Monthly Archives: October 2020

eScape.UK: The Beach

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While you have been taking your afternoon siesta in your deck chair they have been plotting to trap you on the beach to pay you back for all the tricks you have played on them. The only way off the beach is by a cliff path and they have locked the gate.

Rating: Fun!
Completion Time: 33 minutes
Date Played: 26th October 2020
Party Size: 1
Recommended For: Everyone

The Beach is a fun and easy to play escape game from the folks behind Learning Connections – an interactive educational content company over this side of the pond in the UK. There’s a brand new series of online escape games and I chose to get stuck into the most recent, “The Beach” to start!

The idea is simple. You’ve come on holiday with a group of friends but, after oversleeping one morning, they decide to get you back for all the practical jokes you’d played on the trip! All the huts are locked and, unless you want to spend the night sleeping in the office, you’ve got work to do!

A mean but well spirited prank – if you don’t crack the codes in time, you’ll miss the end of holiday dinner. If there’s one thing I know about British sea holiday goers, they love a good end of holiday dinner (I’m speaking from experience here. *dreams of fish and chips*)

As a game, it’s a classic point and click with strong escape room vibes! You move left to right through a variety of locations, finding items and using them by clicking on them (or a combination) at the right time. You’ll find ciphers, codes, and other hidden details in unexpected locations. You’ll also have to memorise (or screenshot *coughcough*) bits as you go in order to utilise them later on.

I found the game slightly on the difficult side – it might be that I’m not used to the point and click mechanic. It might also be that I’m playing this one over 2 days from the comfort of my bed, right before bed. But I did really enjoy the cerebral challenge The Beach posed of “okay what can I do with this item in my hand”.

The Beach can be played online for £10 by heading to eScape.UK’s website.

Russ Builds: Airlock

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In the not-too-distant future, on a mission to preserve mankind, Squad 38 are missing in action! Can you save their only survivor? Russ Build presents Airlock!

Rating: Epic!
Completion Time: 50 minutes
Date Played: 23rd October 2020
Party Size: 2
Recommended For: Escape Room Enthusiasts!

You play Mission Control, with Officer Cadet Russ November as the eyes and the ears on the ground. He is stranded in the escape compartment of a spaceship. The oxygen has failed everywhere but there, and the rest of the crew are dead. It’s up to you to disconnect the capsule and send Russ to safety – before it’s too late!

If you’ve played any previous games by Russ Builds, you’ll know the drill! They’re lovingly made by Russ, an enthusiast and playable remotely via a Zoom call. In my opinion, Airlock is a step up from End Game – notably there are more puzzles to solve, a rich story to get stuck into before and after your game, and a few very cool mechanics I’ve not seen before!

The points system is simple, you start with 20 points and lose points as your timer ticks down. For every clue you ask for, you lose an extra half a point. We asked for 8 clues (oops!) and completed in around 50 minutes, giving us 7 points total. Yes, yes, I know! We’re not winning first place any time soon – but we might just win an honorary award for asking for the most clues in an hour?

I mean, my mentality was that I’d rather ask for a bunch of clues and still save Officer Russ November in time… Right? Which was one of the things I loved most about this game – there was a real sense of peril. The game (and the format of Zoom) was totally believable! You get a real sense of being Mission Control with your avatar’s life on the line if you can’t crack the controls in time. We enjoyed it.

In terms of controls (*cough* I mean puzzles), you have 5 distinct puzzles to complete. These are 5 boxes in the control panel in front of you. Each is a little different and contains some reference to the pack of information you download in advance. You must quickly cross-reference all the information given to you, spot patterns, and decode the aircraft’s mechanisms. Exciting!

Overall, we enjoyed it! As always, a lovely way to spend a Friday evening – I’d recommend this for enthusiasts all around the globe looking for something a little bit different. A game with a lot of love and care, good fun, and exciting to boot! Thanks Russ!

Photos provided by Russ Builds.

Airlock can be played for free (donations encouraged) by getting in contact with Russ Builds directly.

ClueQuest: Halloween Survival Escape Training

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Around this time of the year we get numerous reports of Halloween horrors terrorizing neighborhoods across the world. That’s why we have developed this emergency training course for all field agents – including you!

Rating: Spooktacular
Completion Time: 1 hr 7 minutes
Date Played: 21st October 2020
Party Size: 2
Recommended For: Ghoulfriends, Little Monsters, Best Witches (aka everyone!)

ONLY ONE WEEK TO GO UNTIL HALLOWEEN, GHOULS!

