Sutekh sends one of the Totems as a package to two of the researchers involved, Dr. Piper and Dr. Baker of the Phoenix Division, who are taken by surprise, killed and stripped of their souls by the foul creature.

One of the researchers, a talented young man named Rick Myers, is working as a caretaker at the Bodega Bay Inn and has also been using it for a place to conduct his experiments on the A.I.

Fascinated by the puppets' spontaneous reactions, and believing that the formula is the answer to the running AI projects, Rick wants to see how smart they are by playing a laser tag game with Pinhead and Tunneler.

Cameron, who is competing with Rick for success, tries to use the formula's secret for his personal gain, and he and Lauren decide to use a strange gameboard found in the trunk to try and contact Toulon for its exact composition, whose recipe was not recorded in the diary.

Screen Rant ranked Puppet Master 4 as "a little more past the halfway point between perfect and awful", calling it "more confusing than the already convoluted chronology of the entire series".

[1] Billboard magazine pointed out that while "[depicting] the once-fearsome puppets as good guys" made them less frightening, "the artfully designed remain uncannily creepy".