RATING: 4 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: +8:18
X marks the spot for a high seas adventure from the comfort of home, without any sand in your boots!
The treasure of Captain Smith, the greatest Caribbean pirate, is on Tonipal Island! You were on his trail when the Governor of the island had you arrested and thrown in a damp prison. Meanwhile, Johnson, the famous treasure hunter, is also on his way to Tonipal, determined to find the hoard before you. You have no choice but to escape, eliminate the competition and dig up the treasure!
Capitain Smith hid his treasure on Tonipal Island. Dig it up before another treasure hunter gets hold of it!
It’s a race to uncover the buried treasure of Captain Smith. The Governor has called upon us to locate it – but Johnson is hot on our trail. Unfortunately, beyond mention in the early story, this adventure quickly loses its sense of competition and Johnson is all but forgotten. We found ourselves wishing it could have played out a bit more like later Unlock! games, where battles spring up unexpectedly in the app causing the action to shift for their resolution. But alas, this treasure hunt is much more of a one-team race.
The Tonipal’s Treasure does, however, unquestionably succeed in establishing an immersive storyworld – with multiple character interactions and even a little bit of black magic courtesy of voodoo priestess Mami Wata will aid treasure hunters on their quest to riches.
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. Unlock!’s decks are larger than a traditional playing card – measuring in at nearly 4.5″ tall by 2.5″ wide.
It’s interesting that The Tonipal’s Treasure is the only Unlock! title to use a different print material, with cards that are thinner and lighter weight. While the cards themselves are used in a unique way, we can’t imagine a reason that would have prevented them from sticking to the thicker, high gloss finish traditionally used across the brand.
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 scene-triggered background tracks music to enhance the experience.
It’s best to prepare to dedicate a much larger than usual amount of desk space before setting sale for The Tonipal’s Treasure. By the and of this adventure, there will be a lot of cards in play, which can be daunting for those used to only having a small handful active at a given time.
To uncover The Tonipal’s Treasure, explores will need to truly think like a pirate. Swashbucking sword fights, disobeying direct orders from the British naval fleet and eavesdropping on drunken chatter outside the local tavern all come naturally. This island locale is unquestionably a world where bribing a tight-beaked parrot for information feels organically obvious. Savvy treasure hunters may even spot a nod to a classic scene from Disney’s iconic Pirates of the Caribbean attractions around the globe!
Unlock! packs in puzzles that are both challenging and memorable, including a particularly inspired use of a voodoo doll, and a genuinely complicated – but entirely intuitive means of deduction with Captain Smith’s ship manifest.
Other puzzles sail on choppier seas, however – including one cannonball battle that comes down to quite literally a 50/50 guess. The Tonipal’s Treasure also teaches explorers why good pirates want to drink rum, not make it – thanks to an annoying mathematical-based process that feels a bit out of place in this storyworld. We also encountered a particularly colorblind pirate, who expected us to match a noticeably blue symbol with a turquoise one as though they were the same thing.
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.
The final step in uncovering The Tonipal’s Treasure will be the most time-consuming of them all – though in this case that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It certainly charts a course for riches in a way that evokes a genuine “pirate” flavor.
It should be noted that Unlock! offers a “bonus round” of sorts for this game – something unique to the brand. From what we’ve been able to uncover, it would appear as though this was some type of prize-based contest to promote The Tonipal’s Treasure upon its release. Although the contest has, of course, long concluded, it can still be played. Sort of. We spent an hour and fifteen minutes on this bonus puzzle, before finally sending it to walk the plank. What begins as an logical (albeit slightly groan-inducing) extension of the main game’s finale turns into a convoluted shipwreck of unintuitive leaps. It’s also important to note that playing this “bonus round” requires owning all of the games from Unlock! Escape Adventures and Unlock! Mystery Adventures, as well as the Unlock! Demo Adventures print-at-home sets. While we certainly recommend The Tonipal’s Treasure itself, we highly advice pirates and landlubbers alike to chart a course in any other direction, skipping this bonus round entirely to avoid the inevitable frustration.
The Tonipal’s Treasure is the hard difficulty game released as apart of Unlock! Mystery Adventures 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.
Unlock! tackles the pirate theme in an immersive and almost cinematic manner, packing excitement, mystique and a whole lot of story into its tiny rectangular box. The Tonipal’s Treasure dares to be different, with a highly unique flowing finale that’s not an exclamation point, but rather an ‘X marks the spot’ for a swashbuckling high seas adventure, all from the comfort of your own captain’s quarters.
*Montu, Escape Authority’s VP, Dog Business™ and lead home game correspondent endorses the opinions found within this review.
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Venue: Space Cowboys
Location: At Home Game
Number of Games: 29 (1 + 1 Tutorial game included in this box)
GAME SPECIFIC INFORMATION:
Duration: 60 minutes
Capacity: 1-6 people
Group Type: Private / You will not be paired with strangers (but if you are, call 911 immediately to report a home invasion.)
Cost (at Publish Time): $15.31 (Amazon.com) / or purchase the complete Unlock! Secret Adventures box set for $41.98 (Amazon.com)