I almost never get to play Halloween themed escape rooms! Unless it’s horror themed, most companies don’t have permanent rooms kitted out with vampires, mummies and jack-o-lanterns. 2020 has presented a unique challenge for this new medium and Cluequest have risen to the occasion! Enter “Halloween Survival Escape Training” a brand new Print, Cut & Escape game for the whole family.

It’s got EVERYTHING – a nervous scientist running the program, vampires, zombies and experiments gone wrong. I learned more about the universe of Mr. Q and his friends than I’d ever wanted to know, and Player 2 even exclaimed “WHAT? [Redacted Character] was a vampire this whole time and we’ve been helping them?!”. It’s hilarious! Frighteningly good fun!

As with the rest of Cluequest’s Print, Cut Escape series you have the option of the team shipping a full colour version of the pack, or printing your own black and white one at home. We went for the latter – I actually really love that it’s print friendly. Colours or no colours, the illustrations are gorgeous as usual and really pop out from the page.

In Halloween Survival Training there are 4 parts. Each part represents a different Halloween character – you have Zombies, Vampires and a creepy lab experiment gone wrong! At the end you must complete an exam to find out if you’re ready to survive Halloween.

To help along the way, there’s an online portal that sets the scene. Here you input passwords and navigate through each chapter of the game aided by the Cluequest Crew.

In terms of puzzles, we found this one to be on the harder end of ClueQuest games! (There’s actually one puzzle we had to get the solution for – and I’m still not completely sure how to figure it out!) But that didn’t deter us from powering through our Survival Training and completing the exam at the end! Sometimes when the puzzles are harder it just means you feel an extra sense of accomplishment when you finally figure them out – I love this.

One of the puzzles we absolutely adored involved learning the Zombie language. Armed with the words I now know, I’m confident I can communicate in any global zombie outbreak. Bring it on, Day of the Dead! This puzzle was just so charming and funny to work through.

Other puzzles involved searching and finding, rearranging and putting things in order, cutting (oh yes, there’s a bit of cutting involved) and assembling Tetris-like shapes, as well as a fun cipher wheel! There’s a good mix and all with that familiar ClueQuest flavour to them.

We clocked our finish time in just over an hour! I think that’s a pretty respectable ‘escape time’, but you could easily get over 2 hours fun from this game. It’s absolutely perfect for Halloween and great for the whole family, so if you haven’t got plans already – you do now!

Halloween Survival Escape Training can be purchased for £15 on ClueQuest’s website here.

The Escape Game: The Truth Seekers Remote Adventure | Review

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GO DEEP INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS (well, a mysterious exhibit in an old museum) to find a powerful and ancient book of magic to reverse a spell and save the day! Solve your way into the mysterious curator’s office and get outta there before it’s too late. Oh, and it’s also haunted.

Rating: Phantom-tastic!
Completion Time: 37 minutes
Date Played: 22nd October 2020
Party Size: 7
Recommended For: Everyone! (Especially professional ghost hunters and fans of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost)

The new Amazon Original “Truth Seekers” is a light-hearted horror / comedy about a group of friends who team up to film ghost sightings across the UK. It’s kind of like Buzzfeed Unsolved’s Youtube series, but British. As a Brit myself and a huge fan of “Shaun of the Dead” and “The World’s End”, Truth Seekers is the TV show that might just make this ghastly year we call 2020 worth it after all.

So when I was invited by the awesome folks at The Escape Game to get a first preview of the tie-in escape game I was thrilled. You, and your group of friends, get to step into the shoes of the Truth Seekers team themselves and investigate a very strange paranormal spike at a museum in Weymouth.

On arrival into the Zoom call for your remote adventure you’re greeted by two members of The Escape Game team. The first is your host – a shout out to Kyle for running our game! The second is a Games Master *cough* I mean ‘on the ground’ member of the Truth Seekers kitted out with a camera and headset. They’re your eyes and ears on the ground and it’s your team’s job to direct them as they move around the room. You also meet Elton (Samson Kayo) over a pre-recorded video, who sets the scene nicely.

From here, your task is to find the Praecepta Mortuorum (a spooky looking book hidden in a very sinister looking place). But be warned! You’ll disturb the ghostly spirits the moment you lift it off it’s pedestal, so escaping won’t be quite so easy.

In our team of 7 was a motley crew of talented escapists from all around the globe! It’s fundamentally quite a collaborative game – so even though you may be placed in a Zoom call with total strangers, they’ll quickly become your family in the 45 minutes the game takes to complete.

