Review: Expedition: Challenger

RATING: 2 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: +0:39

Life, uh, finds a way. Even when we can’t.

Story

A young woman knocks at the door of your PI agency. “My name is Gladys Ungerton. My friend, Ned Malone, has gone missing. You probably heard about him: he is one of the members of Prof. Challenger’s expedition! They recently returned from the Lost Valley full of strange creatures. I just received this notebook and this odd message. I don’t understand a word of any of it. Can you please go to the offices of Prof. Challenger? If you are true to your reputation, you will bring Ned back to me!”

Explore a valley full of dinosaurs and save the members of Professor Challenger’s latest expedition!

Expedition: Challenger is a time traveling adventure game, sending explorers back to the age of the dinosaurs. Set in the Lost Valley, this land is plagued by not just larger-than-life prehistoric beasts, but also a seemingly endless war between the Jungle People and the Desert People – two tribes taking up residence on opposite ends of the land.

Finding Ned is the main objective – after all, thats what Gladys hired us to do. But Ned isn’t the only member of Challenger’s original expedition crew missing. Things quickly turns from exploration to rescue mission. To make matters worse, explorers have the added burden of time on their shoulders, and not in a “you have just 60 minutes” trope sort of way; Each missing member of the expedition team is in dire health, and getting worse by the day. With every passing moon, they get closer to their own deaths.

Unlock! does a solid job of bringing the prehistoric world of the dinosaurs back to life, immersing explorers in a world full of unexpected dangers and really big teeth.

Scenic

As we’ve touched on previously, being a home game, we define “Scenic,” from a graphic design perspective, as well as the quality, weight and feel of print materials inside the box.

We mentioned that Space Cowboys goes the route of fully card-based escape home games. Each edition is produced to the highest levels of quality – with thick, glossy textures that have the feel of a upscale deck of playing cards. Unlock!’s decks, however, are larger than a traditional card – measuring in at nearly 4.5″ tall by 2.5″ wide. Expedition: Challenger will have a whole lot of active cards out at the same time – so we recommend your crew prepares for this journey by clearing a large amount of desk space.

Members of Professor Challenger’s expedition also receive a Survival Guide booklet – with pages full of dinosaur facts, pertinent scientific knowledge as well as notes from the personal experiences of some of the missing team. This Survival Guide will become handy multiple times throughout the expedition.

Something we’ve always enjoyed about Space Cowboys is their use of multiple different artists for each Unlock! box set. What results is a distinctly different animation style, evoking unique moods that help bring each storyworld to life. No two decks within a set will ever feel the same, or even slightly similar, for that matter.

Each game’s respective page within the Unlock! app fully compliments the theme of its storyworld, with unique buttons, sound effects enhance the experience. In Expedition: Challenger, Unlock! has spared no expense, completely transforming the app into a custom map-based game board across the Lost Valley.

Puzzles

Expedition: Challenger starts off as a traditional Unlock! game, before radically transforming into something completely different, with consequences that impact the entirety of the experience. Moments into the investigation, the app completely changes, becoming a virtual map-based game board. Explorers must travel through each “block” of territory in sequence – and can only make it so far in a given day before sundown forces them to set up camp for the night.

Each time “night” falls, the action very briefly pauses, as that “round” of play, so to speak, has come to an end. This new mechanic plays heavily in the rescue mission aspect of the game – as each missing member of the expedition crew has various aliments, causing their health bars to drop at individually differing rates each night.

All that has to be completed is finding Ned Malone – with each other member of the team making up a sort of bonus side quest. Traditional card-based objects collected along the expedition often combine to form vital survival gear – and sometimes can spell the difference between life or death for the rescued crew.

The Lost Valley is teaming with prehistoric life – and not all of it is friendly. At times, gameplay stops unexpectedly to fend off a hungry intruder – with the aid of your trusty survival guide, of course – adding to the immersion of Expedition: Challenger’s storyworld.

Some cards carry a new anchor icon, effectively locking them to a specific location on the app’s game map. As such, these cards can only be used or solved when explorers are physically on that square of the map, which can become challenging as the health of some members of the team begins to steeply drop.

Other puzzles, though, are far less intuitive – from a convoluted trek through the jungle to tribal drums that we wanted to beat with our own heads. Other steps require straight-up prior knowledge, like the boiling point of liquids in Celsius, etc. Sure – you may happen to know that information – but if you do not, there’s simply no way to proceed because it is not present to be referenced anywhere in the game. Another moment should have been a really neat tech-based wow moment – and though we quickly recognized what was expected of us, we simply couldn’t make it work; perhaps this was a weird problem with our iPad, or perhaps it’s something in the app – but whatever the cause, we had to press the solution button each time.

Each Unlock! game is run through a free app, available in the Apple iTunes and Google Play stores. Through it, you’ll not only manage time limits and receive hints, but also enter various codes and even solve some of the puzzles in tech-driven, digital setting. As an added bonus, the Unlock! app also includes themed background music that helps bring the storyworld of each game to life, sometimes even triggering sound effects to further enhance specific puzzles.

The app allows games to be played either with or without penalties for incorrect answers. We prefer playing without penalties, as we feel it more truly mimics a physical escape game experience where you may try a code in a lock when you’re uncertain. Although the penalty free mode is activated (in the app’s Settings) by turning off the timer, rest assured you will still receive your escape time at the end. In fact, turning off the timer is the only way to receive an accurate escape time, as penalties add multiple minutes to your overall duration.

All things combined, it’s difficult to not feel as though Expedition: Challenger tries to be too many different things at the same time, muddling its puzzle flow and making what should be a solid, clever game much more confusing than it needs to be. It quickly starts to feel like a puzzle with way too many pieces to juggle, making it difficult to focus on the parts that matter, and in turn, making all aspects far more confusing than they need to be.

Overall

Expedition: Challenger is the hard difficulty game released as apart of Unlock! Exotic Adventures – Space Cowboy’s fourth commercial outing. This series may be purchased either individually or as a complete set, packing not one but three different full length home games inside the box. Interestingly, at the time we ordered ours, we’ve found it’s almost always proven cheaper to purchase each single game one by one on Amazon. We advise you to price your options to find the most cost effective way to add Unlock! games to your own collection. It would appear as though Unlock! has since moved away from the individual games with newer releases, instead making them only available as single-boxed three packs.

As with each Unlock! offering, a playable Tutorial is included. It should be noted that the Tutorial is the same in every Unlock! series, so once you’ve played it, there’s not much benefit in revisiting it.

Space Cowboys also has a series of free, downloadable games – called Unlock! Demo Adventures – available through their website, which you can find by clicking here. They range in length, although several are full 60 minute games. To play them, it’s best if you have access to a printer and several sheets of cardstock, as well as a scissors to cut out each individual card. Just for fun, we did try playing one game “fully digital,” with the help of Photoshop to lay out each of the cards on our virtual desktop – and while it did work, and we still were able to enjoy the Unlock! experience, we found this to be far more time consuming than just taking a few minutes and a few sheets of paper to print them out as intended.

Expedition: Challenger is one of those examples of the Unlock! brand trying so hard to do something unique that it simply loses its way. On paper, there’s a lot of really clever, genuinely ground-breaking ideas at play in this home game – but in execution, there’s just so many moving parts that few of them ever come together in a sensible way. Part home escape game, part video game – Expedition: Challenger never truly manages to realize its full potential. Unlock! may have spared no expense, but in the process they became too ambitious for their own good here, producing a game fit for extinction.