lupin and the Great White Diamond: Experience a jewel race in the early 20th century Paris and take up the challenge of Arsène Lupin.

Lost in the TimeWarp!: Professor Alcibiades Tempus' time machine works erratically. You must return the timeline to normal.'

What you get: Your EUR 29 or equivalent will buy you Unlock! Timeless Adventures, the sixth 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. All the scenarios in the box accommodate from one to six players in an hour per scenario. The first scenario is advertised as easy, the second as of moderate difficulty, while the third as 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 3 leaflets. 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 in case this is the first product you buy and you had no previous exposure to the series.

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 will 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 amount of 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. Players may 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 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.

The first scenario features the line's perennial villain, the cartoonish Professor Noside. His exploits this time are centered around a circus, with the players watching the show and looking around in-between the acts. Arsène Lupin and the Great White Diamond is an era-themed adventure based on the eponymous character of Maurice Leblanc. The players need to trail two different thieves as they make their way across Paris: one that steals trinkets and another one who has stolen an enormous diamond. Lost in the TimeWarp is a time travel adventure with a very interesting premise. The players inadvertently start World War III because of catching a butterfly. Now they have to undo all the damage that they caused.

The strong points: I actually didn't expect this to happen, yet the designers of Unlock! have listened. There are many improvements in relation to the game's previous boxes when it comes to the rules and the mechanics of the game. The most important one is that codes are abolished; no card produces a code to be inserted in the app outside of a machine. The only things that work on the app are the machines, irrespective of whether they provide a puzzle, or a site, or a tune, or a map of places that one can virtually visit. This solves a lot of problems and takes away a lot of the frustration that the previous games created through relentlessly penalizing the players for interpreting the clues in a non-envisaged way. It was so hard-wired in our brains that we should try to avoid the app lest we get penalized, that we didn't interact with it even when we actually needed to without the fear of seeing our timer spiral down. If there is a lesson to be learned from the three adventures in this box, that would be not to be afraid to interact with stuff that appear exclusively on the app.

The second improvement relates to the pointless use of designs that could potentially be interpreted like numbers, leading players to reveal totally irrelevant cards. In previous boxes this was a standard issue that were encountered an average of 2 to 5 times per scenario. In this box it was only encountered twice or thrice in all three scenarios added together. Again, finally! The puzzles should be challenging, hard even, yet making a grind out of a game simply isn't fun. I am really looking forward to see the present practice repeated in future Unlock! games.

The game has also improved its clean-up issues, especially in The Noside Show. As soon as a cards useful life was over, the next card prompted you to retire it. That was no necessarily the case with Arsène Lupin and the Great White Diamond where the players get to visit more than half a dozen places whose central cards remain open throughout, even that scenario however instructs, near its end, to burn all the cards bar one. Finally. Finally!

The game engine remains robust and has numerous surprises up its sleeve, 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, and 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. In this box the most entertaining puzzles related to music and where notes were placed on the bar, checking the backs of cards after some conspicuous prompts, some letter-related puzzles and a few social subconscious thought-processes. How do you show to someone that you love them when you have a switch blade and a tree at your disposal? You carve your names on the trunk, of course.

When it comes to each scenario separately, The Noside Show was by far the most enjoyable even thought it was a failure time-wise. It is advertised as the easiest scenario of the three, I would however qualify it as the second easiest. Its enjoyment didn't stem exclusively from how neatly and entertainingly the theme was presented, but also from some very clever puzzles, an ingenious usage of numbers covering other numbers in cards that had to be superimposed upon one another, as well as the 'circus programme' where the cards that one added would provide the solution for one of the final riddles. There wasn't a single puzzle which felt convoluted or far-fetched. The timer was used in an extremely clever way. Depending on the machines you would try to solve, the game would know approximately how far you had progressed, and would alter some of its replies when visiting particular locations inside the app. The music was a staple, the one used through all Noside adventures. So was the art, this however increased the scenario's familiar feeling and cuteness. It really felt like going through the different acts through a circus programme. I also credit the scenario for distancing itself from the hidden numbers schtick which has been repeated an unhealthy amount of times in other adventures. There are many other ways that allow progress, and the game suddenly feels a lot more confident about exploring them. As an example, do you know how to build a circus tent, and what do you see from above, when it's finished?

Arsène Lupin and the Great White Diamond was a standard chase, yet when it comes to the aesthetics it was unparalleled. The imagery is very reminiscent of Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, with all the right colors, contours and shades. The music and the background soundtrack are sublime, one of the best in the series. The adventure felt substantially easier than the first, being both more linear as well as solvable with brute force without being afraid of losing due to wasted time. I still don't know the logic behind a couple of the riddles, one of them being how to find the identity of the perpetrator of the petty thefts; we Gordian knotted the mystery, and that was it. The manhole puzzle deserves a special mention since it is both hard and rather obvious at the same time; this is how one-shot puzzles should be. The Arsène Lupin tag was a nice thematic treat for those who had already played the Sherlock Holmes adventure from the previous box, even though the plot doesn't actually touch the core story of the gentleman thief.

