OVERALL PRODUCT RATING: 4 Keys
Run away with the circus, join a jewel heist in 1900s Paris and get stranded by a time machine, all from the comfort of your own home!
We’re starting with the OVERALL section, which typically closes out each of our reviews in order to provide the big picture information about this product. From there, we’ll bounce to one general SCENIC section for the entire product – as all four games have equal quality materials and graphics used. In place of the traditional STORY and PUZZLES sections, we will be replacing them with three mini-reviews – one for each included game.
Unlock! Timeless Adventures is Space Cowboy’s sixth commercial outing – packing not one but three different full length home games inside the box. 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.
Earlier Unlock! releases could be purchased in one of two ways – individually per game, or as a package set housed in a single themed series box. Interestingly, we’ve found that in those instances, it almost always proved cheaper to purchase each single game one by one on Amazon. It would appear as though Unlock! has since moved away from the individual games with newer releases, as both Unlock! Heroic Adventures and Unlock! Timeless Adventures are each only available as single-boxed three packs.
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.
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.
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.
Although the Unlock! Timeless Adventures Box does indeed hold three unique stand alone games, we’ll be presenting them as one single review simply because they cannot be purchased separately. You’ll notice there is one “OVERALL PRODUCT RATING” – which we’ve combined together to give an average score. Each individual game within the box will also get its own rating below.
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.
Different in Unlock! Timeless Adventures, each game includes printed supplement materials that further advance the puzzles in their own unique ways.
The Noside Show
RATING: 3 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: +7:10
All afternoon, the promotional truck criss-crossed the streets of town while a man bellowed into a loudhailer, announcing the Diosen Circus. Wonderful! Young, old, and everything in between, each resident has received their admission ticket for the first performance!
The Diosen Circus is coming to town but Professor Noside has prepared a great sabotage act! Stop him. The show must go on!
It won’t take much for returning players to figure out the Diosen Circus is nothing more than an anagrammed rouse by recurring Unlock! villain, Professor Noside. Stealing the identity of ringmaster Mr. Loyal, Noside surprises, well, no one when he’s revealed amid his latest bumbling plot. From a narrative perspective, the Noside tales are often among Unlock!’s most entertaining – full of visual sight gags and sometimes not-so-tongue-in-cheek jokes. As always, the animation style of this latest Noside tale is wacky and wonderful – with outlandish circus folk and absurd animals rounding out the cast.
Unfortunately, from a gameplay perspective, The Noside Show was a bit of a mixed bag. This was especially surprising given the fact that Noside episodes are typically reserved for the the series’ easier games. In Unlock! Timeless Adventures, however, we found ourselves needing to make use of a much larger than usual amount of clues, thanks to multiple times were we weren’t entirely certain how to proceed. The Noside Story isn’t by any means all bad, however. When this game builds its momentum, the flow becomes rapid fire and genuinely fun.
The Noside Show includes additional game materials beyond just the deck of cards, that will become useful in a exclusive layer of gameplay that finds circus goers gathering collectible trading cards throughout the show. This unique mechanic both furthers the narrative flow and adds an enjoyable puzzle payoff, all why immersing players deeper into the Diosen Circus’ storyworld.
Arsène Lupin and the Great White Diamond
RATING: 5 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 19:51
You are all the residents of a Parisian orphanage. Your days are dull and most often, your stomach growls. However, all could change. Today, one of you has found a mysterious letter nailed to the door…
Experience a jewel race in the early 20th century Paris and take up the challenge of Arsène Lupin!
As orphans in Paris, 1900, times are grim – but fortunes could change within the hour thanks to a mysterious note found nailed to the door from an equally mysterious figure, a one Arsène Lupin. Is he friend or foe? Could he be the mysterious “Roof Thief?” As the Paris Exposition begins, Lupine invites the underprivileged children to join in a quest for the Great White Diamond, a 180 carat gem he’s hidden somewhere in the City of Light. Finding it won’t be easy though – thanks to a competing group of orphans known as the Marcel gang who are willing to do anything – including fight you – to get their hands on it first.
Arsène Lupine and the Great White Diamond is a shining example of Space Cowboys creating a home game experience that is truly outside the box, both literally and figuratively. Each step of this journey evokes a sense of adventure and urgency – transporting hopeful orphans back to a day long since passed, thanks to vintage-style sepia toned illustrations brought to life with the sounds of quaint Parisian corner bistros.
Like a brick and mortar escape game, Space Cowboys achieves a true sense of back and forth throughout the experience, with several instances of “Oh wait! I have seen that before!” that leads to a true sense of exploration, albeit through a simple deck of cards. Arsène Lupin and the Great White Diamond also has a game mechanic unique to the Unlock! series, sending hopeful orphans on a literal quest around the city of Paris, with the aid of a map that will guide them to their next destination.
Perhaps best of all, from a story perspective, the narrative of this adventure has a delightfully lighthearted twist that we truly didn’t see coming until moments before its card landed in front of our eyes – building to a most satisfying climax.
Lost in the TimeWarp!
RATING: 5 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 2:39
The sky is rumbling when you arrive in front of your friend’s house, the eccentric Professor Alicbiades Tempus. A scientist obsessed with time in all shapes and forms, he asked you to meet him at his home so that you can experiment with his latest invention! Once there, however, you can’t find him anywhere. Neighbors tell you that lightning struck his house.
Professor Alcibiades Tempus’ time machine works erratically. You must return the timeline to normal!
In Chaos Theory, there’s a little something known as the Butterfly Effect. Basically, it states that when time traveling, even the tiniest change in the past can cause a ripple that creates massive, unimaginable changes in the future. So what could possibly go wrong when Alcibiades Tempus decides to visit the past, or when completely untrained time travelers encounter several of his ancestors in hopes of recovering him? [EDIT: We’re being told the answer is “everything.”]
True to the Butterfly Effect, every little thing travelers do in the past genuinely does impact present and future realities. Through a cleverly unique game mechanic, Tempus’ modern day living room “changes” multiple times throughout the course of the game, thanks to swapping cards that spotlight the repercussions of choices made centuries ago. Lost in the TimeWarp! becomes much more than just rescuing Tempus when the fate of the universe, and a potentially dystopian future hang in the balance.
Thanks to a time travel machine accessible in the Unlock! app, would-be trans-temporal explorers must pick not just the right places to search, but the right years to search them. And although we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention a moment or two where picking the correct year felt like a bit of a leap in more than just the time-space continuum, Lost in the TimeWarp! is a solid-enough home adventure that is still more than worthy of a 5 Key rating. This is one of Space Cowboy’s most enjoyable, most immersive and most narrative-driven Unock! games to date (see what we did there?) Not only does the graphical tones change throughout the decades, but so too does the background music played through the app as the adventure progresses – all building towards an unexpected in-app finale that truly made the entire experience a blast.
Upon first learning of this product, we’re not afraid to admit that we thought there was no way a simple deck of cards could ever evoke the flavor of being in an actual, highly themed physical space. We’re happy to say that Space Cowboy’s Unlock! series has consistently proven us wrong.
Unlock! has become the one home series that we find ourselves constantly checking online in hopes of finding a new release – and the moment one is available, we order ours immediately. The Unlock! series has consistently proven to be a breath of fresh air in the home game setting – providing experiences that are always clever, fun, story driven and set in a wide variety of unique themes – with the one consistent constant being their ability to inspire the feeling of playing a genuine escape game without ever leaving the comfort of our own home.
*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 (3 + 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): $29.99 (Amazon.com)