Over the years, puzzle books have earned themselves a mass audience of people who can happily while away a few hours working on some sudokus or some cryptic crosswords. They’re a great way to pass car journeys – as long as you’re not driving of course – or to lose yourself in on a cold, wet Winter’s night. But I can guarantee no one – and I do mean no one – has ever seen or completed a puzzle book quite like the new release from Dimitris Chassapakis titled The Cypher Files, out in the UK on Thursday.
It is quite literally an escape room in a book. A complex, brain-bending interactive game, the book challenges you to solve puzzles on each page, and obtain keys to move forward by submitting answers online. In order to solve the many puzzles the book offers, you’ll have to think outside the box – and the book itself.
The premise of the book is that the reader/player is an agent of CY.P.H.E.R., the secret international agency working on ’unsolvable’ code-based cases. A number of unexplainable disappearances have meant C.Y.P.H.E.R. have been called upon to research and investigate numerous cryptic clues to help solve the mystery. As with many or most disappearance cases, time is short and the race is on to crack the codes, and therefore the case. The challenge for the reader/player in order for them to succeed will require them to draw, write, fold and cut pages, think critically and differently and explore a series of virtual escape rooms to find the answers they seek. As long as you have a pencil, some scissors, a laptop or tablet with an internet connection and a desire to challenge yourself in a truly unique kind of way, you’re good to go.
To give you an idea of how challenging The Cypher Files is – at least for occasional puzzle players like myself – it took me a couple of weeks to work through, and some of the puzzles had me so baffled and curious that I literally took the problem I was trying to solve to work with me as I couldn’t get it, or the desire to figure it out, out of my head. It will delight – and possibly stress out – even the most competent of puzzle fans, offering something genuinely different for people to find on virtual and literal bookshelves everywhere; and for that alone, at a time when truly ‘one of a kind’ items of any description are practically unheard of in today’s mass market, Chassapakis should be highly commended.
