Review: The Island of Doctor Goorse

RATING: 1 Key RESULT: Win REMAINING: +3:12

Stranded on an island and forced to work together with a teammates I’m not allowed to talk to, following rules that apparently don’t actually exist. How’s that for a twist?

Story

The day had started off well. After weeks of hesitation, you finally accepted the invitation of Archibald Goorse, the eccentric billionaire, archaeological rarities collector. You’d been flown to his private island, located a few miles from the Bahamas, in an old twin-engine. Unfortunately, the aircraft had been caught in a storm and you only just had time to bail out with a parachute before seeing the plane crash land in the middle of the jungle. After losing consciousness, you wake up on a windswept beach. Fortunately, despite some bruises, you have nothing broken. Instead, your group is now split in two teams.

How are you going to join forces to successfully leave this cursed island? Visit the island of an eccentric antique collector billionaire and overcome its traps!

The Island of Doctor Goorse is a most unique place – and not just because of it’s mismatched landscapes of arid deserts dotted with Egyptian pyramids and luck gardens home to Greek temples. No, this game is unique for a very different reason; and it’s not a good one.

Across countless games, one constant of the Unlock! brand is their compelling, immersive, narrative-driven nature. Each game tells a story through its locations and puzzles, establishing characters, a clear conflict and organic objective. That is, until that plane crashed on a hodgepodge island.

With a set-up that piques the imagination, and countless questions swirling around the mysterious titular character, we learn… absolutely nothing. There’s never mention of just who Arcibald Goorse is. Nothing of his background is ever discovered. We never learn why we’ve been invited to the island, or why the island exists in the first place. It’s impossible to become immersed into a storyworld which puts so little effort into us as its audience.

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.

Unique to The Island of Doctor Gorse, this game actually has two independent decks of cards – one marked with a green symbol and the other yellow. This will play heavily into the game’s most marketable mechanic, which we’ll discuss in a moment.

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.

Puzzles

The Island of Doctor Goorse is the only truly split-start home game we’ve encountered – and to a great degree, it follows the flow of those brick and mortar rooms which offer a similar mechanic. Unfortunately, it also befalls many of the same pitfalls.

After the plane crash, visitors are stranded on two completely separate parts of the island. At first, they have no means of communication between them – until one team establishes how to tune a walk talkie (card) to the proper frequency, thanks to a code that is logic leap-y at best. This sets the stage for the ‘hurry up and wait’ flow that befalls many split-start physical games, and absolutely plagues this at home version. When new areas are discovered by one team, the cards drawn are only from their side. Yes, there are times where both teams will share content – but a much better flow could have seen each side drawing simultaneously.

Like brick and mortar home games, The Island of Doctor Goorse is fully dependent on equal skill distributions between the yellow and green teams. If one side is made up of more experienced players, the novice group is almost certainly going to hinder their flow multiple times throughout the game, leading up to the point where the two groups finally merge.

Even prior to merging, teams will share the digital portion of this game. Each Unlock! title 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.

Among the oddities to be found in The Island of Doctor Goorse are a handful of illogical puzzle connections – but those are almost too insignificant to talk about given the much bigger problem with this game: it willfully breaks Unlock!’s own puzzle rules multiple times. And we me multiple times. There are several types of cards in a given deck – marked with symbols and colors. Green cards are “machines” – which lead to a digital puzzle within the app. Yellow cards require a four digit numerical code be entered. Grey cards share information. Red cards and blue cards, marked with puzzle pieces, connect together to lead to a new combined card. Think of it as filling a cup with water before you drink it — on their own, either part doesn’t particularly serve the greater good.

These are well-established rules by Space Cowboys that apply across the entirety of the Unlock! brand of games – yet, in The Island of Doctor Goorse, there are multiple times where red cards combine with grey, or red or blue cards may be used individually without pairing with anything at all. Why do we even have rules?

Overall

The Island of Doctor Goorse is the hard difficulty game released as apart of Unlock! Escape Adventures – Space Cowboy’s first 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.

The problem with this game isn’t so much that it’s illogical, but that it seems intentionally defiant against following the brand’s own established rules – and in doing so, it becomes illogical, for entirely new reasons. While we appreciate the attempt at doing something different by creating a true split-start at home game, the inconsistencies of mechanics found here make The Island of Doctor Goorse anything but a happy vacation.