The Most Emotional Quest
“These people are batshit crazy”.
This was my first reaction after testing and completing “The Most Emotional Quest.”
I’ll start with a bit of background on what city quests are. In Sofia, they have a history of over 5 years and exist in two main formats – I call them adventures and quests. Adventures focus more on the experience, involving actors and roles and putting you in non-everyday situations. Adventures like NO FACE Events and their See Beyond adventure, Room 66 and their scenarios Paparazzi and Stars, Act in the Park, and Experiment 66, Bulgarian Treasure with my favorite to this day Shopsko Treasure, Questopia, and the ùest Silence of the Lambs. The other type of urban quest, like the Night Watch, usually relies on more complex puzzles, providing satisfaction when you engage your brain to the max and solve the task. If you want a stroll and more fun, the first type of adventure is for you. If you’re not particularly interested in immersing yourself in the atmosphere but enjoy challenges, solving complex puzzles, and competing to win, the second type is your kind of entertainment.
Unfortunately, a significant part of these formats were one-time events and did not reappear on the market. Night Watch also ceased its activities, leaving fans of complex puzzles without a platform. On the other hand, Room 66’s formats have remained stable on the market and, for the second year, offer outdoor adventures.
The main problem if you’re a fan of such adventures is that once you’ve played the route, you don’t have the option to replay it. This is usually the problem with Fury as well; we can never get enough adventures. So when our friends from King’s Room and Puzzlenarium Room told us they were organizing an outdoor adventure, I eagerly awaited the invitation to test it.
What surprised me the most was the scale of the production. Let’s start with the inventory. In the beginning, your team receives wristbands, making you recognizable to enemies and friends. Since you are in competition with many other teams, the colored bands indicate who is in the game. When you play at night on the streets of Sofia, it’s not always easy to distinguish reality from your imagination or that of the organizers; here, you have a clear indication of when the competition is around. You have to speak quietly and conspire with your teammates without allowing someone to breathe down your neck and take valuable information from you. You also receive a super-useful inventory, cleverly arranged. The items won’t help you solve puzzles, but they will give you that “AHA!” moment because you will know exactly when and where to use part of it. Besides being beautifully and conveniently designed, it personally gave me the feeling of a video game when you assemble the stick with the rope, and it becomes a fishing rod to catch a fish to bring it to the mermaid, who gives you the herb to bring to the shaman, and then… I got carried away; I think you understand what I mean.
Let’s talk about the locations. Scattered over a considerable part of Sofia and its surroundings, some of the locations surprised me tremendously. Each place offers its atmosphere and tells its story. I didn’t understand why the competition is called “The Most Emotional Quest,” but after playing it, it became clear because the puzzles and the adventure take you to places where you get intoxicated by magic, in another location, adrenaline rushes through your veins, and at another place, you meet historical figures or try to solve the mysteries of seemingly everyday situations while juggling with mellons (for example, or not).
The puzzles were wonderfully combined. We couldn’t solve two of them without a hint. Which gave us a feeling of challenge, overly easy quests turn into a simple car race, which is not the goal of this event. Overly difficult puzzles, on the other hand, lower the team’s morale and create a very tense mood. The balance here is perfectly struck, and I believe that if you are not too proud to pick up the phone and ask where you’re going wrong, you will have the opportunity to finish first. Some of the easy tasks are designed to stimulate your creative and artistic side or test your dexterity and what you remember from childhood. The difficult ones will force you to learn new facts from the Internet, but in any case, I can tell you that while running somewhere on the central streets of Sofia with your friends, you will have a lot of fun. A lot 🙂
Of course, we can’t forget the actors engaged in keeping you in the mood, making your task more challenging, easier, or crazier. Without giving away too much, I’ll mention that at each location, there are people whose only goal is to immerse you in a movie. In one of the tasks, there is a music-related puzzle, and if you don’t get excited about the scale of the endeavor there, I don’t know what to tell you, except that such kinds of games are not for you. It wasn’t easy for these actors, especially with a team like ours; we subjected them to all sorts of things to extract the right information. I’ll leave you only with the picture of Dimitar, ready for action. I don’t know how no one actually challenged us to a fight…
The people who made this quest put a lot – effort, dedication, and thought. Solely with one goal: to take you out of the gray and dull everyday life for a few hours. How often can you boast that after a crazy day at the office, you have the opportunity to jump directly into a Hollywood action adventure? And then go home and go to bed as winners 🙂
We didn’t win the competition; I personally was part of the Fury 2 team, and we were surpassed not only by Fury 1 but also by several other teams. And even though I hate to lose, for me, it was a great pleasure to stretch Stanka’s (a blue jeep with the bad luck to be named that way) tires, shout like crazy, “Run, don’t look at me, run, I’m telling you,” on the yellow pavements, and in the end, have a beer with the organizers to tell them how lucky I am to know them and that they do what they are doing best – entertainment. Because it’s done with heart.
The next edition of “The Most Emotional Quest” is on October 4th. You still have time to sign up! 🦸♀️🦸🦹