Review: The House on the Hill

RATING: 2 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 18:24

Some teenagers opened The Book of the Dead, and now one of our favorite home game brands is suffering its curse.

Story

For the past three days, paranormal activities have increased: apparitions, flying objects, possessed children… After investigation, it has been uncovered that a group of youngsters who came to have fun in the abandoned house on top of the hill read an excerpt from The Book of the Dead, thus unleashing these phenomena. The mayor relies on your group of experts to get into this house, find the book and put a stop to it!

What is going on in this run-down manor? Explore its sinister rooms and thwart the curse which haunts this isolated place.

Our paranormal investigation begins inside The House on the Hill, where, despite mention of the “youngsters” who unleashed this unbridled evil, we never try to look for them, nor do we ever find out what happened with them. So basically, haunted house with cursed stuff happening is our narrative.

This is a bit surprising, because Unlock! is genuinely known for their flowing narrative, each one unfolding and making the gameplay experience all the more enjoyable and immersive. Here, though, we find ourselves with little storyworld flow. Spooky settings and the notion of evil, with essentially no interaction with actual ghosts, haunting, or curses. Well, in less you could the finale puzzle, which we can only explain with curse words – but more on that later.

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 an 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.

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, and triggered background music scores, changing from scene to scene to transport the adventure off the cards and bring it to life all around players.

Puzzles

Progressing through an Unlock! game will lead players to either a number or letter – and if correct, this will indicate the next card(s) to draw from the deck. The House on the Hill starts off strong, with logical steps that evoke the sense of searching an abandoned house. Finding clever ways past locks and means of fixing necessary items helps to instantly transport paranormal investigators into its storyworld.

Early on, some satisfying misdirects give a sense of “you didn’t really think it would be that easy, did you?” – resulting in almost brick and mortar style “ah ha!” moments. In truth, for a decent duration of the game, we sensed The House on the Hill was destined for a rather high Key Rating.

But then it broke its own rules. In each Unlock! game – there are a variety of different kinds of puzzle cards. Some lead towards codes or digital based tasks to achieve in the app. Others – blue and red ones – if a correct pair – add together their total numbers to lead to the next card that should be drawn. Except in The House on the Hill. Here, there are red and blue clearly marked puzzle piece cards that should, in effect, be grey cards used to decipher information – because at the end of the day, investigators will NOT combine their values in the proper way. Ironically enough, the card pictured in the official Unlock! stock image to the left is specifically one of the issues we’re referring to.

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 a tech-driven, digital setting.

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.

For those who are brave enough to reach the end of this paranormal investigation, The House on the Hill has one more unexpected twist. No, it’s not super-natural. It’s a moment verging on a huge leap in logic that left us howling at the moon.

Overall

The House on the Hill is the easy difficulty game released as apart of Unlock! Mystery Adventures – Space Cowboy’s second 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.

As is often the case with any escape game, players are more likely to remember how it ends better than everything that happens before it. Just like any great movie – it’s important to end stronger than you begin – sending the audience out buzzing. Unfortunately in the case of The House on the Hill, it actually starts strong and holds steady for a chunk of the game, before ultimately flying off the rails. Had there been one or two logic leaps, we could happily overlook that – but it’s difficult to turn a blind eye to the game effectively breaking the consistent rule set of mechanics for the entire Unlock! brand. That’s the equivalent of a brick and mortar escape game explicitly telling players to never use force, only to have one puzzle that requires shattering a ceramic vase to get the key sealed inside it.

Something bad happened inside The House on the Hill. But because of The House on the Hill, something worse happened inside an Unlock! package. Thankfully, the easiest way to exercise this demon is to remember this game is the outlier, with much of the rest of the Unlock! Adventure games remaining pure of heart.