Lost in the TimeWarp! is a demanding adventure at times. It starts by using the butterfly effect literally; that should bring a few smiles around the table. Depending on where you are and what you are doing, it might be painfully linear with only on card per puzzle or extremely broad, with more than half a dozen items and locations at your disposal. It requires concentration since at times you might not be very certain of the era you are at and whom you are actually meeting. We were perplexed about what 'current year' would be, until we realized that the app takes the feeds directly from your mobile's clock; current year is the year you play the game at. A-ha! Some of the riddle were far-fetched like the one with the books and the safe, most however were solid and well-developed. I have a feeling that some of them were addressed to Unlock! veterans who have thoroughly understood the exception-based logic that the game uses when it comes to card revelation. I can't however hold that against the adventure.

Before each game Unlock!'s decks are presented with 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, he is unlikely to remember where in the deck a card is. .

Just like every game in the series, Timeless 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 eighteen-game experience into account, I would suggest going with a maximum of four players. Even though I have not playtested any of the Unlock! boxes with more than four players, 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 (or multiple mobile phones with a flashlight function). They are the only way to detect patterns or minuscule hidden numbers on those cards, hidden discolourations or secret patterns, 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 periods 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, in Unlock! the worst thing you might need to do to an item would be to fold it in a way that does not destroy it. The game has a resale value, and can be enjoyed a high number of times.

The game's components are of a high quality, consistent with the series' previous products. There is nothing more to say here.

The weak points: It is imperative that you allow the app to access your device's functions like its camera, microphone and accelerometer. Only the accelerometer is needed for one of the adventures in this box, yet other adventures in previous boxes utilize other functions. Without those the app will not work for quite a number of puzzles, thus ruining your enjoyment. I find it incredible that the app does not warn you that it will not work if you do not give it full access, and even more so, that it does not do so before each adventure that uses the app's enhanced features. That's something that Unlock!'s designers should fix.

The structural issues of Unlock! have been seriously toned down, even though they might rear their ugly head once every now and then. The players still have no way of confirming that the card they just revealed is indeed the card that the previous card or combination of cards leads to, this however is an issue only when the previous cards contain obviously false leads. This only happened a couple of times in this box, so kudos for that. Be on your toes and put back any card that you just revealed and which looks blatantly irrelevant to what you were actually doing.

Unlock! continues to cheat. 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. 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.

Even though there are still instances of the players being penalized for choosing the 'wrong' course of action, I am not going to outright complain about the logic behind the timer being problematic. Compared to adventures in previous boxes, relatively few courses of action cause the timer to drop in any of these three adventures. There has been significant improvement already. I wish the designers can find a more elaborate way of making failure hurt.

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. 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.

When it comes to the weak points of each particular adventure, Arsène Lupin has this puzzle where one player should look at an image and describe how a suspect looks like in order for the other players to recognize him through the app. You can't do that when you play solo, yet the game miraculously claims that it can be played from one to six players. To make a long story short, if you are playing solo you simply hold the image and compare it with the images in the app. It's clearly not a biggie, yet it should have been clearly noted.

The same adventure had an overall 'meh' feeling. The game has done chases before, and its linear approach at the beginning didn't feel particularly inviting. I wouldn't call this a bad adventure, yet it didn't hold me as much as I would have wanted it to.

Lost in the TimeWarp! contained a couple of pointless lead which led to the revelation of a totally irrelevant card or two. I wish this weren't the case. A few of its puzzles could have been better phrased; the one with the fuel for the time-travelling machine was almost misleading and caused a bit of annoyance, since it blocked all progress for almost 20 minutes. That's a lot for any puzzle, and even more so for a suboptimally structured one.

Scrap paper and a pen proved useful once again. You might need them for the music puzzle in the third adventure, as well as for a couple of other puzzles. They are not indispensable, yet they help.

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: I enjoyed the new scenarios of Unlock! Timeless Adventures and the obvious improvement that it brought on the line's mechanics and guiding principles. If I could I would have given it a 4 / 3,5. Less numbers to insert in the app, less searching with flashlights, less stupidly false leads, more thoughtful puzzles, nicely created scenes and theme. If you haven't yet played an Unlock! game, the present one or Heroic Adventures are probably the two best.

For more info on Unlock! Timeless Adventures visit Space Cowboys at http://www.spacecowboys.fr.

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