Access Escape: Escape the Mailbox: The Diamond Detective

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.