Unlock! Exotic Adventures: Scheherazade’s Last Tale

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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’re off to a magical land filled with genies, evil sorcerers, and legendary heroes stretching as far as a camel’s lifespan… it’s Scheherazade’s Last Tale!

As is the norm with Unlock! games, the deck of cards you receive will comprise the bulk of the game and main source of puzzle interaction. What’s different about this particular Unlock! game however is how much we enjoyed the quality of the accompanying app. As stated in most of our other Unlock! reviews, we enjoy the size and artwork on the cards, but there’s nothing in particular that will ‘wow’ people. Overall, it’s a good set of components and a good start…

The components tie well into the immersive side of the game. The story of Scheherazade’s Last Tale (say that 3x fast!) is an interesting one. Unlike most of the other Unlock! games, there’s a ‘’Choose Your Own Adventure’’ flavour to this game that comes through. For Gen-X’ers this next reference will strike a chord, but this game feels almost like The Never Ending Story. It’s a story, about a story, where you play the role of the main character having to choose what to do, where to go, and living with the results of each choice. At the end of the game, you’re brought back to the reality that this was just a story… or was it? In any event, our team felt engaged most of the time and there were enough moments of ‘’hey that’s cool!’’ to keep the interest level going. The story was pretty good, and interacted well with the soundtrack provided through the app. The only major drawback for immersive game-play comes from the limitations on number of people who can ‘actively interact’ with the puzzles at any one point in time. We’ll talk more about that in a minute…

Puzzles in Scheherazade’s Last Tale (seriously… why wasn’t it a puzzle to pronounce this 3x fast?!) really caught our attention. We loved the diversity, creativity, and the fact that we could ‘choose’ a path to pursue in the game! We hope future Unlock! games will use this to some degree because there’s a lot of potential for more. The only area of critique we had for puzzles was the limitation on number of ‘active players’ who could interact with them at any point in time. Some of the app puzzles were really fun, but with only one person in the group being able to physically manipulate and input information, it dampened the engagement level of an otherwise excellent game. For the most part we felt Scheherazade’s Last Tale’s puzzles were among the best (if not the best) in all the Unlock! series we’ve reviewed so far.

Was this game fun? Yes. Is it something we think you’ll like? Again, yes. Is it worth the purchase? Now that’s a question that requires some context in answering. If you can get this game for $10 USD or under, we feel it’s a pretty good value considering you get about an hour’s worth of entertainment and it can be replayed. It’s when prices get closer to the $15 USD mark we feel it becomes a bit more subjective on value. If you really enjoy solving puzzles in a small group of 2-3 people (or by yourself), then yes, this is still a good purchase because the puzzles won’t let you down. IF however you’re expecting a game that will rival an escape room experience, and if you’ve got four or more people playing, you may want to reconsider. We enjoyed the game quite a bit though, and considering where the Unlock! games started and where they are now, we can’t wait to see what they continue to come up with.

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!