Review – Valentine Brawl by Enigmailed

Review – Valentine Brawl by Enigmailed

Website Link – https://enigmailed.com 

Price –  £5.50 (approximately $7.50)

Disclaimer: while we were very kindly provided with a free product to review, all thoughts are our own!

Product:

Enigmailed offers many intriguing products, but this review focuses on their Chocolateral line – chocolate bars wrapped in puzzles.  The puzzles are crime themed and are printed on the candy’s wrapper.  Currently, Enigmailed has nine different flavors for sale on their website with options to bundle multiple at a special price or to sign up for a monthly/yearly subscription.

It’s important to note that the puzzles are all contained on the product’s packaging itself, so you won’t have to worry about them melting away or ending up in someone’s belly before you crack the last clue.

We were given a copy of their milk chocolate Valentine Brawl just in time for the holiday itself.  In fact, we got to use it as an opening salvo to our Valentine weekend celebrations.  What’s Valentine’s Day weekend without a little chocolate, right?  Our case had us investigating a jewel heist and some missing rings.

Our thoughts:

This is the first time any of our reviews have had us critiquing the taste of the product.  The puzzles are limited to the chocolate bar’s wrapper, so the candy itself is a free game whenever you decide to dig in.  It didn’t take long for us to dive into the treat.  The breakable pieces made it easy to share and we happily munched away as we worked on the puzzles.  We’re now of the opinion that more games should come with sweets, especially if they’re as tasty as Enigmailed’s Cornish milk chocolate.  We admit that the candy disappeared long before we finished solving all the puzzles.  Yum.

The case synopsis on the front of the bar nicely lays out the premise of the mystery, but also lets players know what they’ll be solving.  With Valentine Brawl, we immediately knew what four questions we had to answer: the who, the what, the why, and the where?.  Each question aligned to a different puzzle, which stayed mostly self-contained.

The puzzles provided a good level of challenge.  We ended up being able to figure all of them out, but a few also took a good deal of thought from us.  Being unfamiliar with Enigmailed’s puzzle style, we did overthink a few pieces, but once everything started clicking, we appreciated the puzzles and considered them well designed.  In total, solving the case took us a little over thirty minutes. We checked our answers via the hint system, which was clear and user-friendly.

There is only so much room on the wrapper of a chocolate bar, but Enigmailed made good use of the space they had.  We liked how they used the shape and dimensions of the wrapper to help separate the elements of the puzzles.  Since all the puzzles were limited to such a confined area, we did need to squeeze in close to make sure we both were able to work on the bar together.  Again, this was our start to Valentine’s weekend so nothing wrong with a little closeness.  If you’re not as comfortable being so tight with your co-solvers, might we suggest an extra bar or two?  That would mean more sweets, which is never a bad thing.

We only had one of the flavors on hand, so we can’t comment on Enigmailed’s entire lineup.  However, we were very pleased with what we did experience, and we would definitely be interested in purchasing more flavors and puzzles in the future.