Cyberpunk Unfolds is a pop-up Escape Room that was on Kickstarter back in December 2023 and delivered sometime in the later 2024.  It promised delivery in January 2024, so it was a number of months late.  We were very excited to get this, as it was #10 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!

I think we were SO EXCITED for this Cyberpunk Unfolds because it was another Pop-Up Escape Room game!   We had good luck with Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor (see above and below), so we were excited to get another Pop-Up Adventure!  A Pop-Up Adventure!  

Granted, the Cyberpunk Unfolds is a smaller scope than Doomensions, but it still looked cool.

Let’s take a look!  There’s some minor spoilers on the content below (pictures of the game), but it shouldn’t affect gameplay at all if you don’t look too closely.

Jumping In

So, Charlie and Allison are my Escape Room buddies: we have played a lot of Escape Rooms board games together (Unlock, Exit, etc)! See above.

It might seem obvious from the cyber theme, but this escape room requires a phone or an iPad. In fact, you need to scan a QR code to even start the game (see above).

After clumsily trying my phone for a few minutes, we reverted to Charlie’s iPad (see above). 

If you play this, get an iPad to play so everyone can see the screen (it’s a bunch of web sites, not an app to download). See above.

Gameplay

The gameplay was a little unexpected, as you interact with some people in Cyberspace almost like a text adventure game!  You type in responses, almost like you are playing an old Zork adventure game.  See above!

As we played, we were directed by little videos showing us how to open up the Escape Room and get to the next scene.  There were a few struggles at the beginning, but it was nice that they actually showed a video showing EXACTLY how to unfold things.  

Over the course of 1 night, about 1.5 hours, we proceeded through the Escape Room: we’d solve puzzles based on the current scene and enter the solutions into the “chat” with VIN, which would move us to the next scene.

By the end of the night, we ended up just opening up the puzzle so everyone could see it.  It was “cool” that there were scenes that were 3D, but they actually got in the way of everyone seeing the scene!  To make it so everyone could stay involved, we just flattened the scene on the table later in the game. See above as we flatten one of the last puzzles.

This is an Escape Room: you solves puzzles based on the current scene and move to the next scene.  We don’t want to show too much more for fear of revealing too much.

Reactions

The 3D puzzles and scenes were pretty cool, and we made some cool stuff.

But, in the end, we actually didn’t like this very much. The quote of the night came from Charlie: “There were a lot of awkward points during the game”.  Some of the puzzles were awkward and unclear, some of the directions for moving forward were awkward and unclear, and some of the time was spent just awkwardly trying stuff. 

There were many times were we would say “Really? That’s the solution?”  

You might say “well, you guys are just stupid“.  Sure.   But we’ve played a lot of Escape Rooms together, so I think we have a sense of what works and what doesn’t.  Caveat Emptor.

Conclusion

Let’s be clear; Cyberpunk Unfolds is very playable; there is a help system (so we didn’t get stuck completely), there are some cool puzzles and there are some cool moments.   But, none of my friends (not myself) really liked this experience.  

There are directions for “resetting the game” … which we chose not to take.  We couldn’t see passing this onto another group of friends (see above).

This is not a bad game, it just wasn’t for us.  Because it is playable, has a good hint system, and contains some cool moments, we’ll give it a 5.5/10.  Maybe you’ll enjoy this more than we did, but we struggled with a lot of points of awkwardness in the game.