Immersive Review Rundown: Of Mindscapes & Multiverses

Look, it feels surreal to be dropping theatre, selfie palace, and VR reviews while sitting in a very calm part of Los Angeles (like most parts of Los Angeles) while the United States Federal government pretends that things are in such a crisis that they have to bend & break the law because they really want TV news footage of Marines in the streets.

But our job here is to put out reviews of plays, selfie palaces, and games. To cover culture as both source of meaning and an industry. In fact we’re a little defeated if we DON’T do our job. Yet don’t get it twisted: things are NOT GOOD in the United States from a whole “functioning democracy” standpoint right now.

Which isn’t exactly going to do wonders for the toursim, entertainment, and culture industries. Because all of that is downstream from basic freedom of expression and the ability to assemble. Like, those two things are FUNDAMENTAL if you want to have immersive theatre, theme parks, and escape games. Maybe we can share XR experiences in private, but there are whole surveillance apparatuses tied into the internet that make THAT trickier than you’d think.

If you’re wondering why this has gotten into your weekly immersive review roundup: well, DHS employees laid hands on a US Senator today. Then pretended like they didn’t know who he was. Try thinking of anything else while that’s going on in your city.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.

— NN

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Paradox Museum London — Fever
From £20; London UK; ongoing

Other people besides me get the overwhelming urge to lie down on the ceiling of the Underground, otherwise they wouldn’t have built a way for us to do it.

…right?

Just across the street from Harrods stands the Paradox Museum: the London branch of this international attraction (13+ sites worldwide) provides guests with a diverting and reliable hands-on insta-friendly hour-or-so. Over 50 exhibits — maybe around 20 or so are properly interactive, the rest being instructive — teach visitors about conceptual and visual inconsistencies with photogenic graphics and touchables.

More of a funhouse than a museum, this permanent installation is a solid half-day-out option for families with pre-teenage children and school groups, or particularly photo-hungry punters. With edutainment principles at its core and an accessible venue, science & visual arts enthusiasts will appreciate the in-person demonstration of many of the mental exercises often only read about or only seen on film sets: forced perspective furniture making giants & hobbits out of humans, zero-gravity effects, spinning-room vertigo. My companion and I particularly enjoyed the upside-down subway station and the Mirror Maze, inciting a type of delight not felt outside a seaside sideshow.

The Paradox Museum is essentially experiential art: light, shadow, colour, reflections, size and space all vying with each other to produce affect upon the viewer(s). Bring a friend as many of the interactable pieces are only observable as the non-participant and several exhibits are only viable with the help of a camera providing the inhuman third eye required to record the visual difference between two human forms (phone mounts are available at the most popular spots).

A nice morning or afternoon spent in Knightsbridge around your Harrods Food Halls visit (and particularly good for rainy days or half-term), the Paradox Museum is a funky little attraction to drop by to challenge your other senses.

— Shelley Snyder, UK Curator

Selina: Mind at Large — Trotzkind
$29.99 — Remote (VR, Meta Quest Only) — Available Now

Exclusively available on the Quest, Selina: Mind at Large (S:MaL) is a VR narrative puzzle experience from German based studio Trotzkind. After becoming separated from her family due to a tragedy, Selina meets Aniles and quickly forms a close bond. Yet Aniles commits a betrayal that cuts Selina so deep, it infects her mind and memories. It falls to the player to help Selina reconnect the flow of her memories within her mental dreamscape to remove Aniles’ dark influence.

While S:MaL’s magical storybook-like narrative starts slowly, it quickly delves into rich, relatable family themes interlaced with harsh realities of growing up against painful tragedies. This tone is perfectly balanced, Selina and Aniles’ gut-wrenching struggle leveled out by the child toy wonderland setting and aesthetic. This is a story about looking back through the bad to remember the good, a difficult act to perform when young.

Additionally, Trotzkind tells this narrative excellently, showcasing prodigious storytelling skills. Enough details are provided regarding Selina’s history and her dynamic with Aniles but nothing is spelled out, allowing the player to draw their own conclusions, including self-reflective ones. Finally, bringing S:MaL’s emotional journey together is Misa D’Angelo’s performance. D’Angelo breathes life into Selina, imbuing lively wonderment and enthusiasm into the dialogue.

