A haunted house. An undersea submarine. Pirate treasure buried on Tonipal Island. Three new adventures and three new chances to escape from certain danger—three new Unlock! adventures are coming soon from Space Cowboys:
- The House on the Hill
- The Nautilus’ Traps
- The Tonipal’s Treasure
Like the three previously released Unlock! adventures, each of these new adventures captures the pulse-pounding excitement and devilish puzzles of an escape room and brings it to your tabletop in a single deck of cards. While the Unlock! companion app ticks away the seconds and offers hints when you need them, you and a group of your friends must use your logic and deductive skills to find the solutions to a series of interconnected puzzles and escape the room. With the perfect mixture of intuitive mechanics, cunning puzzles, and only an hour to escape, each Unlock! adventure is a self-contained experience in a single box.
Locked Away
Just as in a physical escape room, each Unlock! adventure begins with you trapped inside a room. Whether that room takes the form of a haunted house, a submarine tunnel, or a pirate prison, you have just one objective: escape! But there are devious puzzles that you’ll need to solve before you can crack the last code—and you’ll need to move quickly, because time is running out.
At first glance, the room you’re trapped in may appear unhelpful. Other than a solidly locked door, there may be little to direct you except an assortment of strange objects. Closer examination, however, reveals the truth. Every room card displays an assortment of numbers or letters that correspond to cards in the deck. These symbols may be highly visible and obvious, or they may be hidden—but once you find them, you’ll be able to retrieve the corresponding cards from the deck, giving you access to more clues and objects that you can use to progress through the adventure.
Piecing Together the Puzzle
Using the cards that you uncover from the deck in each Unlock! adventure, you’ll face an array of puzzles, each attempting to stall your progress and stump your efforts. Most of the cards that you’ll find in your investigations fall into one of three distinct categories: objects, machines, or codes.
Objects are either red or blue, and red objects can be combined with blue objects to advance. A simple example might be combining a locked cabinet (a red object) with a key (a blue object). Of course, the puzzles that you’ll face in each adventure can be much more esoteric and unusual, but finding the objects you need and solving the puzzles to combine the correct objects is one of the key ways that you’ll uncover new cards and advance through the puzzle. The correct combination grants you a new card from the deck by adding the numbers on the red and blue objects, but you must be cautious! Combining two objects that aren’t meant to go together can cost you valuable time or force you to take another penalty.
Other cards within the game will prompt you to manipulate a machine that you can interact with. What’s more, starting with these adventures, you’ll now be able to interact with machines inside the Unlock! app, giving you an easy platform to solve the puzzle and uncover the solution. There’s nearly infinite variety in what these machines may be, but ultimately, you’ll need to use your logic and the clues that you find in order to solve the machine’s puzzle.
The last type of card that you’ll encounter is a code card. These cards require you to discover a four-digit number and input the code into the app. Finding the correct code advances the story, but if you’re wrong, you’ll lose even more time! Of course, the Unlock! app does far more than just keep track of your quickly diminishing time. In addition to allowing you to interact with machines within the app, the app can give you hints if you’re stuck or help you find hidden objects, making it an indispensable part of the Unlock!experience.
Three New Adventures
You’ve already explored the secret, underground laboratory of a scientist, thwarted a supervillain’s dastardly plot, and worked to reunite your team after crash landing on the island of an eccentric billionaire. Now, three new adventures will soon arrive to test your skills:
At the beginning of The House on the Hill, strange, paranormal activities have surrounded an abandoned house for the past three days. When an investigation uncovers that these occult occurrences center on an excerpt read from The Book of the Dead, you and your companions are tasked to enter the house, find the book, and stop the curse…
Whereas The House on the Hill surrounds you with the atmosphere of a horror story, The Nautilus’ Traps brings you to the bottom of the sea. When a sea monster attacks your submarine at the outset of the adventure, it’s up to you to make your way through the depths and back to the surface if you’re going to escape… before your oxygen runs out.
The third adventure, The Tonipal’s Treasure, sets you at the start of a hunt for the treasure of Captain Smith, hidden somewhere on Tonipal Island. As your adventure begins, you’ve been arrested by the Governor and thrown into prison—you’ll need to escape quickly, especially since Johnson, a famous treasure hunter, is also on his way to Tonipal in search of the very treasure that you seek.
