Escape Mail Episode 11 by Mobile Escape

Inspectors' Review:

• Puzzles in bed are fun!

• It requires scissors...ONCE AGAIN I must make it clear we have no thumbs....this is discriminatory!

• The journal is tasty...don't tell the boss!

• This is a supervising kind of job today for us inspectors...have fun boss!

• Paper is very sniffable.

• A cheque!! We're rich!

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Boss' Review:

Continue my escapade into Escape Mail’s subscription service, here is a review of episode 11! If you aren’t familiar with Escape mail, I went in more detail in the previous review of episode 10 but essentially it is a Canada based subscription puzzle service by Mobile escape. You receive monthly envelopes from your “cousin” who requires your assistance in finding your family’s lost treasure. Check the previous review here for more information.

With this latest instalment, your cousin JJ is off to reclaim some stolen pieces by XXXXX (spoiler). He received a curious diary from said thief and believes is may be the key to hacking into this thief’s possessions. While JJ is on the ground investigating you pour over the diary to provide him with important codes and passwords. In terms of narrative, there wasn’t a large amount of progression until the end but even then it felt a little slow. It was often JJ just saying “I need to get into this now, can you help me out.” Thus I would say this episode was more limited in the narrative plot development. This doesn’t mean it was bad but just be aware. For someone like me who enjoys plot driven experience, I was hoping for a little more. I will say the ending does build anticipation for the ending in next episode so I look forward to the climax!

In terms of puzzles, this envelope leaned towards more math based scenarios. There were manipulations, logic, and more but all the puzzles were multistep and required completion of a previous portion before you could get the true answer. I enjoyed the logic puzzles, the ciphers, and the manipulations but I struggled with a couple math puzzles as they required a bit of visualizing in some regard. There were quite a few steps and flipping through the diary to combine pages created some issues for me. That said, I am not visual puzzler. If you have these similar issues I recommend being comfortable to drawing in the diary itself or photocopying the pages the lay out side by side. I needed quite a few hints to push through so I would say this was much more challenging compared to episode 10.

Customer service is fine as always. I really appreciate the continued advancement to their hint system. They now included nudges in addition to hints which was awesome. They do tend to create poetic hints which I’m unsure how I feel about. I always loved the hyperlinks for certain puzzles to show how they should look as I needed that for a couple.

Overall, episode 11 of Escape Mail provides temptation towards the conclusion of this season. More challenging than the previous episode, this small envelop is chalk full of puzzles for players. I recommend this to do with a partner or two as it uses quite a few puzzle techniques that would benefit from having a small group of people with varying puzzles strengths and weaknesses. Potentially do this as a game night each month with friends? This doesn’t have a huge narrative but plenty of puzzle challenges to keep friends engaged and conversing.

Check our Escape Mail here!