Seize the Show’s ‘Rubix Control’ Can’t Hide Its True Colors (Review)

In 1963, Doris Day and James Garner made The Thrill of It All, an incredibly dated, fairly doofy romantic comedy about a woman bullied out of her successful career in advertising by her husband. I bring up this film to point to one particular scene which feels like it must play out at Seize the Show regularly: a marketing agency goon shows his coworker a new soap ad set in the Old West. The coworker asks, “Doesn’t this look exactly like our last ad?” “Don’t worry,” says the agency goon, “the average audience is not sophisticated enough to notice the similarities.” Smash cut to two children, pointing at the TV, playing said ad. “It’s the same story, they’re just wearing different costumes!”

I regret to inform you, I will be playing the role of the two gesturing children in tonight’s production of Rubix Control: A Seize the Show Escape Room.

(Some minor spoilers follow.)

Rubix Control is the latest endeavor from Seize the Show leveraging their “Gamiotics” system. Think Jackbox Games-style phone inputs informing a live performance. Each scene typically has one small game or quiz. But this time, the Gamiotics system has been contorted to support an escape room. You and your fellow theatre-goers are a crack team of interns, sent in to rescue the crew of the “Rubix,” an ever shifting, cube-shaped space station. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel like I was still jumping down the streets of Broadway. Despite the change in setting, mechanically, it still felt like the last production of theirs I saw, All About Evil, even culminating in a similar murder mystery-style parlor scene to identify a traitor in the crew. Note: a set dressing does not change the fundamentals of a piece.

And is Rubix Control even an escape room? A lot of this boils down to debatable semantics: what is an “escape room,” really? I’d argue that an escape room is a game in which you, the player, collaborate with a team to solve a series of puzzles and challenges with the goal of progression towards an ultimate objective, be it an “escape” from a space or solution to a problem, all in a limited amount of time. Having been birthed online with free online Flash games like The Crimson Room, I see no problem with a virtual escape room. But the Gamiotics system is something far flatter than the texture and exploration which give an escape room its central pleasures. Spoiler: three out of five puzzles here were static images, eventually solved through a single multiple choice prompt. One puzzle even got interrupted without warning for story purposes, never to be resumed.

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I do have to applaud the two puzzles in Rubix Control that broke the mold; they used the fact that each player was on a computer or phone to their advantage. However, each of the two required the use of external web applets. While in most circumstances I wouldn’t see an issue with incorporating third party tech, the fact that the only two enjoyable segments of Rubix Control broke away from the seemingly fundamentally central Gamiotics system raises the question why it was used in the first place. Perhaps the rationale is less a creative decision than a business one: Seize the Show is the production arm of the company producing the Gamiotics system, currently seeking investors through the Seize the Show web site.

The story of the evening also left me a little cold. On paper, I like the idea of rescuing a wacky crew from a malevolent AI controlling their spaceship. The issue comes when you’re informed that there’s a traitor onboard the ship a la Among Us or Werewolf. Identifying the traitor becomes your primary concern, and as the advertisements say, you can happily play again because there’s a new killer every week. In retrospect, this same problem plagued All About Evil. Each character was forced to remain paper-thin in order to be able to swap them into the murderer role as needed. But where that show was saved by the color of Broadway history, Rubix was adrift and lacking cultural touchpoints, making the story feel hollow and uncompelling.

Rubix Control is an interesting experiment for at-home immersive. The acting is campy but fun and the price is reasonable. But why an “escape room”? Why try to twist a perfectly decent game engine into something it’s not? While, of course, this could just be a creative misfire, the cynical side of me suspects this is a misguided attempt to prove the versatility of Gamiotics to the aforementioned potential investors. Fundamentally, though, the underlying motive doesn’t matter, because it’s audiences, not the money people, who end up dealing with the subpar product.

Will I attend another Seize the Show production? Maybe, if it touches on themes that tickle my personal obsessions. But I’ll go in eyes open. It’s likely going to be the same show, and well, I can honestly say: I’m just here for the different costumes.

Rubix Control continues through February 20. Tickets are $16.99

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