Climb ‘The Ladder’ To Discover The Next Stage In Immersive Gaming (The NoPro Review)
Hatch Escape’s long-anticipated new room remixes the idea of an escape game into an arcade/story mashup
When people talk about The Ladder, they may describe it as an escape room, but that’s not quite right. Like its neighbor at Hatch Escapes, The Nest, it has elements of an escape room: there are puzzles to solve, things to look for and find, and rooms to move between. And, like The Nest, The Ladder has ideas on its mind that go beyond the known escape room tropes.
As The Ladder begins, you and your group choose a new employee at Nutricorp, a vitamin company, as your avatar. Your goal is to help your avatar climb the corporate ladder in whatever way you see fit, whether that’s through earning money, engaging in corporate shenanigans, or by deciding on another path for your employee.
As you progress through the experience, you’ll move through the years (each room represents a decade of time) and complete tasks to earn money or solve puzzles to dive deeper into the story of Nutricorp. In between decades, you’ll get new story beats and decide how your avatar reacts to what’s going on. Based on your success at completing tasks and solving puzzles and choices you make about your avatar’s life, your story will unfold over 90 or so minutes.
If you’re thinking that this sounds like a video game, well, you’re on the right track. Coming back to the comparison to The Nest again; if that experience plays like Gone Home, The Ladder plays like a cooperative Mario Party. In each room, there are usually three activities that will earn your group money and one puzzle that will help advance the story of Nutricorp. The activities are variations of things you’ve done before or games you’ve played, which makes it easier to jump in as soon as you move to a new space. The puzzles are more involved and require dedicated attention from a few members of your group.
That all serves to create a fundamental tension between earning money for your avatar and advancing your career that way, or by solving the puzzles to gain information and unraveling the lore, which serves to advance your career in a different direction. Depending on how much money you earn, what information you gain, and the choices you make, you’ll receive one of a handful of different endings.
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I realize I’ve spent a ton of time just explaining what this experience is and how it works, but it’s helpful to understand because of how thoughtfully all of these elements are put together: The Ladder is carefully crafted to make sure people are always having fun.
Each room is fully decked out to match its decade (special shoutout to the 1980s), and the activities are nicely aligned to the vibe of each room and where you are in your career. Those activities are relatively simple, but a ton of fun (special shoutout to the 1990s) and easy for players to jump between at any point. While some of our group were racing through a puzzle, I spent my entire time in one room gleefully playing a giant version of Boggle, unaware of how that puzzle was being solved.
Did you catch that bit about multiple endings? That’s right, The Ladder is also meant to be replayable (in fact, Hatch Escapes doesn’t expect groups to be able to solve every puzzle in their first go). For repeat players or those who do manage to solve all of the puzzles, there’s even a bonus room that offers extra story moments (this room was still not open as of our visit).
Thankfully, there’s so much to enjoy in The Ladder that returning to it to get a different ending or playing it a different way feels like an easy choice to make.
The Ladder is open now at Hatch Escapes and tickets start at $75 per person.
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