As a puzzle experience, essentially each puzzle is the same (with slight variations) as the player must guide the flow of water through a room. The complication is that the water must flow UP or AROUND walls and corners to reach its end point. Fortunately, the player is imbued with powers that allow them to rotate the room’s orientation and tools that permit the water’s flow to disregard gravity. Typically, if the player simply stops and thinks about the room for a moment, the solution becomes apparent making it perfect for beginners.

Having S:MaL’s puzzle design rely on the environment is truly a breathtaking usage of VR. It’s a gratifying feeling to explore a digital space with (seemingly) no boundaries, freely moving in an improbable way to reach an impossible place. Also, rotating environments allows the player to easily note the narrative and aesthetic design choices. There are many subtle storytelling details scattered throughout S:MaL, so the player is constantly rewarded either with solving a puzzle or organically making discoveries about Selina and her life.

Unfortunately, even for a Quest experience, S:MaL is a rough, patchy game. When loading between areas, dialogue is regularly cut off and subtitle text doesn’t always appear. An element repeated its animation when returning to an environment. And while in the last area, a few environmental elements did load at all. While there’s nothing game breaking present, there’s simply too many noticeable issues to let slide.

Worst, Selina’s character model and animation is tragically lacking. The lip movement and dialogue are rarely in sync. Even when the player is locked in a stationary position, Selina looks off center, over their shoulder. And while she is known to fly around occasionally, Selina still floats when her feet are (supposedly) planted on the ground. While these are common VR issues, the player is supposed to bond and empathize with Selina and these technical issues make that impractical. It’s heartbreaking to mention and while possible to excuse, these issues sadly heavily detract from S:MaL’s other wonderful elements.

While being far from the most polished, smoothest experience, Selina: Mind at Large has a tremendously thoughtful, emotional narrative laced throughout its unique puzzle design. Immersive audiences will thoroughly enjoy the deftly craft story and marvelous world design, though is weighted down by deficient character animation.

– Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator & Remote Experiences Editor

Last Call’s Worlds Collide — Last Call Theatre (At The Hollywood Fringe)
$27.50; Los Angeles; through June 27

The latest Hollywood Fringe season offering from Last Call Theater is a distillation of their formula that plays heavily into the company’s greatest strength — their very game cast of improvisers — and rewards audiences who are willing to pick up the ball and run with it. Yet I suspect it will be hard for those who aren’t familiar with the last calls game to pick up and play.

Get into it.

As opposed to setting up an elaborate story world for this production the last Call Theatre team has the audience pick a setting, genre, conflict, and characters out of a hat at the top of the show. The cast then goes and rifles through costumes, and comes back out and introduces themselves in character.

It is, in a word, clunky. This isn’t a polished immersive experience but instead a LARP-lite sandbox. For the preview run the setting was a 1920’s mobster nightclub with a side of horror, and the conflict was a power struggle. The audience was assigned the role of being members of the mob. “Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi” is one of the standard LARP plots, so figuring out a general direction to play in was simple. But then again, I used to run LARPs, spent the better part of a decade doing Johnstonian improv, and have a theatre degree.

While I was able to quickly have a blast by making big choices — like misunderstanding the concept of a gluten allergy because I was a mobster in 1923 and thus asking everyone if they were fine with horse meat for dinner — the guy literally standing next to me at the start of the show didn’t get nearly as engaged. In part that was because he was wearing an orange lanyard which the company had offered as a option for those who just wanted to observe, but that almost went out the window when one of the actors failed to notice he was wearing one and tried to loop him in anyway.

Frankly, I’m not sure what someone would get out of just watching the antics, as there was literally no plot and not even that much in terms of showy performance beats.

Paradoxically, I had more fun at this than I’ve had at other Last Call shows because there was no elaborate lore underlying the scenario. This meant that both the actors and the audience were free to BS and make things up as we went along. The freedom of not having to worry about getting something “wrong” was wonderful, and it really showed that the secret to Last Call’s success is how good their actors are.

That said I can’t imagine someone who doesn’t go in for some heavy make believe is going to get much out of this. A little onboarding at the top, along with the rules, that make it clear how one can play with the performers would go a long way… and maybe set a new standard for how Last Call brings audience members into their worlds, colliding or otherwise.

— Noah Nelson, Founder & Publisher

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