Room Escape Artist

Murder mystery novel

Location: at home

Date Played: October 2025

Team Size:  we recommend 1

Length: 300+ pages of reading, and listed as 2-4 hours of puzzle content

Price: $69.95, currently on sale for $59.95

REA Reaction

Horrors Untold blended the non-fiction history of Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights with a fictional storyline about a horror event obsessed blogger with puzzles. The puzzles and the storyline of the book were intertwined but not dependent.

I certainly learned a lot about the history of Universal Studios HHN through reading. If you’re interested in the history of Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights, this might be for you. The history part seemed especially well researched.

If you like solving puzzles while also reading books, this is an unusual addition to this limited genre, especially if you’re ok with going at it alone, because there weren’t any hints.

For the casual reader/ puzzler, however, the price point seemed a bit high for this book, considering how many at-home puzzle experiences you can get for the same value. This book is best for fans of Universal Studios HHN.

Who is this for?

• Horror fans
• Best for players with at least some experience
• Folks without internet access

Why play?

• Interesting history of Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights

Story

Horrors Untold blended the non-fiction history of Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights with a fictional storyline about a now murdered horror event obsessed blogger, Hunter Spivey. Hunter’s audience begged him to start covering the history of Halloween Horror Nights, and as he dove deeper down the rabbit hole he descended into madness.

As the reader, it was my task to discover who murdered Hunter and why. Diving into Hunter’s past works, I learned a lot about his research (non-fiction, I believe!) about Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights. This research spanned lore, monsters, descriptions of entertainment, food and drink.

Setup

While unassuming at first glance, on the literal first page of the book, I was asked to cut out a puzzle element to use while reading later. The book was really well made and I was pretty resistant to cut out this item at first, especially when the book offered a printable version of it online. However, it turned out later in the novel, there was more cutting required, so I finally bit the bullet.

Gameplay

LumiNarrative’s Horrors Untold was a unique, play-at-home book with a moderate level of difficulty.

Most of the puzzling difficulty stemmed from identifying what was the puzzle within the book. Once identified, the actual mechanics of the puzzle were fairly straightforward, and used several times for multiple solves. The vast majority of puzzles inside this book were related to breaking a coded cipher, which manifested in some unique ways, but I found a little repetitive.

None of the puzzles within the book require the internet to solve, which makes this book great for plane travel, when readers may not have access to reliable internet. There was nothing to look up!

Analysis

➕ The book was beautifully produced, and it was clear a lot of care when into choosing the correct artistic elements. The puzzles also fit the theme of “what you may find in a book,” leaning into their setting in an appropriate way.

➖ There were no hints for this experience. I ended up decoding a particular puzzle based on context clues instead of the intended solve method. While I think this was still a puzzle(!), it didn’t appear to be the writer’s intended solve. Players who get stuck don’t have a mechanism to help themselves forward.

➕ Once I cracked the code, there were many different translations to perform, which was a nice way to pay off a meta puzzle.

❓There was a helpful list that indicated which pages contained puzzles, which led me to believe there were many more puzzles in the book than in reality. Several of the pages were just different sections of the same puzzle, reusing the same mechanic 4-5 times.

➖ There was a ton of text in the margins (scrawled notes from other readers), which added to the immersive element that I was really reading long lost notes, but it made it quite difficult to discern puzzle content from flavor text.

➖ Some of the puzzle answers didn’t seem to be used anywhere? Maybe I was missing something, but without hints there was no way for me to check.

➕ While reading Horrors Untold, I learned a lot about the history of Universal Studios HHN, and I’m excited to experience it with this newfound knowledge.

Tips For Players

• Required Gear: scissors, pencil, scratch paper

Buy your copy of LumiNarrative’s Horrors Untold, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: LumiNarrative provided a complimentary book.