One of the nice things about playing this game remotely is that unlike other Zoom games I’ve experienced this lockdown, you also have access to a 360 panel of the room to pinch, scroll and move about in at your own pace. Whilst everyone else is busy arguing about which book to pull off the shelf, you can spend time and zoom (no pun intended!) into closer details of the room… It’s almost like a real life escape room experience!

Even though I say it’s almost like a real escape room experience, the ways in which it’s different are delightful too. I don’t want to give away any spoilers but you may come face to face with a creepy doll. Nay, one of the most horrifyingly creepy dolls I’ve ever seen in my life. And then, when you’re looking the other way – she might just MOVE. BOOM, in your face, sitting right on top of a clue you need. *blood curdling scream*

Plus, and here’s one for the escape room enthusiasts out there, there’s no way to brute force anything. It’s completely cerebral! Make of that what you will, but I personally love seeing pristine props that have never been forced into a too-small hole.

Jokes aside, it was a really, really fun game. Just the ticket for a spooky Thursday night in before Halloween – I’m actually jealous of everyone else in the world who hasn’t yet played this, for they’ll get all the joy of experiencing this brilliant remote game all over again from the start. Go forth and beat our score, escape roomers!

The Truth Seekers Remote Adventure can be booked FOR FREE online here between the 23rd October until the 18th November 2020. But hurry! I reckon this one is going to book out quite quickly!

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ClueQuest: The Dagger of Time

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You and your friends are summoned by Kaileena, the Empress of Time to stop an evil being. She restores and gives you the Dagger of Time, an incredibly powerful artifact that contains the very essence of time itself. The dagger contains the Sands of Time, and with it’s power, you’ll be able to manipulate the time to your liking: slow, stop, or even rewind it! Reach the Hourglass Chamber and stop the Magi!

Rating: Incredible!
Completion Time: 1hr 7mins
Date Played: 18th October 2020
Party Size: 2
Recommended For: Videogame Enthusiasts, 16+

The Dagger of Time is HERE! After being teased quite early in 2020 (before *gestures at the world* all this happened), it finally launched this month at ClueQuest! After dabbing our way to victory through Escape the Lost Pyramid back in 2019, I was pleasantly pleased to say the dabbing mechanic is the same … No, improved in The Dagger of Time!

The story goes that you and your intrepid band of adventurers must journey in this virtual reality simulation to ancient Iran, to the brink of a beautiful kingdom quite literally falling apart at the seams. Your guide, the scantily clad Empress of Time Kaileena gives you a mysterious dagger to help you. This dagger can turn back time, literally! You can freeze time, speed it up, reverse it all in one go. Falling rocks? No biggie for me and my dagger. I’ll just pause that right there.

At the end of your adventure is a deadly magi is threatening to destroy time. Or destroy the world. I’m not sure but he’s out to cause a lot of problems for you and your team.

The series has come a long way since it’s arcade debut in the 1980s! I’m a big videogame fan and any sort of VR (or escape room) experience that ties in with a popular game franchise is a huge win for me. The Dagger of Time was thoughtful and respectful to the game origins with some cool new mechanics that only work well in a VR setting.

In particular, I enjoyed this game for its puzzles! It felt as close to a real life escape room as any other VR game I’d ever played, but with the added bonus that you can do things in VR you could never do in real life. Such as scaling enormous heights, crawling monkey bars over ravines, rummaging through cupboards to find clues… Oh wait, that last one you can actually do in a real escape room. But hey! It was twice as fun rummaging in VR. You can also throw things at your fellow players without risk of hurting them.

In terms of puzzles, the feeling of playing Dagger of Time was just like playing a puzzle based videogame. So a little different from your usual escape room experience. This is also recommended as the hardest of the three VR games available at ClueQuest – so perfect for veteran escape room players or gamers. You must do a lot of looking and searching, you must twist dials into place, you must rewind time and freeze it in order to solve several chambers, and there are some interesting colour mixing puzzles I was pleasantly surprised to play!

Overall, we really, REALLY enjoyed it! I’ll let you in on a little secret. My blog is called “The Escape Roomer” because Player 2 (my partner) isn’t really an escape room player. I’m a soloist. Yep, I’ve played rooms before as a team of 1. But you know what Player 2 is? An avid gamer! We really bond over VR escape games. It’s the best of both worlds for somebody not that enthusiastic about escape rooms, but willing to try something exciting and new.

Shout out to our Games Master Miquel!

