Unlock!: Timeless Adventures

Last in the Timeless Adventures box, Time Warp is marked as the top difficulty level - although in my experience the difference in ‘official’ difficulty between Unlock! games is relatively small, and outweighed by how well or otherwise you click with particular puzzles.

This one is of course a time travelling adventure. Like both of the other games in the box set, it has a system for structuring the game into a sequence of stages - in this case time zones - and a supplementary sheet that helps ...

Arsène Lupin is another totem of French culture almost completely unknown to me, but who seems to be a mysterious but gallant master thief. In Unlock!’s game you are not the legendary criminal himself but a group of street urchins to whom Lupin has set a challenge - follow his trail of clues to find a diamond, and thereby prove yourselves as potential protégés.

Unlock! reliably have excellent artwork, but I particularly liked the fin-de-siècle illustration style here. That complemented the gam...

While each Unlock! game is a stand-alone story, fully half the boxed sets have included an episode featuring the closest thing the series has to a recurring villain. The Noside Show is the third of these, and its cartoonish style of illustration and puzzle logic will be familiar if you’ve played one of the others.

Noside Show is set at a circus, and has a structure based around a sequence of performers. It’s not as linear as that might sound, since there are also side areas to ‘explore’, using ...