Contact
As you progress through the steps in this online escape room series, there are a few things you can do to ensure the best experience.
Add hello@
openhousemysteryparties.com to your contacts list to make sure none of your escape room emails get marked as spam by mistake.
Use your same email address in the web forms throughout the escape room series.
We may send you hints or reminders to keep you on track, and it could be confusing if you start getting these messages in more than one email box.
If you need to change the email address you’d like to use, before entering the new address in a web form, use the “Update your profile” link at the bottom of any email we’ve sent you.
Throughout this escape room, you’ll find PDFs with interactive form fields. The interactivity built into these forms will only work properly if you open them with Adobe Reader on a desktop computer.
The web-based portions of the escape room will still display and function on a mobile device, but mobile users should keep a couple of things in mind:
#1 Avoid the temptation to use the Back button in your mobile browser. You should always be able to find an x in the top right and/or a big “close” button at the bottom to get you back where you want to be.
#2 Without access to the interactivity in the PDFs, you’ll want to have some paper and pencil handy to track your inventory and work through the puzzles.
Pro Tip: If you want something a little fancier than plain scratch paper, you can download our printable Inventory & Notes PDF to give you an organized place to track your Inventory and work out the puzzles.
Many steps in this escape room are unlocked using the correct name of an item found while exploring another location. The Inventory PDF will help you keep track of the items you have available for use.
Items in your Inventory will often carry over from one part of the escape room to another.
We recommend you download the interactive Inventory PDF (found by picking up the clipboard in Chapter 1) to your local device.
If you don’t already have it, Install Adobe Reader, and use it to access fillable form fields in PDFs. Both the Inventory and several of the puzzles you’ll find deeper in the escape room have interactive fields that will only work if you open them in Adobe Reader.
If you prefer not to use Adobe Reader and the fillable PDF fields, paper and pencil can work fine, too.
In fact, if you enjoy writing things by hand, you may have more fun puzzling out the mystery with a notebook to jot down your theories and look back over your progress. Our printable Inventory & Notes PDF will make for a great place to keep track of everything!
You can work through the escape room at your own pace and over as many sittings a you would like.
When you’re ready to take a break, bookmark the last page you visited in your browser and save your Inventory PDF. You can also save your emails from the escape room series and use the link inside your most recent email to get back to where you left off.
Be sure to move through all the webpages in the pre-set order.
You’ll likely miss an item for your Inventory or a clue for a future step if you try to get around the system to skip ahead. (This would require brute force guessing of web page addresses and passwords, so you don’t have to worry about skipping a webpage accidentally.) 😉
Within the same webpage, however, you can press the buttons in any order you like.
The big buttons at the bottom of many of the popups will often refresh the page to give you a new start if you enter any incorrect answers.
Make sure to look at every area on a webpage before moving on to the next. This will ensure you don’t miss any items you’ll need to have in your Inventory for future steps.
Each chapter of the escape room has a box at the bottom of the page with buttons to let you review your progress.
The Inventory button serves as a minor hint. It lets you double check your Inventory contents against the items you should have available for use BEFORE exploring any areas on that webpage.
You can also review the map of Higsley Manor (once you find it), the letter from Xavier Herrington that started your adventure, and any clues you’ve found that point to the true reason behind Higsley’s disappearance.
The items in the reference section are not integral to the puzzles in the corresponding chapter. They are there for your convenience and to help you find your place in the narrative after taking a break from the escape room.
Many items you will find in the escape room are “sheets of paper” you can read or otherwise interact with.
Most of these are PDFs that will open as an embed in a popup within the escape room webpage you are working through.
If your browser has trouble loading an embedded document — or you would prefer to save the PDF to your local device, simply click the button above the embedded document to start your download.
The PDFs for the escape room are stored using Google Drive. It has come to our attention that some client-side services may block the visibility of files stored in Google Drive. (For example, your workplace’s IT department may disallow this access.)
If you run into this problem, for the time being, our best recommendation is to use another device without this limitation. Take a look at the Mobile vs Desktop section for tips on getting the best results when using a smartphone.
To progress in the escape room, you’ll need to enter several pre-defined passwords calling for characters from a US English keyboard.
If this is not the type of keyboard you normally use, be sure to set your keyboard to US English under configurations before attempting to enter a password. Check out these instructions for Mac or instructions for PC if you aren’t familiar with how to do this.
What you are sure was the second image you saw in the painting still stares back at you: an erupting volcano and an amphitheater full of panicked people.
You can’t see any indication for how the picture could have changed, but you’re almost positive that it looked different when you first walked in.
There is a little plaque attached to the frame with the date 1814.
See WikiHow: Solve a cryptogram for more info.
This PDF has interactive form fields. Download and open it with Adobe Reader for the best experience.