Exotic Adventures
29 December 2021
at home
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
Another game in the Unlock series by Space Cowboys. The game play happens through a series of cards and an interactive app. Unlock Exotic Adventures comes with another three stories, we have Night Of The Boogeymen, Scheherazade’s Last Tale, and Expedition Challenger.
The first and easiest of the three is Night Of The Boogeymen, in which you find yourself in the room of a little boy who is plagued by nightmares. You have to fight a variety of boogeymen, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, to free the little boy and let him have a good night’s rest. This game was different as the boogeymen place limitations on the player which makes it a little harder to solve it, but also adds another dimension of fun when you, for example, have to play with one hand behind your back!
Scheherazade’s Last Tale is absolutely beautiful and very well designed, spinning a gorgeous tale. You have to find a scribe before the sultan demands to hear another tale. The mechanics of this game are wonderful, but I do have two big gripes with it. Firstly, one of the games doesn’t show that there are more than one solution you MUST take before you can advanced, which can steal quite a bit of time if you think you already found the correct answer. But more importantly, the ending is very unsatisfying as it doesn’t immediately make sense and doesn’t provide useful hints either, so I was stuck trying a few random things until one actually worked. Answers should always be devisable from the game itself, but this one was not.
Expedition Challenger transforms you into a PI who must find a student who went on an expedition and did not return. Along the way, you gather up the other participants in the expedition team and save them from their precarious situations. While this game was very different to the other Unlock ones I have so far played, I really enjoyed this format. It was a little more involved, but I loved the adventure game feel of it and had a lot of fun making my way through the different areas of the map and encountering all kinds of hurdles and puzzles. It is very cleverly done and shows off all the different ways the app can be interacted with very well.
Overall a very mixed box, with some great and some average games, so it was difficult to decide on a rating.