Escape Quest: The Avengers (Play at Home)

Avengers….Assemble!

The intergalactic villain Thanos wants to destroy half the population of every inhabited planet. To do so, he searches everywhere for the six magical stones that grant unlimited power. If the villain gets his way, the universe will face the apocalypse.

Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and mystical demigods must stop the cosmic Titan before his destructive onslaught hits the Universe.

Today you’re a superhero, an ally of the Avengers! Your task is to stop the maniac Thanos, protect the artifacts and preserve their incredible power.

The fate of the Earth has never been more uncertain. If there is even the slightest chance of success, you must try to save the Universe…

Over the Christmas break we’ve been trying to make the most of our time to play more online games, it feels like we’ve been neglecting them in favour of real-life games lately, so it’s good to work through our ‘to play’ list. First up for one of the non-descript days between Christmas and New Year where all concept of time is lost, was The Avengers by Escape Quest, an Austrian escape room company.

If you’re a fan of the Marvel universe then the name of this game will be very familiar. I’d imagine if Disney ever got wind of this game then they may have some issues with the subject matter, but for now, this game is very much all things Avengers.

With no expectations and no idea of what this game was going to be like, we tentatively clicked to launch the game. It said that we could play on multiple devices so we booted up in Chrome on both our computers. This did work although we found that if one person solved the puzzle then the other person just needed to hit refresh to be pulled through to the next puzzle.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

The Avengers is made up of 10 levels of puzzles, each puzzle requiring one solution to move you on to the next. Having seen that this game could take up to two hours we were pleased to see that the game essentially saved itself after each completed puzzle and the timer didn’t resume until you hit ‘next’. This meant that you could solve as many or as few puzzles in one sitting as you liked. For us, we played through in one sitting and found the game took us around 38 minutes to complete.

This game is quite hard to explain as it didn’t feel like a traditional online escape room where you need to solve puzzles to find combinations etc, it was a bit of a hybrid and had elements that played out like an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). To make the game feel a little more epic there was a soundtrack that could be played through the browser which felt very Avengers-esque.

There was a timer prominently displayed on screen so we could see how long we had taken overall, but interestingly there also seemed to be a time limit for each question. I’ve no idea what would happen if the time limit for a puzzle reached zero but it certainly put us on edge simply knowing that it was there.

This game is available in German and English, we played in English and didn’t really find any issues with translations. Although saying that, there was one audio clip early in the game that was in German and we had no option to make it into English. It can’t have been important as we managed to solve the puzzle without it.

PUZZLES

This game was different, very different. Puzzles revolved around various tools on the internet (which were fair game and we were guided towards) but they all worked around the fictional story that Escape Quest had pieced together for The Avengers.

The skills that will most be tested when playing this game will be those related to internet research. Some puzzles had obvious signposting for where you needed to go, while others were much more cryptic. A number of tools are ones that you will likely be familiar with if you’ve played other ARG online escape rooms, but we certainly learned about a few tools that we didn’t know existed.

I believe the game said that it got harder as it went on but we found that it seemed to get easier for us. Of course, it could be that once we understood how we were supposed to play this game and use the internet, it became a bit easier to know where to look. The only puzzle we really struggled on was the first one, it felt rather random and we only came to the solution by going down a rabbit warren of an internet search.

CLUE SYSTEM

The Avengers was not only an interesting game thanks to it’s countdown clock on each question but the clue system was also different. Fortunately, we didn’t need to delve too deeply into the clue system but there were a couple of occasions where we needed to look at the first clue to make sure we were on the right path.

You technically can have a clue as soon as you start a puzzle, but if you do you will take a 10 minute time penalty (harsh?). If you’re willing to wait, I think for five minutes, then you can get the first hint for free. If you need another clue, you’ll again have to wait for another five minutes for it or take another 10 minute time penalty, and so on and so forth until all of the available hints have been taken.

I don’t have a clue what happens if you still can’t solve a puzzle after exhausting all of the hints as I couldn’t see any option for revealing a solution. If you play this game and either run out of time on a question or run out of hints, please do let us know what happens!

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m not really sure how we felt about this game. It was a challenge in places, and at times quite clever, but it didn’t feel like a traditional online escape room experience, it was more like a test in our internet researching skills (which we totally passed).

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Laptop/Desktop computer
• Speakers turned on
• Notepad for note taking
• Search Engine for internet research

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: 37:45 mins

Website: https://escapequest.at/

*Disclaimer: we weren’t charged for this experience, but this has not influenced our review.