After our first two days on the Norwegian Getaway, we had played both the ship’s escape room game and the ship’s murder mystery game, and outside of a few remaining trivia games, we were left to our own devices for thought-driven games. The good news is that I brought along a supply.
The Unlock “Short Adventures” series is a huge hit for cruise ships. I brought four of these with us- The Awakening of the Mummy, The Red Mask, The Secrets of the Octopus, and The Secret Recipe of Yore. We ended up playing all four.
The design for the games is ingenious, and perfect for a cruise ship. The Short Adventures games are smaller than a traditional deck of cards, with only about 30 cards each. In spite of the low card count, the games take 30+ minutes to solve.
The secret sauce is the Unlock app, which opens the door for getting more mileage per card out of the game. The app can be downloaded at any point ahead of a trip and doesn’t require an internet connection to use, so it’s absolutely perfect aboard a cruise ship. Unlock games are also easy to repackage and share after playing, making them great candidates to play once and pass along.
On the flip side, I also tried one of the new Exit escape novels, this one called The Fairground of Fear. I was quite disappointed. The puzzles were fine, but there were a few other elements I found to be quite poor.
The first element is lack of reusability. Working through the book requires cutting, tearing, folding, and other elements that render the book useless after one play, and I hate it. It already pains me to have to toss the more common Exit escape games in the trash after playing once, and that’s just a cardboard box, a small pamphlet, and some cardboard trinkets. For the Exit novels, it’s even worse – tossing a novel-length book after one use seems quite irresponsible. Because the book requires scissors, it’s also not an optimal choice for travel.
The puzzles were fine. I admit I didn’t get the full experience because I refused to damage the book while playing – at least my copy will get two plays out of it before it winds up in the recycling or trash. That rendered a handful of puzzles unsolvable, but I’m ok with that tradeoff.
I also wasn’t a big fan of the novel. The pacing / structure / style was akin to a Goosebumps children’s book, with characters disappearing in an ominous setting, leaving the reader to imagine if something horrible happened, without ever committing to adding a real sense of suspense or danger. You might think this approach was set to make the book spooky but accessible to all ages, but the book randomly drops an F-bomb at one point. It’s a strange decision that forces a more mature label than the book otherwise would need.
Ultimately, the puzzles were enjoyable, and someone who cuts out the necessary components will probably have more fun with the book than I did. Still, I’ve always hated games that need to be tossed after one play, so I wont be picking up any more of these. As an alternative, the Sherlock Holmes escape books by Ormond Sacker are brilliant, intricate, and reusable, and if someone wants a book to travel with, I highly recommend one of those instead.
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