For the past couple of years I have been a bit of a guinea pig for the iWalk Cornwall team! I have been helping them to test their amazing new range of MYSTERY WALKS. These brilliant interactive walks bring together so many things I love – they get you out and about, they are fun and interesting, they get you interacting with where you are and they help you discover something unexpected and exciting about places you thought you already knew!
Their creator, John Alden, and I have been friends for years and I know how hard he and his family have worked to produce not just the Mystery Walks but also their ever popular walking app iWalk Cornwall, so I wanted to help spread the word and talk to him about how this new venture came about:
Tell us about the iWalk team?
iWalk Cornwall is a local family business set up by Dave (my brother) and (me) John in 2012 to create and maintain a “living” collection of well-tested circular walks in Cornwall. Linda, my partner, now also helps us with the photography and social media too.
We created the first version of iWalk Cornwall (countryside walks) app 12 years ago and have been gradually improving and adding more walks to that over the years. There are now 310 walks available, ranging from 2 to 13 miles. Nearly all of these are circular and we make sure that they are packed with local history and nature information to enjoy along the way!
The Mystery Walks app is something new that we’ve been working on behind the scenes for the last two-and-a-half years.
What inspired you to create the Mystery Walks app?
We did an escape room, which was fun but we felt that the time limit made it a bit of a flustered experience. We thought “wouldn’t it be nice if there was no time limit and you could take your time to think about the puzzles a bit more?”. Also it seemed to be a bit of a shame to be inside when there is so much to see outside in Cornwall, so that got us thinking.
We already had a lot of experience of creating location-driven content in the iWalk Cornwall app but also data-modelling puzzles from when I worked for the BBC (I led the software engineering team that created the quiz engine used on the education websites).
We could see how the technology on a smartphone could be used to create a true mystery tour where you genuinely wouldn’t know where you were going to go next (but the app would). Also we worked out that we could turn that into an outdoor escape room, so you’d have to “earn” your way to solve the mystery by cracking the puzzles.
There is so much detail in each one, how long did it take to create?
The process from idea to finished mystery takes well over a year. It takes a few visits to find suitable clues and devise the best route to make the most of those.
Coming up with the story and a unique way for mystery to come together from the clues takes quite a few creative sparks and often a couple of false starts.
Once we’ve settled on that we need to do the puzzle modelling, devise a couple of hundred hints, artwork, sound effects, compose and record the theme tune etc. Then after it’s been created, we user test it about five times with different groups of people to tune the puzzle difficulty and hints.
Who are the Mystery Walks designed for?
It’s aimed primarily at adults who like solving puzzles (the puzzle difficulty, vocabulary and humour is pitched at adults).
Teenagers will be able to do most of the puzzles with an adult there to offer a bit of “old person” general knowledge (aka wisdom).
Younger children will be able to do some of the easier puzzles, help with navigation and with spotting clues. If the 2-3 hour duration is too much for their attention span in one shot, there’s a possibility of splitting it into 2 or 3 sessions, either side of lunch or across two days.
What can people expect from one of these mysteries?
The walk itself is at the less challenging end of the iWalk scale – most are in the 2-3 mile range, on hard surfaces (so walking boots aren’t needed) and, for about half of the locations, relatively flat.
The winding nature of the route through a town or village allows it to explore some tucked-away gems and hidden alleyways that most visitors and even many locals haven’t been to before.
Each mystery has at least 40 puzzles which are a mix of physical clues, word puzzles, logic puzzles, number puzzles etc. Different people tend to have different strengths which is why it works really well in a pair or small group.
Each mystery has a unique theme and story and also the structure of how the puzzles come together to solve the mystery is completely different in each case.
How long does each take and what do people need to do one?
They typically take around 3 hours. It varies a bit on location depending on the length of the route and how quickly you use the hints to solve the puzzles, and obviously if you stop for refreshments etc that will be extra time on top of that. Some people like to make a day of it and intersperse it with sightseeing, refreshments etc.
The main things you need are a smartphone and a friend! The mysteries work really well with 2 people or a family group where you can bounce ideas off each other and work together to solve the puzzles.
There’s a “before you go” list in the app. with a few other reminders and suggestions (optional pen and paper, reading glasses if like me you’ll be holding your phone at arm’s length otherwise, etc).
Where are the mysteries that you have created and do you have plans to do more in the future?
There are mysteries in: Bude, Boscastle, Porthleven, Tintagel, Port Isaac, Padstow, Newquay, Perranporth, St Ives, Falmouth and Looe. We’re working on Penzance at the moment.
In the longer-term, we have a few more locations which look promising but there’s a year or so of work to do to create those.
Find out more here: Mystery walks in Cornwall – outdoor escape rooms