After I excitedly told my family about the letters in one of our weekly Zoom calls, my mother fessed up to buying me a subscription to Dear Holmes, a mail service that sends mysteries through the mail in a series of weekly letters, revealing a new case bit by bit every month.
As it turns out, this is just one of the many ways that stories and puzzle-solving experiences are being served through the mail. A little while later, a Wirecutter colleague mentioned that she had gotten a case from the Instagram-popular Hunt A Killer service, and due to a mix of professional curiosity and a personal desire to collect things to do if, for example, I was forced to isolate in my apartment for some reason, I began to delve into the cryptic world of puzzles via post.
For this guide, I researched companies that offered similar games, focusing on boxes that include physical props and objects in addition to written clues and stories. I read player reviews, looked into each company’s website, and dug up YouTube videos of players solving past cases to get an idea of what each service offered.
What I found is that the immersive games are broadly divided into two types of experiences: narrative mysteries that focus on deduction and exploration of a fictional environment, and boxes full of puzzles that focus on providing an escape-room-type experience at home.
Once I had an idea of what sorts of experiences were out there, I ordered and played seven options that, based on my research, seemed to exemplify what these boxes offer. Whether it’s the open-world feeling of the Mysterious Package Company’s boxes or the country-hopping clue-laden experiences of Finders Seekers, these boxes demonstrate what you can expect if one of these enigmatic missives arrives at your door.
During my research, I also talked to Mairi Nolan, an escape-room reviewer and designer of narrative mystery experiences, and Dave Neale, the writer of the most recent edition of the tabletop deduction game Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars. Both helped me understand the process that goes into putting these sorts of narrative puzzles together and what differentiates good puzzles from bad.
Ostensibly, the puzzles inside these boxes are meant to challenge the player and engage their curiosity or observational skills, and all of these puzzles do so, to varying degrees. But the best of these boxes bring the player to a place where they feel like they’ve cracked a riddle that only they could have solved. “Anything that excites you or gives you an ‘aha’ moment is really good,” said Nolan. “At the end of the day these have to give you joy.” Creating that feeling of epiphany, the kind you usually get in novels only after the mystery has been solved for you on the final pages, is where our favorite boxes shine.
A note on difficulty: Puzzle difficulty is relative and will vary (sometimes wildly) between players and even between boxes from the same service. The evaluations below are based on my playthrough experience as someone who enjoys puzzles and mysteries and who had played through a few similar boxes before starting to work on this guide. Your mileage may vary.
