Unlock! Exotic Adventures: Expedition Challenger

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Once again the Unlock! team has been hard at work with its release of the Exotic Adventure Series: Night Of The Boogeymen, Expedition Challenger, and Scheherazade’s Last Tale. Our Toronto ERA team took a nice Sunday afternoon to gather some of our members and play through each of these. In this review we’ve turned our attention towards adventure and getting rid of a deadly curse – it’s Expedition Challenger!

Having played Night Of The Boogeyman right before Expedition Challenger, our expectations were slightly raised because of how much we enjoyed the first game. It seems with each new series, the Unlock! team has demonstrated an incredible ability to keep improving upon their games to the point where one might even argue the value of spending a night in with these escape based games instead of going out. They’ve definitely come that far! Does Expedition Challenger deliver on the same level? Yes… and… no.

Allow us to explain… The component quality is fairly standard, with a deck of cards, and not much more. Like the other Unlock games in this series, there is some good interaction with the accompanying app, but the game is primarily card based. They’re fairly nice cards (good quality and size), and the box is light, small and portable.

The immersion of Expedition Challenger was decent in comparison to earlier Unlock! games, but there’s still room for growth. The accompanying app (with a soundtrack and timed game events) helps the immersive experience. It’s fair to say a team’s willingness to ‘buy into’ the atmosphere will play a big part in how immersed your team ultimately feels. Or to put it another way, we strongly recommend NOT playing this game with people who only want to rush from start to finish without appreciating some of the story and atmospheric development taking place along the way.

Speaking of puzzles, we were a bit divided on how we felt about them. Some of us felt they were clever and enjoyed the different types of interaction with the app. Others on our team felt there wasn’t really a ‘wow’ or team building feature that stood out enough for the puzzles to be considered strong. Either way, we did agree that a group of two or three people is the sweet spot for this game. More than that and you’ll find players without anything to do, fewer than that, and you won’t have the ability to bounce ideas around or talk about immersive elements within the game.

Was it a fun game though? Yes it was, who doesn’t enjoy the struggles of searching a deep, dark, uncharted lost world, so you can stop a deadly curse? Was it as fun as some of our favourite Unlock! games? That depends on who you ask. From the five of us who played, two of our ERA members loved it, two moderately enjoyed it, and one not as much. Again, it’s important to keep in mind as with most of the Unlock! games, although they often say you can play from 1-6 players (or 1-4) the sweet spot for most of these games is in the 2-3 person range.

We want to hear your thoughts! Be sure to comment in the section below or send us a message via ERA’s email, Facebook, or Twitter… As always, happy escaping!