  We look at the puzzle \textit{In the Details} which appeared in the 2013 MIT
Mystery Hunt and which gained fame as the \textit{fractal word search}. This
seemingly impossible puzzle, whose solution could not fit the memory of a
modern computer if the puzzle were solved using a brute-force approach,
requires an understanding of its fundamental structure to be cracked. In this
paper, we study fractal word searches in a general setting, where we consider
one- and two-dimensional word searches with alphabets of any length and
replacement rules of any size. We prove that the puzzle is solvable within a
finite number of steps under this generalization and give an explicit upper
bound on the latest level on which a word of a given length can appear for the
first time in a given direction.
