Unlock!: Secret Adventures

The Unlock! series of escape games is now up to nine games, with another three about to be released, plus various mini demo games. In Europe the main games are sold as boxed sets of three, and in each such set I've found the third game in the box to be the most complex, interesting and successful. That goes double for their Oz game, which I found hands down the most satisfying and well-rounded game they've produced yet.

This game is of course based on the Wizard of Oz - specifically, on the L. ...

It is very much to Unlock!'s credit that they keep experimenting with their format. Having established a game system that works, they could have easily settled into churning out identikit games. Instead, each new release seems to push the format in a different direction. Some of those experiments are more successful than others; Tombstone Express is a bold attempt at innovation but sadly didn't win me over.

This time the theme is the American West, set on a train where you're tasked with protec...

The first Unlock! game I played was Squeek & Sausage, and that game's characters return in this sequel, which has some joking references back to the original but which works perfectly well even if you haven't played that one. It has the same bold cartoon style of artwork, which is also reflected in the style of the puzzles.

The core of the Unlock! game system is the way it has red and blue object cards, and you can combine one of each by adding the card numbers to find the number of the card to...

This is a fun game in the Unlock! series, however I can see it infuriating some players. It has some crazy logic at play throughout the game. If you've not played any Unlock! games before I would recommend starting with some of their earlier games such as The Forumla.