Puzzle Post – The Disappearance
A bit of a different one today on Punchboard. Long-time readers will know how much I love mystery. I’ve reviewed board games, online escape rooms, and even online murder mysteries, and I tend to enjoy them all. The folks behind Puzzle Post sent me a copy of their new escape-room-in-an-envelope – The Disappearance.
I love an escape room, and living in deepest Cornwall I don’t have many to choose from, so the ability to have the same kind of experience at home is great. The Exit games are great, and I really enjoyed The Detective Society (read a review here) and more recently The Morrison Game Factory (read that review here). The Disappearance feels a lot like The Detective Society. You have a big envelope with a load of things inside. Flyers, maps, printouts, letters, postcards etc. You have nine puzzles to solve in this game, and almost no information to start with.
At first it can make you feel a little bit like a deer in the headlights. Loads of stuff to read, and no idea what to do with any of it. If you take your time though and concentrate on each part in isolation, you start to understand what the puzzle wants you to do. For me, in The Disappearance the first thing I solved was a postcard. After that things started to fall into place, and with the help of my wife and son, within an hour we’d cracked it.
It’s helpful to know at the outset that you’re looking for nine numbers, each between 1 and 99 in order to solve the case. You’ll also need a phone and internet access, both for at least one of the puzzles and so you can enter the solution – IF you get it right of course.
Final thoughts
This style of game is always difficult to review because there’s only so much you can say without spoiling the game for others. The things you need to know though, are that the puzzles are clever, ranging from that-wasn’t-too-bad to wow-that-one-took-some-thinking, which is exactly the sort of mix you need in a game designed to be enjoyed by a group of normal people around a dinner table,
The acid test for me when it comes to these games where you want to feel immersion in a mystery is how realistic the things included seem. The Disappearance nails it. There’s a surrounding theme of industry’s impact on Arctic marine wildlife, and honestly, some of the things in the envelope you’d swear were real leaflets.
One other thing worth mentioning is that there are two copies of all of the puzzle materials included too. It means you can make sure everyone around the table can see all of the puzzles, or if you had a big group you could compete to see who’s the fastest, or alternatively do what I did – keep one copy pristine to give to someone else to try.
The bottom line is, if you enjoy escape room puzzles, you’ll get a kick out of The Disappearance. £17 might sound steep for an envelope full of card and paper, but when you think that it’s a whole group of people who get to enjoy it, it’s really not bad at all. Puzzling fun with a lot of care and attention to detail gone into the design.
You can buy the Puzzle Post games on their website, here.
