Escape Hunt – An Enola Holmes Adventure [Hivemind Review]

An Enola Holmes Adventure is a free print-and-play collection of puzzles with a light narrative, created by Escape Hunt in the UK. This game was released in partnership with Netflix to promote their new movie, Enola Holmes. The film was noticeably escape room-ish.

Format

Style of Play: print-and-play collection of puzzles with a light narrative

Required Equipment: computer with internet connection, printer, pen and paper, scissors

This game is meant to be printed.

Recommended Team Size: 1-3

Play Time: 30-60 minutes

Price: free

Booking: download and play at any time

Description

This is a full-color PDF of puzzles with setup instructions, a few minimal/ quick folding and/ or cutting puzzles, and an accompanying hints website with some hints also included at the end of the pdf in mirror writing.

Hivemind Review Scale

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

This print-and-play puzzle hunt is very nicely tied into the Enola Holmes Netflix movie, and the pages are quite beautiful. A printer is definitely needed. The puzzles are easy enough to be approachable by most players. A few even use mechanics that were introduced in the movie.

My players went rogue during the game and started cutting along the dotted lines of pages that we were not supposed to have access to. After all, only one or two people can really work on a puzzle at a time, and the others couldn’t resist the temptation of the other puzzles.

On the whole, we had fun doing something that tied into the movie that we had just enjoyed the night before. Also, the quality was remarkable for a free hunt. After we got the final solution, we emailed it to receive a lovely little surprise.

We didn’t use the hint system, but I appreciate that it was there, and sufficiently obscured so that we didn’t accidentally read it.

Fro’s Reaction

I always love seeing a puzzle experience designed to accompany and promote a movie, TV show, or other content, and this game was an enjoyable extension of the world created for the Enola Holmes Netflix feature. It included a variety of puzzle types in a manner accessible to those with minimal puzzling experience, and the design treatment was beautiful and polished. The need to print the game materials required some extra effort that serious puzzlers might not find worthwhile; however, if you’re looking for a light puzzling experience that you can play on your own time, this is worth checking out. If you’re a fan of the Enola Holmes movie, then this becomes a must-play experience.

Matthew Stein’s Reaction

The game is afoot – but not for too long, as this one clocked in at around 25 minutes for me. An Enola Holmes Adventure is presented through a gorgeous, colorful PDF which is intended to be printed. Both the writing and visual elements in this game contribute to a vivid extension of Enola’s world, and the puzzles – though rather elementary (pun intended!) – are consistently well integrated. This set is pretty clearly more targeted towards families than puzzle enthusiasts, and it’d be a pre-breakfast snack for Enola herself.

The game is fully sequential, with each puzzle taking place in a particular location and solving to the name of the next location to visit. While this is a clean puzzle structure in theory, I found its implementation here to be a bit too predictable – the game lacked a directional narrative arc or difficulty progression, and the final puzzle felt particularly anticlimactic. For a story/show based around astute observation and deduction, it didn’t feel as on-theme for puzzles to be quite so spoon-fed to the solver, and I would have liked to see more content in line with one prop, a 1885 newspaper, which was creatively referenced throughout the game.

David Spira’s Reaction

Elementary, my dear reader.

I’ve played plenty of puzzle games that weren’t designed for me. An Enola Holmes Adventure was decidedly not designed for me, and that’s not a criticism. This feels like it was designed for true newbies, more specifically younger newbies… and I love that.

An Enola Holmes Adventure was a collection of paper puzzles that covered a wide variety of puzzle types in a short, free package.

Look – there’s nothing notably innovative or mind-blowing going on in this game; it’s a by-the-numbers assortment of puzzles. But that’s all that this game needed to be. I think that it is the kind of game that could set a young person on a path towards greater and more interesting puzzles and for that, I am thrilled that it exists.