Last year the Dimitris Chassapakis from Greece published an interactive book: Journal 29. This book is full of riddles (63 to be exact) and has a total of 148 pages. There's also a story in there somewhere: researchers came up with no results on their secret excavation for 28 weeks. But in the 29th week something strange happened. The team dissapeared and the only thing left behind was Journal 29. And that's what you'll need to solve the mystery. Sounds like something we escapers like, right?
Journal 29 got launched in December 2016 through IndieGogo. Within two weeks they reached their target. Eventually it even reached 326% on the 1st of January 2017. 1499 backers together came up with 39,663 dollar. They even made two of the three stretchgoals. Not bad!
Our experience
We spend about two evenings with the book and we really needed to force ourselves to stop playing sometimes. After solving a riddle you want to go straight to the next one. Never a bad sign! You solve the riddles by scanning an QR-code with your telephone. This will bring you to a website where you can enter the answer you found. Upon entering the correct answer you'll get a password. You need to write that down because you'll need it with later riddles. This works perfectly.
The puzzles are original and mainly logical. There were a couple out of the box ones that made us work hard though. For these puzzles we turned to the online forum and searched for hints. You will not get the correct solution right away, but other people who solved the riddles will give you hints slowly so you can come up with the correct solution yourself.
We do have some criticism though. To be honest, the story of the researchers didn't do much for us. It feels like they came up with a really basic story to tie the puzzles together, instead of the other way around. It's not that it really bothered us, but a better story would have made the endresult even more impressive. Another point of criticism is the quality of the print. If the resolutions of the images or print would have been a little bit better, it would have improved the quality of the final product a lot. It's a bit of a shame, because the illustrations are beautiful. Oh well, if that's the only two things we can complain about...
We ordered Journal 29 from Bookdepository and it costs 15 euro (including shipping) at the moment and we totally recommend it!
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