Unlock! Heroic Adventures published by Space Cowboys
We've played other Unlock! games (the Star Wars set and Night of the Boogeyman and a bunch of others) and have had mixed experiences. The Heroic Adventures set is highly rated so we decided to give it a go.
Unlock! games are escape room-type games that use a custom deck of cards and an app to solve a bunch of puzzles in an hour. The puzzles are thematically tied together to roughly follow a narrative (like an escape room). The app provides a timer, clues, some interactions (entering codes or solving puzzles on the app), and thematic music.
The first adventure is Insert Coin. The players are a kid whose cell phone has run low on power and decides to play Grandpa's old arcade game in the attic. The game absorbs the kid and we had to play through several levels of video games that were clearly based on classics like Donkey Kong and Tetris. The game uses the app for some Augmented Reality challenges where cards have additional information on them when viewed through the camera on the apps device (we must have given the app permission to use the camera a while ago). The ending was especially fun and funny. We finished in time (just barely) and had one or two dings against us for using hints and bad guesses on puzzles. Still, we scored four stars, so not bad at all.
The second adventure is Sherlock Holmes - The Scarlet Thread of Murder. Players are assisting Holmes as he investigates a murder. Some of the cards were resources in the app, letting us look up information the way Holmes used reference books. Then we had to sift through evidence, identify some suspects, and solve some puzzles. A few puzzles were more than cryptic to us, including the last puzzle, unfortunately. We ran over time as well but still managed to score three stars. Not the most fun experience in spite of some clever use of the app.
The final game was In Pursuit of the White Rabbit, based on Alice in Wonderland. The puzzles share the whimsical and occasionally non-sensical narrative of Lewis Carroll's book. Players help the author find an ending for the crazy story he is crafting. We were a little intimidated by the timer starting at ninety minutes but the extra time was extra-entertaining, not extra-excruciating. We had fun solving the puzzles with some great "aha!" moments. We did take a few hints and the final puzzle was a little tricky to solve mechanically. Being familiar with classic story helps. This was much more enjoyable than the Sherlock Holmes mystery.
Overall, we had a good experience with this set on Unlock! games.
We also got a used copy of Scheherazade's Last Tale, one of the adventures in the Exotic Adventures set (they used to sell all the adventures individually). Scheherazade is the heroine of 1001 Nights, a source for Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, among other tales. Players help Scheherazade as she gets down to the last tale and wants to escape the Vizier because she is really in love with the Sultan. Puzzles include working with a magic carpet to travel around the city and rubbing the magic lamp to get the Genie's help. Some moments were cryptic, but only a few. Some puzzles show up early but take a while to get solved which was a bit frustrating. The final puzzle wound up being a brute force solution for us because there were no good hints about the answer in the materials. Twenty-two minutes of penalties! I'm surprised we still scored three stars.
Recommended for escape-room-at-home fans.
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