Review: Squeek & Sausage

RATING: 4 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 7:20

A clown-like mad scientist is poised for world domination, and the only thing that can stop him is an overweight mouse and a possibly expired sausage. Let’s discuss.

Story

Blasted Professor Noside! Once again, your old enemy has stirred up an evil plan, but you have courageously slipped into his headquarters to prevent it. While you wander the corridors of this old shack, a trap door opens beneath your feet and you fall into a dark and damp dungeon. Your screams will not help you; you’re prisoners of the Professor. The world is lost forever… unless you get out of here and sabotage the plans of Noside. You are our last hope.

Thwart the plans of the despicable Professor Noside in this cartoon-style adventure!

Squeek & Sausage is a delightfully absurd adventure through a cartoon world full of bizarre twists and inane turns. Marking the first appearance of the bumbling Professor Noside, this character will become a recurring villain throughout the Unlock! series of games.

Every step along the way throughout this deck furthers the narrative, oftentimes in some unexpected ways, creating for a rather memorable experience. Saving the world may not be easy, but it sure is funny!

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.

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 background music scores 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.

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.

Throughout its course, Squeek & Sausage is a logical flow of puzzles that often require good guys to utilize real-world problem solving techniques. While some steps provide straight-forward codes, others require would-be heroes to combine items in such a way in a last ditch effort to serve a greater purpose – for example whittling random things into a key or finding an outside the box solution.

Unfortunately, that very notion of “outside the box” proves to be Squeek & Sausage’s only detracting moment – thanks to a puzzle that inexplicably expects prisoners to search for a hidden clue – not somewhere within the game or its deck of cards, but hidden on the box’s retail packaging. This intentional breaking of the fourth wall always hinders both the storyworld and intuitive flow of a game.

Overall

Squeek & Sausage is one of two medium 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 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.

Squeek & Sausage, overall, is an entirely enjoyable highlight of the Unlock! collection, staying in character and immersing players into an outlandish storyworld that’s both compelling and fun. This game would have likely received a solid 5 Key score with little hesitation if it weren’t for the expectation that players search outside the game, among the retail packaging to find a clue. And while this specific instance is a bit more obvious than similar situations we’ve seen from other brands, this is just never a good design choice for a home game to make.

Just the same, Space Cowboys produced another highly unique and incredibly fun game overall. Willingly walking into Professor Noside’s trap with the preface that one step will be out of place and a bit annoying should be enough to make anyone – mouse or human – squeak with glee.