The Dagger of Time can be booked for £25 pp on ClueQuest’s website.
If you’re not based in London, you can find an escape room that does it near you.

ClueQuest: TimeQuest Kids

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The Earlybirds are the youngest ever members of the Supervillain Organization of the World, and now they’ve got their hands on time travel technology! When they make their move, then the timeQuest team are going to need all the help they can get in stopping these juvenile villains, and saving the universe from a catastrophic time paradox!

Rating: Great Fun!
Completion Time: 1hr 14mins
Date Played: 18th October 2020
Party Size: 2
Recommended For: Kids

Today was a very ClueQuest kind of day! First thing in the morning, logging into Zoom and playing TimeQuest with my 11 year old brother then, in the afternoon, heading onto the site to play the new VR game “Dagger of Time”. But more on that later!

Due to the new London lockdown restrictions we’d planned to play this one in person around a table over Sunday lunch. But at the last minute we swapped to Zoom as to not mix households. I’d definitely still recommend giving this one a go face to face, but in a pinch playing digitally works nicely too.

Okay so I’ve NEVER played anything by ClueQuest I didn’t absolutely love. When I heard they’d released a game for kids, I couldn’t wait to play this with my brother. The same brother I took to Cluequest for his 10th birthday – yep, I reckon you could say we’re a family of fans.

TimeQuest did not disappoint, it was just as exciting, charming and fun as everything else the company produces. The puzzles were unique and brilliantly crafted, the illustrations engaging, and the narrative hilarious. Let me climb up on a roof one second and shout it a little bit louder for those at the back: “THIS GAME IS AWESOME!”

The story goes, the youngest two super villains (the Early Birds) have concocted a new, nefarious scheme to eliminate bed time forever. After all, if they keep getting sent to bed early how can they get up to more villainous activity? So, they travel back in time to get rid of time. Bear with me on this one. No time = no clocks = no bed time.

I hear kids around the world suddenly stirring, interested in this proposition. I for one can never get Player 2 to go to bed before midnight when I’m minding him. I think the Early Birds are onto something!

You, a team of secret agents working with Mr. Q (if you’re new here, he’s a mouse), must follow them through time and undo the damage they’ve caused. You’ll have to right all the historical wrongs, repair clocks from history, and put the Early Birds to bed once and for all.

In terms of puzzles, they’re actually challenging enough to be enjoyed by the whole family, not just kids. Player 2 and I were off to a rough start having to request rather a lot of clues on the first puzzle (oops!) – but once we got into the swing of things, we nailed it!

You’ll find yourself using good logical reasoning, hunting for hidden things in images and putting jigsaws back together. In other words, a good and accessible mix of puzzles!

As with the rest of Cluequest’s Print, Cut, Escape series, you get a series of chapters (in this game, 3!) and an online interface with which to input your answer at the end of each. I’ll admit – ClueQuest games are heavy on the printing and cutting, but it totally pays off with the creativity of puzzles and how much fun they are. It’s recommended to print and cut everything out in advance – especially if you’re preparing this game for a younger child to play.

We printed and cut as we went along, and generally took our time playing this one at a fun pace with snack breaks and spy music. Overall, a great time had by all.

TimeQuest can be purchased for £15 on ClueQuest’s website.

Access Escape: Escape the Mailbox: The Diamond Detective

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You sip your morning coffee, you need it, it’s 4:30AM! You were happily asleep in bed just 90 minutes ago when you were rudely awoken by a phone call. There had been a robbery at the local jewellers, a total of ten million pounds of jewelry stolen.

Rating: Something Different!
Completion Time: 20 Minutes
Date Played: 16th October 2020
Party Size: 1
Recommended For: People who want more interesting emails in their life

This is a short and sweet review and a short and VERY sweet email-based escape came from Access Escape over on my doorstep here in London. With their escape rooms shut, they’ve kept up this buzz with a TOTALLY FREE series of email based mini-escape rooms. The Diamond Detective is the first of more to come – so now’s the chance to sign up if you haven’t already!

To play Diamond Dogs, you must have an email address. Check? Great, you’re onto a good start. Each puzzle in the game comes in the form of an email direct to your inbox and, to proceed, you must email back the correct ‘password’.

The story goes you are a detective working a case of a massive diamond heist. There are almost no clues to go by… Almost! The culprits signed into the wifi (a rookie mistake) during their heist and you’ve gained access to their email account. This sets the scene, you must decrypt the series of emails by solving various pieces of information, such as the culprit’s name, where they’ll meet next and what what time.

