Agent November Q&A

Agent November has taken their time to answer some crucial questions before the release of another award winning game, Mind Heist! 

For anybody who does not know who Agent November are, can you explain who you are and what you do?

We are ‘Agent November’ – an underground spy agency working around the globe. We undertake missions that prove too tricky for regular operatives so often need to find new recruits to work on cases… 

Before lockdown in 2020 our new recruits would join us in Central London to undertake one of our 3 regular missions: “Robyn Yew”, “Major X Ploe-Shun” and “Murder Mr. E”. 

These days recruits who join the agency choose an online mission and are able to link up with our spies and operatives via our high-tech interface. This interface looks a lot to the untrained eye like Zoom. 

The missions are always against a ticking clock and quick-thinking and puzzle solving is key to achieving the goal of the mission. Some new recruits giggle their way through their missions – we’re not sure why! Ok, we admit, sometimes our operatives make bad puns when they’re nervous. 

But if I step out of deep cover for a moment, we are actually Agent November Escape Rooms! A small business based in London. 

Over the last 6 years we have had a lot of fun, creating outdoor and pub-based spy-themed escape games, in Bloomsbury and East London. 

We have also run our missions at the Edinburgh Fringe, Brighton Fringe and Adelaide Fringe. Best of all we’ve delivered bespoke commissions for organisations like the Houses of Parliament, where we created an escape room that ran inside the Palace of Westminster and explored the puzzles and challenges of lawmaking. Our biggest ever project was in December of last year, when we launched a world first: A museum-sized live online escape room, in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. TV presenter Steve Backshall led players through the locked halls of the museum in a live streamed, interactive night time mission. The mission was seen by over 5,000 people on twitter, 10,000 on YouTube, and 100,000 on Facebook! It raised just shy of £30,000 in donations for the museum. 

We jumped online at the start of lockdown in 2020 and have developed our missions accordingly – designing our first online mission from scratch, and launching it in mid April 2020. 

Your real life missions also had a short spell operating successfully with social distancing, will these return in 2021?

As soon as it is safe to operate in the real world again, we will reopen our outdoor central London based missions. Last summer we were extremely careful with how we ran our real world missions; all the stuff we’ve come to know and love from 2020 (i.e. social distancing in place, enhanced cleaning protocols, gloves, hand sanitiser; all the classics!). 

For 2021 we are keeping a keen eye on government restrictions and recommendations; we always want to go the extra mile when it comes to safety and make sure we are following the spirit as well as the letter of the law. The great thing is that two of our real world missions (Major X Ploe-Shun and Robyn Yew) take place in the parks and streets of Bloomsbury. That means it’s a very low risk activity for our staff customers, compared to if they were meeting indoors. Our Murder Mr E mission normally takes place in a pub (remember those?), so naturally we will have to wait a little longer before that can be relaunched in the real world.

However… excitingly we have plans to tweak these missions and bring out online versions of them all later this year! That means that before too long, players will be able to play an epic online detective story that takes place over the course of not one, but FIVE escape rooms!