Enigma Fellowship: The Enigma of Lost Knowledge

Having launched in the early days of the pandemic, Enigma Fellowship is now well established with a range of five different box games, so I’m very behind the times reviewing their first one. The Enigma of Lost Knowledge has you commissioned to investigate a missing professor, and provides a fat envelope of papers with which to do so.

I found the style here quite similar to the Escape The Crate games, in that you have various envelopes that mostly represent a lock or other obstacle that you encounter in the narrative, plus a webpage where you enter solutions. If a solution is correct, you get the next piece of story and are told to open the appropriate envelope, which typically contains more clues and another envelope.

The website also provides hints and solutions, and these are excellent. Each puzzle has very granular hints, clearly marked, so there’s no danger of getting more information than you wanted. A reset guide also lets you pass the game on to other players, with no components needing to be marked or destroyed.

This game primarily uses printed paper components, though supplemented here and there by items such as postcards and photos. These fit the academic setting and in one case in particular are inventively used, but production values are on the simpler side. It’s a game that gets more linear as it goes on: when you begin the challenge is finding the puzzle in the materials presented. Later on the puzzles are more explicit but more challenging to solve.

Lost Knowledge is a well-executed, straightforward puzzle game with logical puzzles. Those who’ve played many boxed games are unlikely to find it exceptional, but are also unlikely to find it objectionable. It ought to work well for beginners, though first time players might need a nudge working out how to get going.