All in all there are around 5 distinct puzzles to solve. Some of them I got right away. Others, well, lets just say my outbox looks a lot like:
Mairi: *answer*
Access: Incorrect.
Mairi: *clue*
Access: Clue
Mairi: *clue*
Access: another clue

… And so on, and so on!

But it was fun, really fun! I’ve never played a purely email based game before and given the setting of the story it really worked well. Thoroughly believable and engaging. Best of all, it’s free. A nice distraction from the day and something I can look forward to taking part in every month.

Officially, I scored around 40 minutes. The joy of the game is that because it’s email based you can come back to it later – which I did. So unofficially I might only have taken around 20 minutes but hey! I distract easily!

Oh, and if you want to create your own email-based escape game like this, Access Escape have created their own software called Puzzle Panther which you can try here.

Play the Escape the Mailbox series for free by signing up to Access Escape’s mailing list here.

Try 2 Escape: A Pirate’s Life | Review

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You are a brave pirate who has been trying to find Blackbeard’s treasure for many years. You know if you find his treasure this would make you the Pirate of all Pirates. You’ll need to use all your cunning and bravery to solve the clues to find where the treasure lies and sail the seven seas.

Rating: Yo ho yes!
Completion Time: 35 minutes
Date Played: 15th October 2020
Party Size: 2
Recommended For: Small Group, Adults or Families

A Pirate’s Life is a short and sweet play at home escape game from the crafty people behind Leisure Kings, who have turned their hand from team events to something a little more digital: online escape games from the comfort of your own home! Introducing Try 2 Escape.

The idea and object of this game is simple. You are a pirate, locked up (perhaps rightfully by the amount of grog I’d apparently drunk!) and alone, who must first break out of jail, find a ship (with the help of hilariously named Two Toes Terry!), and set sail into the sunset in search of the legendary Blackbeard’s treasure!

I actually remember reading about this in an article a long time ago. I think I must have been googling Octopuses (just your normal Google searches huh?) – they think some of Blackbeard’s Treasure might have been found. Little do the archaeologists know that actually, I just discovered his treasure myself! Right now, when I played this game. That’s right – we won!

The game is overall fun and light hearted. Player 2 and I finished this one at the end of a cosy Thursday night over a couple of drinks around my laptop. I’ve never actually played a game of this format via Zoom, but the website does recommend it would be good for that too! For me – where a game is linear with one puzzle each after another protected by a password at each stage – I think an in-person group is just the ticket for the best player experience.

If you do want to boost the experience of playing A Pirate’s Life up a few notches, the game comes with a ‘setting up guide’ which includes some of the coolest looking cocktail suggestions I’ve ever heard! Alcoholic or… Grog free! You’ve also got a kit of printable costumes (eyepatches and wrap around pirate hats!), and a cheat-sheet of pirate slang. You bet I studied up and I’ll be shivering my timbers the rest of the weekend!

Our cocktails… Well they had grog in them! I went a little off menu on this one as my ingredient collection was limited – but if you want to try what we tried, combine sweet pea tea (for the blue colour) with whiskey, a dash of bitters, lemon and syrup. The little octopus I cut out of an apple is optional!

In terms of puzzles, the game starts easy peasy and ramps up to a good level of difficulty by the end! In particular Try 2 Escape has really good website interactivity – each puzzle has click and drag elements, things to assemble, jigsaws to put back together and a slider puzzle which probably took me 60% of the total time take to finish! Haha.

I mention it as I think this is the first online escape game I’ve played that makes good use of this interactivity. There’s no printing, no static pages you have to copy into MS Paint to manipulate! A nice touch!

A Pirate’s Life can be purchased for £20 on Try 2 Escape’s website.

Agent Venture: The Heist

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Agent Venture stands outside the HQ of B.A.D. Corp, ready to expose their many crimes. But they can’t succeed alone. You and your friends must help them infiltrate the HQ, navigate the labyrinth corridors, hack doors, distract guards, bluff past nosey receptionists, and more.

Rating: Incredible!
Completion Time: 50 Minutes
Date Played: 11th October 2020
Party Size: 5
Recommended For: Everyone / Party

It’s me… I keep uploading secret files to social media. Oops!

Agent Venture experiences have a few things that set them apart from other escape games. Firstly, you have a live actor with you the whole time (thanks Dispatch Jason!). Secondly, ahead of the game all players must choose their role – and choose carefully! Thirdly, it’s not exactly an escape game – it’s an ADVENTURE. Fourthly, and most importantly, it’s so much more than an adventure – it’s a choose your own adventure. Every path you take is unique and every team who plays will have a very different experience from the next.

