The Escapement: The Network

The Network is a premium at-home escape game-in-a-box, which combines printed and physical artefacts together with video delivered via an online portal. You'll also have to discover content placed on a variety of well-known external internet sites.

A huge amount of effort and care had been placed into the game content - all the material is completely original and features a cast of actors - there's no stock footage here, and the quality of the components is high. There's a lot of attention to detail: little things like the fact that photos are printed on photographic paper, not plain A4, and there's a delightful physical prop featuring some fine craftwork by the creators.
The puzzles themselves have been equally carefully-constructed - there's just enough information to guide the player to know what to do, while still presenting enough of a challenge to feel the satisfaction of solving. Every detail has its purpose - there's nothing missing, and nothing spare. As with many ARGs, the puzzles we enjoyed most were those that were "hidden in plain sight" but only noticed by those who knew where to look, and this complemented the game's undercover operative theme perfectly.

The game is separated into 3 sections, and we played through the whole thing as a couple in around 2 hours. It is not the cheapest experience out there but, for the original content and moments of delight you get while playing, I'd say it's absolutely still good value for money.

Update:- I recently offered to help someone who was stuck at a particular point in the game. Even though I had not kept my notes, I was pretty confident I would be able to provide a nudge since we had breezed through that section. It turns out that this might have been partly by luck rather than by good judgment as, on playing through the second time, I became stuck as to understanding why a particular answer wasn't being accepted. This led me to discover that both the input verification and hinting systems could be improved (which hadn't become apparent on our first playthrough since we'd not made use of either). It's nothing that the designers can't fix, but could definitely lead to player frustration, so I'm knocking off half a star from my previous rating.