Review Rundown: Two From London, One From NYC

Sometimes I’m feeling clever with the titles and the runup for the rundown, sometimes I’m not.

Guess what kind of week this is!

The good news is that this edition has two things you should check out if you are in or swinging through London and a field report from this past weekend for a piece, and a collective, that is now definitely on our radar. Which means it should be on your radar.

Looking for more to do in NYC? Want to get an interesting dance artist from Chicago on your radar? Check out last week’s edition for even more reviews.

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The Inquest — Jury Games
From £42.50; London UK; ongoing

Every couple of years, your number comes up: The Inquest offers a jury duty summons to investigate a suspicious death. Aided by your team, you’ll be guided through a collection of testimony and evidence while simultaneously guarding against case tampering — both from within and without.

A live reimagining of a lockdown-era Zoom-based production, The Inquest is single-room group-based puzzle solving at its most pure. All the pieces and resources are fully realised in the room: tactile and tangible props like laptops, evidence bags, purpose-built online databases and live phone numbers to outside sources. Our handlers (representatives from the Coroner’s Office) are engaged and experienced, encouraging curiosity where needed to advance the narrative while gently discouraging spending time on too many dead leads, and when the texts and calls start coming in our handlers are on the receiving end of significant attention.

Our crime: we were a bit too clever. Though our team was only made up of 4 players (Jury Games recommends around 6 with a maximum of 14) we had a couple veteran escape room experts in the room (myself not at all included). This led to a bit of quick jumping to one or two crucial plot points but our handlers expertly slowed the pace down to ensure the experience developed organically over the game time of 90 minutes.

An interesting point to be made here with very limited spoiler-esque notes: because we knew this was essentially a puzzle-solving game and we knew the show lasted 90 minutes, our team kept digging to discover evidence leading to the next level of motive. It’s entirely reasonable to anticipate that less-developed teams could come to different final verdict at the end of their time limit — a comfort to know that unlike an escape room, The Inquest allows for differing endings to the experience rather than just failing to reach the finish line, even if the replay value itself is low.

Appealing to alternate-reality gamers and escape room enthusiasts, The Inquest might be considered a quiet success: taking place in an unassumingly sterile location but chockablock with material. The experience suits young adults to seniors, corporate team building, hen/stag parties, etc, and while it’s not critical for everyone to actively participate at all times it’d be difficult not to be swept up in the enthusiasm: to do one’s civic duty and contribute to jury-based justice (theatrical or not).

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— Shelley Snyder, London Curator

Spring at the Peak: The Festival of Innovation — Phantom Peak
From £39.99; London UK; ongoing

If the season is changing, you can bet there’s a new narrative lineup over at Phantom Peak. This spring is no exception as the gates to both Old Town and New Town are thrown open to the Festival of Innovation, a celebration of the townsfolk’s ingenuity in developing the very quirkiest new ways to merge the cybernetic with steamworks as well as to venerate the noble platypus.

The usual Phantom Peak experience rules apply: 4–4.5 hours to roam the sprawling site and follow as many of the 10 new storylines you like, with a new collectible signature PP card waiting at the end — emphatic completionists can also unlock a special secret 11th trail, but it will likely take you multiple same-season visits to manage this. With such a lengthy runtime, it’s a good thing the on-site food and drink offerings continue to excel (particularly the decadent donuts. I’m a sucker for a good donut.)

While the layout of the venue hasn’t changed much for this season, the team has redecorated the large feature room for the festival (new clues and toys to play with) and included the fresh add-on experience of The Broken Chalice, a special puzzle-solving experience in a private space with an off-menu cocktail included. For only a couple pounds more than a standard mixed drink it’s a fun bit of extra play to further brighten the evening if you were going to have a drink anyway.

In general, Phantom Peak remains a steadfast and keystone immersive experience in London: if you’re coming through town you ought to hit it, and if you’re a local regular or an experience maker it’s nice to drop by a couple times per year to try some of the new storylines and be reminded that yes, the open-world immersive model does work long-term, provided you evolve and incentivise revisits, as Phantom Peak does.

— Shelley Snyder, London Curator

Up Until Now: midair for sometime — Up Until Now Collective
NYC; $10.00 — $50.00, March 22 & 23 Run Concluded

Up Until Now: midair for sometime is an experiment in multimedia installation, combining film, theater, and haptics in a 20 minute experience. Its theme is community: what forms it can take and how it can be inclusive. Inclusivity in the piece is particularly well-considered and thorough, and thus Up Until Now largely succeeds as a meditation on what forms connection can take.

Users don haptic suits consisting of vibrating devices on the back, wrists, and ankles, and then watch a short film about a young man entering a jungle and having a mythical experience with element spirits that conduct a ritual to transform him into a merman. When the film ends, two of its actors physically enter the space and interact with you through touch. Throughout the piece, subtitles, sign language, and spoken descriptions of filmed elements are used to embed accessibility into every aspect.

For the most part, this is effective. The most striking moment was the appearance of the actors after the film. There’s something magical about watching people you’ve just seen on screen manifest in the room with you, and the ritual of touch they perform is intimate and effective, the sign language flowing elegantly with the danced gestures. The film itself was well shot and compelling, although more care could have been put into the treatment of the spoken descriptions. Their timing and tone felt slightly off, and that made them a distraction from the quality of the film where they could have been a smooth addition. The haptic control was also hit-or-miss; much like a 4D film experience, the haptics worked well when smoothly integrated into the action (such as when the character is being caressed) but felt dissonant when there wasn’t a direct relationship.

Overall, though, this short piece was an effective exploration of what families can be and how care and intimacy can be nurturing and transformative. Not all the techniques of inclusivity were equally potent, but Up Until Now works, both in form and in content, as a brief vision of what accepting communities can be.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

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