Henry Lewis, Olivier Award-winning writer and TV and theatre actor (The Play That Goes Wrong; The Goes Wrong Show) will be making an appearance at the UK Games Expo at the NEC on 5 June to promote The Mystery Agency, the award-winning range of escape room puzzles in a box that he has created.
With The Mystery Agency Puzzles, players must investigate and solve a mystery through myriad intriguing physical objects supplied inside the box, and discover secret websites that are hiding important clues.
The detailed tactile pieces included with each puzzle have been designed to stretch players’ powers of deduction; feathers, corks, wooden (locked) boxes, playing cards, flashlights and many more surprises lie in wait to bamboozle you on your quest. The realism of the pieces makes each puzzle utterly engaging and will immerse you and your ‘co-detectives’ in its own unique world.
In creating the puzzles, Henry was particularly keen to replicate the feel and experience of escape rooms. “It was very important to me to make not only a challenging puzzle, but build it around lifelike objects that will bring a theatrical feel to the experience,” he says.
The puzzle range currently includes: The Balthazar Stone, set around a mysterious pirate island; The Vanishing Gambler – with an unexplained missing person in a casino, and The Ghost in the Attic, which investigates a haunted board game from the 1950s.
Each game takes approximately 60 to 90 minutes to solve – but could certainly last a lot longer! If you get stuck, there are tiered hints available online that will help you reach the solution. Glowing posts on social media and on the website – 95% of reviews give 5 Stars – have shown the puzzles have become a very popular dinner party event and the quality of the pieces are a particular talking point.
As well as being artistic director of Mischief Theatre, Henry is a lover of puzzles and brainteasers, and particularly of escape rooms. He is about to star in a brand-new ITV riddle-based quiz show, Riddiculous, to be broadcast this autumn.
The Mystery Agency is exhibiting at the UK Games Expo from 3-5 June, Hall 1, stand 1034. Henry Lewis will be attending in person on Sunday 5 June at 12pm-2pm.