Ultimate Quest: The Power of Four | Review

Ultimate Quest: The Power of Four Review | Designed to be played by a group of four (remotely or in person), a series of seven puzzles have been split into four parts. You must work together and describe what you see in front of you in order to solve them! 

Completion Time: 40 minutes
Date Played: 17th October 2021
Party Size: 5
Difficulty: Medium

Four is a powerful number… Especially in the escape room world! It’s pretty much the perfect team size. This is one of the reasons I get very excited when I see an escape game for exactly 4 players. In our weekly play-at-home escape room session, team Escaping the Closet, our friend Tasha and I thought we’d try something a little different: The Power of Four.

The Paper Labyrinth

The Power of Four was born of the 2020 lockdown and is a spin-off game connected to Ultimate Quest’s Paper Labyrinth series.

Flick from page to page as you try to complete the riddles and puzzles of The Paper Labyrinth.
One book-wide adventure. Can you complete it?

The Paper Labyrinth is our best selling book series and a collection of puzzles and riddles that are all interconnected in some way, be it leading you to another page within the book, or being a component of a puzzle you are already working on. The series comprises of two main parts; ‘The Paper Labyrinth’ and ‘Return to the Paper Labyrinth’, as well as a spin off activity ‘The Power of Four’.
 

Ultimate Quest

Although, as a spin-off game, The Power of Four is no less packed with puzzles. For a game on the shorter and more straightforward side, it still took our team around 40 minutes to puzzle through the whole thing and we had a lot of fun doing so!

Essentially, The Power of Four is available as a short book, or a zipped folder of 4 PDFs which are essentially direct scans from the physical paper based version. We opted for the latter and purchased the digital download version. Where the book encourages you to draw on pages, we made use of Microsoft Paint to work our way through the book collaboratively.

Visually speaking, the game is quite plain – but then again it quite literally is just a PDF from a book. There isn’t a lot of room for creative graphics, what you see is what you get.

Each Player Has 1/4 of the Puzzles

Each PDF has 10 pages in it, and each person has 7 distinct puzzles to solve in the game. However, if the gname weren’t a giveaway these are all collaborative puzzles. Meaning each player has a 1/4th of the puzzle and you should all work together closely to solve them.

As a game, this makes it quite similar to other collaborative multiplayer games such as SCRAP’s Escape From The Two Base Stations, or Lee Ballan’s The Pyramid. But where those are for 2 and 3 players respectively, The Power of Four is for 4 players.

To explain the types of puzzles players will encounter would borderline on spoilers, so I’ll instead just say that the only way to solve them is by carefully describing what you see on your sheet and then working together to piece the information. The difficulty comes in not knowing what everyone else can see, but it’s good fun working together to crack the codes. Of course, there is also a meta-puzzle spread out over the individual puzzles which reveals itself at the ending.

The Verdict

Where we normally reserve our weekly escape game session for Telescape or live avatar games, The Power of Four was refreshingly different. Whilst the PDF version was fun, I imagine purchasing the book would make the experience even more tactile and special – but we still enjoyed getting together over a Zoom call to puzzle through the experience.

One more thing to mention is that we’ve rated The Power of Four as 5 stars for value. This is because the digital download version of the game is only £3.49 and since it’s a four player game this puts it as one of the cheapest hour’s worth of escape game fun on the market: Just 87 pence per head!

If you opt for the physical copy of the book, you’ll also receive a discount code to download digital copies too for free, in case you want to play with people online. It’s a nice business model all round!

The Power of Four can be purchased as a digital download PDF or as a paperback book on Ultimate Quest’s website here.

Ratings