The Mysterious Package Company is a narrative-driven experience company, founded in 2013, that produces stories of mystery, adventure, and horror through puzzles and mailed artifacts. [1] [2] [3]
Colin Bolton, Misha Schneider and Tim Sullivan co-founded The Mysterious Package Company in 2013, as they wanted to create wondrous stories delivered through the postal service.
In 2014 Jason Kapalka, a Vancouver-based entrepreneur, came on board as primary investor. Kapalka is co-founder of PopCap Games and owner of the Storm Crow "nerd bars" across Canada.
Between 2015 and 2019, The Mysterious Package Company launched a series of high-profile and successful Kickstarter campaigns — including The Century Beast, Filigree in Shadow, and HASTUR — that helped catapult the company to greater prominence within the puzzle and immersive storytelling space.
In 2021, The Mysterious Package Company partnered with Toronto-based puzzle company Curious Correspondence to produce Doomensions: Mystery Manor, a commercial hit that became one of the top five highest-grossing tabletop puzzle campaigns on Kickstarter. In 2023, the company formally acquired Curious Correspondence.
In 2024, the company launched No Escape: Dead Man’s Tale on Kickstarter, blending its signature experience crates with puzzle escape games. In 2025, they released Innsmouth Rising, a new crate-based narrative experience, which was also successfully crowdfunded.
In 2015 the company launched The Century Beast Kickstarter campaign. The campaign raised over $400K and was backed by 1,291 pledges. [4]
In 2016, the company introduced a Victorian horror Experience, Filigree in Shadow, as a Kickstarter campaign. Filigree in Shadow currently sits as the ninth-highest-funded art campaign on Kickstarter to date. It is also the second-most-funded mixed media campaign in the world. This campaign raised over $600K and was backed by 1,786 pledges.
In 2019, the company introduced a Lovecraftian horror Experience, HASTUR, as a Kickstarter campaign. The project was described as an immersive narrative inspired by The King in Yellow, delivered through a series of mailings and artifacts. The campaign raised over $234K and was backed by 721 pledges. [5]
In 2022, the company (together with Curious Correspondence) launched Doomensions: Mystery Manor as a Kickstarter campaign. The campaign attracted 5,338 backers and raised $680K. The experience is a 3D pop-up escape-room in a box: no assembly required, players explore the manor through dossiers, clippings, foldouts, and artifacts over multiple chapters.
In 2022, the company launched Body of Evidence: The Murder Mystery Autopsy Game via Kickstarter. The project is a forensic puzzle / murder mystery experience in which backers examine evidence, scrutinize suspects, and perform an autopsy on a paper-craft cadaver.
In 2024, the company launched No Escape: Dead Man’s Tale as a hybrid experience / puzzle escape Kickstarter campaign. The campaign had a funding goal of CA$40,000, and the project was successfully funded. No Escape is described as their first title in a new streamlined format, retaining immersion and surprise from classic MPC experiences, while being more accessible and affordable.
In 2025, the company introduced Innsmouth Rising via Kickstarter as a return to the classic crate-based narrative style. The campaign describes the experience as a “handmade, narrative-rich journey delivered in a beautifully crafted wooden crate,” containing artifacts, documents, and ephemera to immerse players in a Lovecraftian mystery. [6]
Experiences are the Mysterious Package Company's primary product. They are stories or mysteries told over a series of mailings to the recipient. Each experience contains:
Members purchase packages that they send to themselves or a recipient of their choice. The experiences feature genres such as mystery, horror, adventure, time-travel, and science-fiction.
Notable releases include:
Curios and Conundrums was a quarterly subscription box that ran from 2013 to 2018. Unlike the Experiences, it was not meant to be a realistic, coherent narrative, but a grab-bag or anthology of puzzles, stories, and interesting trinkets.
The Mysterious Package Company also develops tabletop puzzle games that push the boundaries of dimension, narrative, and interactivity in analogue form. These titles often combine elaborate physical components with layered storytelling and puzzle design, extending the company’s immersive style beyond the mailed Experiences.
Notable releases include:
In the early years of the company’s operation, some of its elaborate packages were mistaken for suspicious parcels when delivered to recipients in the United States. Their unusual appearance, often featuring distressed objects, wax seals, and aged documents, occasionally raised security concerns.
In several cases, federal authorities were contacted, including one instance where the National Security Agency (NSA) became involved. Reported outcomes included the temporary evacuation of a government building in Florida, the dispatch of bomb squads, and, in at least one case, the brief arrest of a recipient. These events underscored both the convincing realism of the company’s productions and the logistical challenges of sending immersive experiences designed to blur the line between fiction and reality.