The story goes you and your fellow team are members of the Centralised Tactics, Reconnaissance and Logistics – or CTRL for short. You play the ‘eyes in the sky’ with a constant comms link to an agent on the ground. Your mission is to infiltrate B.A.D. Corp Headquarters in order to expose the CEO’s crimes. However doing so sounds a lot easier than it is.

But it’s a good job you and your team are specialists huh? That’s right. Before playing we all had to pick our particular role in the team. Depending on what you chose, you’ll have access to different pieces of information. I played the role of the Researcher: Responsible for connecting the dots and sifting through large amounts of data quite quickly.

Besides Researcher, there’s the Navigator whose role it is to use the floor maps and guide our agent safely through the building. There’s a Hacker, the queen or king of logic puzzles and hacking the matrix. A Communicator role who mans the phones and acts as the voice of the group. Finally (for a group of 5) a Co-Ordinator role who oversees that the whole team is on the right track, makes decisions, and keeps us in check.

Once you’ve picked your role and begun the game – the possibilities are endless! At every roadblock you have a choice of different routes to take. The routes you take will have consequences down the line (if you didn’t direct the agent to pick up an item for example). As well as the ‘given’ routes you can take, you’re encouraged to think outside of the box. *cough* our team trying to call a bomb threat and arguing with the Chief of Security about why it was so important to evacuate.

So was it fun? SO MUCH FUN. The game is yours and you’ll have as much fun as you put into it. We gave it our all and came away grinning from ear to ear. What a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon … Or any other day of the week for that matter! Highly recommended.

Agent Venture: The Heist can be booked for £10 per player on their website or Design My Night.

Mystery Mail: Catch Me if You Can | Review

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A vicious killer is on the loose. You’ve been sent the evidence. Can you crack the case and reveal what happened?

Rating: Mysterious!
Completion Time:  40 minutes
Date Played: 7th October 2020
Party Size: 1
Recommended For: Adults

Okay so I’m a self-proclaimed murder mystery SUPERFAN. I devour the stuff, whether it’s my obscure collection of vintage murder mystery books (yes! I’m kind of obsessed with the noire front covers), to writing my own murder mystery party games, to spending my Friday nights watching cold case documentaries… I just can’t get enough of the genre.

*hears police banging down my door for weird google searches*

So therefore I couldn’t wait to play this absolute gem of a game from Mystery Mail. Wizarding Schools, Christmas, Murder Mysteries… All Mystery Mail needs now is a sci-fi or 80s game and I can tick all my favourite genres off the list.

Catch Me if You Can is intriguingly named and even more enticing once you open the envelope. As with all other Mystery Mail games, you receive this as a mysterious letter through your door – the expectation is that you would buy this as a gift for somebody but no judgement if you go ahead and buy this for yourself! It’s worth it!

It starts with a video from the chief of police who sets the scene: A deadly killer on the loose always one step ahead of the force. It’s up to you now, but you’d best hurry before he strikes again.

What follows is a really cool (and realistic) series of puzzles that works together to build up a case. It’s your job to discover the who, what, when, where and how of the crime you’ve been given. In order to do so, you need to think big, and think outside of the box! I don’t want to give any spoilers but just to say the game will take you outside of the pack and into ‘the real world’ of audio-visual at every turn. I really enjoy games that guide you to secret online pages, find logins, listen to voicemails and send emails *cough*. Catch Me if You Can does not disappoint!

In terms of puzzles, the puzzles in this game are quite unique. When tracking down a killer, unless they’re particularly sadistic, they tend not to leave clues in the form of puzzles. Neither do witness statements, and nor are fingerprints puzzles in themselves. What Catch Me if You Can does is present the information in separate fragments. The puzzle is linking seemingly unrelated facts to paint a picture of what happened. It works! They manage to achieve this very creatively. There’s more than enough puzzles in there to scratch that itch (you’ll have to puzzle your way through messages left from other detectives), but equally the immersion doesn’t break! It feels totally natural – and it totally works!

Once you complete Catch Me if You Can you gain access to an online portal – within this a personalised message from the gift giver

I clocked this game in around 40 minutes. A lot harder than The School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but just as fun to play. It’s an absolute joy to receive something like this in the post and I encourage more people to send their loved ones games like this – escape room fans or otherwise!

Catch Me if You Can can be purchased from Mystery Mail’s website for £9.99.