Unlock! Reviews

We’ve played every this app! game that’s been released. We love them, and are awaiting more releases. We also play on an iPhone—several different models, in fact. We’ve had no sound problems. Note: if you’re only getting sound through headphones, and not through your speakers, check that you don’t have the “silent mode” switch on the side of your phone engaged; unsurprisingly, you won’t get sound through the speakers if you’re in silent mode.

The machines are tricky to understand sometimes. The tutorial has a slight grammar error in the hint for the machine.
You have to make one number combination in your head to reveal the Wire card and THEN you have to combine the Wire with the machine again in Unlock . Unlock won’t accept a +14 with the Key card to get to 25, it will give you a penalty (even though that seems like a reasonable combination).
Wish they would make that part easier to understand.

Our family of three (2 adults, one 10 yr old) had a lot of fun playing this game. It’s a great idea, but needs
some smoothing out. It was far fetched to figure out a few of the clues/ cards (like the colored vials in “Formula”). The penalties were pretty harsh as well! All in all, we did enjoy puzzling through it and had a blast! Now that we know how to interact with the game, we may not need to pause to figure out how to use cards in different version quite as much.

We really enjoy these (have played 4 so far) but the hint system needs a check step built in before showing the solution—e.g., “do you have cards X,Y, and Z?” Several times we’ve asked for hints or solutions on a card only to be sent way further ahead in the game than we actually were. If the hint had just asked first whether we had the right cards, that would have stopped us from inadvertently skipping chunks of the game.

I’ve played around 8 this app games with my girlfriend, and they are all quite enjoyable. Mission #07 in the Epic Adventures pack was by far the most cool. Sound in Unlock is not working and needs to be fixed. It was confusing the first time we ran into the issue, and now it’s just annoying as we have to use hints/solutions for the sound related puzzles.

You can’t close Unlock and come back because it will reset completely.

Also, in Exotic Adventures, the cards came in a random order, which we just immediately sorted. Seemed odd and pointless.

I got the latest box of this app, with Sherlock Holmes.
Tried to play it with my friends, all of us got stuck in Unlock very early. When you try to hit the “locate” button, you’re supposed to see a map I think, instead I’m stuck on a picture of a mobster and have to kill Unlock to exit. I tried all possible interactions and nothing works.
Looking at the booklet with the walkthrough, it appears the image I’m seeing is supposed to arrive at the end of the game.

I thought the sound wasn’t working but I had my silent mode switched on. 😏 It’s fun and a great interactive creative design. Very fun for me and the family. We put a couple people in charge of cards. Someone functioned the phone and showed it to everyone. We all dig it

Every puzzle requires you to do something with a card or cards in direct contradiction to the stated rules. The game should come with a warning that gameplay rules are merely strong suggestions. Plus it should be stated that you need a magnifying glass to find many clues on the cards. Seriously…perfect vision still needs something to blow up the images on the cards just to compete the game.

If those two things were added, it would be a fun experience.

Despite everyone else’s mixed reviews, our games have gone through without a hitch. Sorry about the harsh penalties, but that is the game.
For Unlock ’s sake, the sound quality must have been fixed because ours works well and Unlock hasn’t crashed for us yet.

Played through Nautilus with my wife. We enjoyed the game but as mentioned, the penalty was pretty harsh. Other than that it was pretty much just like an escape room mentality. To find Nautilus scroll through to the right until you find the screen and click it. It will give you a tutorial as well.

Our sound wasn’t working and I have no clue why. Unlock should have a way for players to see a text version of what the sound is supposed to provide. This would be helpful for anyone who is having sound issues, in a place where they can’t hear well or even for the deaf community.

Besides that it was fun but quite difficult to work through.

They should have done a beta test to work out the typos and other miscellaneous errors. There’s no clear direction on what to do and where your character is. We were prompted to grab cards that weren’t relevant to what we needed to do, while the cards we needed were left in the deck. This idea has potential if the creators double checked their work and put more effort into it.

I love this game! The only problem with it is that if your phone is on silent, the sounds will not play.

Due to not being able to get the sound to work properly on my device we missed a vital clue and couldn’t finish. Compounded with the way the game is designed, you can’t play through again. Ruined the experience for me. I found so far the only way to get sound out of Unlock is to plug in headphones. Not sure what that’s about.

These games are great, we have played all of them. Only problem is Unlock crashed halfway through the game which somewhat ruined the experience. This happened on the three newest ones released.

We really enjoyed playing Squeek & Sausage but were surprised to find that you can really only play the game once. So I guess we will be re-gifting the game to someone new. What a weird model.

Cannot hear Unlock on my phone without earphones. Makes it hard to play with multiple people!

We had a blast bringing an escape room into our house. What a blast and a fun way to exchange games between friends.

Playing my first game tomorrow, just did the tutorial. And know why it lost two stars already? Because my iPad is on a stand. And that stand lets it sit on my table. In landscape mode only.

And Unlock only works in portrait mode.

Seriously? You can not put an iPad on a stand in portrait mode. Very annoying.

Anyway, I’m hoping the games are fun. But this is needlessly frustrating.

Game was fun but you had to listen to the harmonica song with headphones which killed time for us trying to figure it out.

There is an error in Unlock that leads players to get stuck in Tonipal’s Treasure. Even the solution provided in Unlock doesn’t work. You’ll need to skip this part which is pretty frustrating. Otherwise it’s a fun way to play and no wastage like other escape games.

To do some of the games we have to hear sounds and the sounds won’t work no matter what we do. Until it is fixed we can’t play the game. Very sad.

Have played through the first 4 scenarios without any issues from Unlock until Nautilus’ Traps. The sonar puzzle would not take the correct answer multiple times, stripping minutes away and leaving us scrambling to figure out where we were going wrong. Finally we were forced to have the Hint just tell us the answer, which was exactly what I’d been inputting the whole time. After receiving the hint, the answer took. Not cool.

There was also an issue where we needed to grab a card but the card number was blocked by the octopus icon so we didn’t know what the necessary card was to continue out adventure. Super helpful.

While I may have criticism with the game design itself, any reviews should only regard Unlock itself. This is a great (necessary) companion app, and we like the actual machine usage built in to Unlock with the latest scenarios. Do more of that in the future. More machines, more app interaction beyond code input.

A fun, creative idea, unfortunately, it seems the games are very poorly designed/planned. It doesn’t seem like they tried it out before putting it into production

I bought the game thinking it’ll be fun.. but you need Unlock to play the game and it crashes AS SOON as it starts. The tutorial works fine but the actual game doesn’t. I’m pretty disappoint that I can’t play and spent $15 on the actual game at a store.

There are bad issues with language and sounds not playing in the formula.

No spoiler...but if it doesn’t work with your phone, pause and go to bgg, It will be human speech