REVIEW RUNDOWN: The Past, Present, And Future Of Immersive Is Now

This week we’re in Seattle, take a quick trip to the recent past in Hollywood, and a trip to the near future of what could be in your post box via Kickstarter.

Let’s get to it.

NoPro is 100% reader & listener supported. Join our Patreon campaign to secure & expand our coverage of Everything Immersive! Get the NoPro Newsletter and access to our Discord when you do. You can also GIFT memberships.

Want more? Check out our most recent edition and our REVIEWS section.

Check out our How To Get Covered By NoPro guide to submit your events & experiences for review.

Want to get listed in our newsletter?
Submit a listing to Everything Immersive.

The Double — Witness
$42–62; Seattle; through Aug. 10

The Double by Witness is the perfect show for people who think immersive theater might not be for them or aren’t sure what it is — and that’s a compliment. Set in between Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood and the Stadium at LIT immersive, the audience is dropped into a familiar-yet-unsettling tech office

Loosely adapted from Dostoyevsky’s novella of the same name, The Double opens with a small amount of time to explore the small cubicle farm, read other people’s desk notes, and wonder where the forks and plates are for the cake in the fridge. The majority of the narrative unfolds through recorded “interviews” that play on office monitors with eerie conference room sequences helping further the story, but it’s not always clear whose experience you’re watching. Driven by what feels like a voyeuristic intrusion, the audience is never directly addressed but you’re definitely implicated.

The set design hits just the right note of uncanny and the use of the conference room space is clever, making part of the experience feel like being inside a memory you can’t quite place. Not everything was perfect — the audio sync with the video monitors had a noticeable drift the night I attended — but it was damn good.

The Double earns its extension and then some. It’s a clever, eerie experience that lingers long after you’ve clocked out.

— Rachel Stoll, Seattle Correspondent

Emerald Echoes — PostCurious
$69; Tabletop; Now Crowdfunding

At the heart of Emerald Echoes, the latest Puzzletale from PostCurious by designers Rita Orlov and Chelsea Stark (with a special thanks to Mark Larson), is a beautifully rendered story about the connections we make with other people, and just how far we’ll go to get them back.

Get No Proscenium’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

To get there, of course, requires solving quite a few conundrums and maybe tearing out a few hair follicles along the way.

Divided up into four chapters split into separate envelopes, Emerald Echoes is framed as a tale within a tale, as the players — in this case player, me — pour over unearthed records detailing the lives of two women, an alchemist named Marketa and her now estranged friend Hannah, whose troubled history at the start of the story motivate our two unnamed researchers to begin poking around in things that their boss would apparently rather not have them disturb.

The backstory is an allusion, it would seem, to The Emerald Flame, a previous PostCurious game of which Emerald Echoes is the sequel. To its credit, the character and story beats are clear enough that I wasn’t at a loss as to who was who when it came to the characters whose past we were researching, even though I never played the original game.

I will confess, however, that I was a bit less clear when it came to the characters who were doing the researching. For the whole of the first chapter of the game, I wasn’t sure if the characters in the “Analysis” dialog, which also doubles as the hint system, were supposed to us — the players — or if they represented communications that we had found. I went back and looked at the instructions, and was still, ah, puzzled. This would keep me at a bit of a remove for most of the game, as it was some time before I knew what my relationship was to the collection of records as an object. (Maybe this was the review copy I had? Things happen!)

That remove slowed my pace down, and instead of plowing through, I took a couple of nights to complete the game, leaning a bit more on the hint system than I usually do. Part of this, I confess, could have been the circumstances under which I played the game. It’s stress city over here, and I tackled it solo under rather isolated conditions. Playing a game about relationships by yourself when you’re feeling stressed out and alone, well, not exactly conducive to connecting to the material.

With that in mind, while you can tackle this solo, I suspect it’s much better when there’s someone to talk over and read the various parts with. Maybe even assigning roles, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. It’s the kind of thing I’m into, and if given the chance, knowing what I know now, I’d do that in a heartbeat.

There’s also a real variety to the puzzle types that will challenge many varieties of brains. One early puzzle will either absolutely delight or infuriate you depending on how your visual cortex is wired. (FTR: I was definitely amused.)

The reward at every turn is the writing, as scribe Lauren Bello renders the voices of the multiple point-of-view characters in the story with an alchemical skill of her own. There’s real life in these characters, and a world that shimmer just off the page.

— Noah Nelson, Founder & Publisher

Escape! The Great Specific Garbage Catch — Dorm Scapes & fear our invasion
Hollywood Fringe; Run Concluded

Part Gen Z dialog on the looming climate apocalypse, part interactive narrative on… well, the same — Escape! The Great Specific Garbage Catch — works far more than it doesn’t, showing some early playwright jitters inside a solid structure with just enough interactivity to keep things from feeling gimmicky or needlessly in the way. Let’s be honest: that’s a feat in and of itself as this show keeps the pace up pretty much the whole way through without it feeling forced or frantic.

Things kick off as the audience enters the space and we are given a quick escape game-style briefing by one of the producers, splitting the audience up into two “teams,” which mostly serves to give audience members jurisdiction over different sides of the stage. We’re informed of a series of audio cues which will let us know whether or not we are supposed to interact with the set at a given time, have accomplished our task at the moment, or are supposed to just sit and listen. On the run I went to, one of the earliest at this year’s Hollywood Fringe during the only weekend it was showing, the system worked for the most part.

In the center of the stage, a performer is shackled to a weight inside of the middle of an elaborate spiral of plastic garbage representative of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from which the show derives its name. Our first task was to sort plastic scraps into matching colored buckets, which progressed us onto a monologue. The dynamic of the show plays out in this fashion: monologues and dialogs punctuated by light puzzling sequences that unlock the next, but from the actors, which themselves can take different formats.

The format switches add some delight to the mix, as does the production designs found object DIY aesthetic, even as the subject matter borders on doomerism. Indeed, if there’s some unease in the garbage patch, it's when the momentum of the show turns a little too inward in that way that early works can, where the text starts to question whether or not there’s a point in even putting the work up. It’s a phase a lot of playwrights go through, but it doesn’t always translate well onto the stage, as the instinct is there to hit something metatextual, but we’re still left with just words to do the job.

That said, there’s a lot of promise in that is on display here from this crew, although a longer run somewhere would likely need to pare down just how many people are involved in running the show. For a Fringe production, this is what we like to see: big ideas, executed with gusto. So: bravo.

— Noah Nelson, Founder & Publisher

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord! You can also GIFT memberships.

In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.