A decent addition to the series

Table of Contents

Location: Home

Date Played: July 2024

Team size: 4; recommended 1 - 6 players

Duration: 1 hour / game; total 3 hours

Price: ~S$61 on Amazon

Premise

Unlock! Extraordinary Adventures includes three separate scenarios for you to explore:
  • Restart
  • Hollywood Confidential
  • W.A.F.F.'s Odyssey

Components

Similar to other games in the series, it consists of:

  1. 3 decks of cards
  2. Tutorial cards
  3. Rulebook
  4. Solutions

On top of that, there's 2 additional components for Hollywood Confidential and W.A.F.F.'s Odyssey. The components are perfect for what it sets out to achieve, an enjoyable, light escape room game.

Gameplay

The game starts with a single card. Throughout the game, you will need to solve puzzles to unlock new cards and subsequently, new puzzles.

Unlock! throws a variety of puzzles at you. Some will have you combining cards to make a new number (2+4=6, reveal card number 6), while others will have you inputting codes into the app, which will tell you if you are correct (new cards) or wrong (time penalty). To further draw from the physical escape room experience, card numbers will also be hidden on some cards in a “where’s waldo” type of mechanic. If you find one of these, you can reveal the same numbered card from the deck.

Should you get stuck, the app offered hints, in addition to being the game’s timer. Usually, you will need to input a final code into the app to “escape the room”. Doing so, will give you your final score based on time and hints used.

Puzzles/Thoughts

➕ Enjoyable puzzles. The puzzles felt quite thinky and relatively fair but there weren't any that was too mindblowing.

➕ Likeable themes. I really enjoyed the first game of being in a video game. I was quite apathetic to the other two however.

➖Confusing mechanics in game 2. Hollywood Confidential introduced a phonebook mechanic which confused us, we had to view the hints/solutions to figure out what it wanted from us.

➖Unfun puzzle. There was 1 puzzle in game 3 that we felt was a bore and was reused a couple of times in the game itself. It dimnished our enjoyment of that game by quite a bit.

Verdict

Unlock!: Extraordinary Adventures is a decent addition to the series. While it's not in my top 5 Unlocks, it's still a solid game and an easy recommend for me.

Rating: 4/5

★★★★✩

You can buy their game here