The Night of the Boogeymen is included in our recommendation guide for Remote Horror Games. For more of the best remote escape games in this style, check out the recommendation guide.
A great bad dream
Location: at home
Date Played: January 11, 2020
Team size: 1-6; we recommend 2-4
Duration: 60 minutes
Price: about $15
REA Reaction
The Night of The Boogeymen is as good as Unlock! and table top escape games have gotten for me so far. I loved playing this game… and we’re not going to give away our copy (like we normally do) because one day I’m going to forget the puzzles and I’ll replay it.
The Night of The Boogeymen had a simple, relatable premise: to help a child suffering from bad dreams. Artistically, the cards struck a beautiful balance of creepiness and childishness that felt perfect for this setup. The gameplay knocked it out of the proverbial park by adding abstract dream like constraints that were regularly changing the feel and play style of the game.
All of this was underpinned by a more (but not entirely) linear narrative that kept the number of cards on the table from getting out of hand or feeling too restrictive (both of which regularly wreck Unlock! games for us).
I highly recommend Unlock! The Night of The Boogeymen. Space Cowboys took their standard formula and added the best kind of spin to it.
Who is this for?
- Story seekers
- Puzzle lovers
- Any experience level
Why play?
- A brilliant and engaging bad dream like mechanic
- Story-driven gameplay
- Adorable art
Story
Young William was haunted by monsters that went bump in the night. Four boogeymen stalked the dreams of the child. As the boy slept we had to banish these beasts from his mind.
Setup
Unlock! games all follow the same structure of card-based gameplay supplemented by a mobile app. I explained it in detail in our first Unlock! review back in 2017.
Gameplay
Unlock! The Night of The Boogeymen was a story-driven, play-at-home escape game with a moderate level of difficulty.
Core gameplay revolved around searching, making connections, puzzling, and a little dexterity.
Analysis
➕ The story was simple, effective, and relatable.
➕ The art was great. It captured the look of childish imagined horrors. When we were finished, I found myself looking though the cards to make sure that I picked up on all of the details.
➕ I found the puzzling delightful. Plenty of challenges were simple and straightforward, but there were enough chewy, satisfying solves to keep it from feeling like all we were doing was plugging related objects together.
➖ One puzzle was conceptually brilliant, but we felt that it was a bit too tangled up in precision. It was far too easy to get it wrong, even after having figured out exactly what we needed to do.
➖ Another puzzle was poorly gated. It seemed like we had all of the necessary information to solve it… but after incurring a few time penalties we eventually realized that we needed a little more information.
➖/➕ I still have no love for the hidden number scavenger hunt in Unlock! games. It’s a weak mechanism. That said, I do appreciate that the app points these out, but still, we occasionally aren’t sure if we’ve found the particular hidden number referenced by the app.
➕ The monsters that we had to battle were fantastic – both as villains and as game mechanics. The constraints that came with facing these monsters transformed this from a game to an experience.
Tips For Player
- Space Requirements: a small table
- Required Gear: a smartphone with the Unlock! app
Buy your copy of Unlock! The Night of The Boogeymen, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
Disclosure: Asmodee provided a sample for review.
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This was my first unlock! and I enjoyed it very much. It seemed to me that the mechanics it had ([censored due to spoiler]) made the experience closer to a live escape room 🙂