The Rundown: NoPro’s Review Crew Surveys The Scene (4/27/21)

One big thing that’s changed over the course of the past year: there’s a LOT more work happening, and so much of it is online.

That means that the review crew here at NoPro has access to far more work than ever before, and even though we’ve grown a little it also means there’s too much to keep up with in a timely fashion. Plus there’s the whole “all volunteer effort” thing, which means that life and paid work gets in the way of filing full reviews.

So to keep us current, this week we kick off two new features. One is what you’re about to read: The Rundown — a survey of what our team has been seeing, playing, and visiting over the past week. When volume warrants it, The Rundown will be weekly. When it doesn’t, bi-weekly. Reviews are in the capsule format, which means that most will be around or under 250 words.

For some reviews, you’ll find links to the Full Review. Click through to dive into the nuances. Speaking of diving into the nuances…

This Wednesday we start a new weekly audio show in our Discord (join here) which will bring part of the team together — with the occasional special guest — to take a deeper dive into the immersive zeitgeist. This show will be livestreamed using Discord’s new Stages feature, and we’ll have the ability to “take calls” from the audience as part of the show. A recording will be made available to our Patreon backers. The first episode starts streaming at 6PM Pacific this Wednesday.

Okay. That’s enough preamble: let’s get to the reviews!

— Noah Nelson, Publisher

Accomplice Cyberquest — Accomplice

Accomplice Cyberquest is like the pub trivia of the online immersive world. It’s fast paced, it’s light, it costs about as much as drinking at a bar, and win or lose, it’s a pretty good time. A light story involving someone’s obnoxious Gen Z brother adds thematic coherence and structure to a fairly classic short online puzzle trail. I felt particularly old trying to figure out the Instagram interface for one puzzle, which made the fairly talented child actors’ barbs about being “slow boomers” sting slightly more than I would have expected.

While for a group of two fairly experienced puzzle fans, the evening flew by quickly, it’s about as challenging as a standard escape room, and is a great option for newer or younger players. Despite the puzzles being occasionally simple, they used a wide variety of online platforms and tools which kept the feeling fresh even to veterans of the genre. If you have a free evening, why not go? You’re guaranteed a few laughs and a fun challenge, and there are generous prizes to be had for experienced puzzle people. Just maybe bring your kid or young cousin and promise them $10 if you win. TikTok tweens will definitely be a useful tool.
— Blake Weil

Air Link — Oculus

This past week Oculus pushed out Air Link, a wireless option for playing PC VR games on the Oculus Quest 2. Yes, you will still need a PC to play the games — like Maskmaker, which I’m making my way through — but critically you will no longer need the damned cable.

This is a feature that was first found in the third-party app Virtual Desktop, but for the life of me after following the eleventy million step instructions and downloading and sideloading and carboloading I could never get it to work. Something about the wrong moon phase interfering with the number of Gs in my house… when I swore I had a full Unit. Anyway: that didn’t work. This does.

It’s not perfect. It will stutter on occasion. A plane flew over and the Museum of Other Realities had a minor freakout. BUT I’VE GOT NO STRINGS ON ME. Lord, but I hate headset tethers. Bravo, Oculus, for baking in this feature.
— Noah Nelson

Blackheart: Ghosts — Blackheart Collective

Plot and poetry don’t seem to be the main appeal of a Blackheart production; the Discord room is. Each character, out of their recitations, served to facilitate a chat room at all hours of the day. Not since pouring my teenage angst out on message boards have I been that disclosive to strangers, or had such an opportunity for radical empathy as I did during this experience. With the constant encouragement to wallow and go deeper into pain, I dug up pains I hadn’t thought of in years.
— Blake Weil, from his upcoming Full Review

The Caravan — Co-Reality Collective

The Caravan is Co-Reality Collective’s online party for one. Billed as a journey of self-discovery, this experience is tailor-made for people who miss Burning Man and want a (remote) space to connect with kindred spirits, dream-logic narratives, and a camel named Chaaba.

My time with Chaaba was filled with light-hearted improv, but — thanks to an especially enigmatic pre-show questionnaire — no two journeys will be the same. Want something heavier? That’s largely up to how you respond during your hour. “Push your comfort zone while delving into play, emotion, vulnerability, and elevation,” reads the flyer. “The more you put in, the more you will get out.”

Overall, I enjoyed my time with The Caravan, but I don’t feel like it delivered on its grandiose promise of becoming a place “where your wildest dreams can roam untamed” or where you might “lean yourself far past the limitless ledge.” For $95*, I wanted a more cohesive show with fewer narrative rails and a more nuanced approach to themes of morality and mental health.

There’s a sizable community of artists behind The Caravan, so it’s possible that the show will grow into itself over time. When that happens, I’ll come back to recommend it more universally. Until then, this is an experience for people who prefer their theatre playfully frenetic and their self-discovery borderline absurd.
— Leah Davis

*Financially inclusive ticketing is available upon request.

Dinner! Franny and Connor Write a Cookbook — Francesa Chilcote and Connor Hogan

The premise of the show is pretty simple, Franny and Connor are trying to finish a quarantine cookbook with a fast approaching deadline and they need your help. You (and one other person) can help them by letting them raid your kitchen, pantry, and fridge over Zoom so they can instruct you on whipping together some kind of recipe that they can include in their cookbook.

It ends up feeling like an episode of Chopped as they have to improvise based on what you’ve got laying around, what you feel like eating, and any dietary restrictions you mentioned in a pre-show survey. Despite no formal cooking experience, Franny and Connor have been coming up with interesting dishes since the show began running earlier this year.
— Kevin Gossett, from his upcoming Full Review

dream/home — Emerie Snyder

“I went for a walk and I got turned around, and I wanted to show you the things that I found.”

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-Emily Krause

Emerie Snyder’s dream/home is a lovely box of joyful possibility. Arriving in a USPS priority mail box (a vessel I am overwhelming familiar with due to mutual aid efforts), I was delighted to open the box and find the inside a magical silver instead of the traditional brown, transporting me into another idea of the world as we know it right from the start. The box contains a small, iridescent bag filled with a map, a stack of orange cards, and a handful of trinkets. The first instruction is to go on a walk and take the bag with you, so I donned my sunglasses and set on a sunsoaked spring afternoon. The experience is self guided with directions printed on the stack of cards. Some directions are practical, like picking a place to start, but there are many surprises within the deck that for me, led to some very happy accidents.

What dream/home does well is playing on the natural magic of the universe. There were many moments during my self guided experience that I found myself marveling in the strange ways the world works. I received a direction to look to my right and I happened to spot a bird, then the next card included directions about a bird. I received a direction to find something red and follow it, a neighbor happened to be walking by in a red sweatshirt. Are these glitches in the matrix or just the simple wonder that happens only if you look close enough? Maybe neither, maybe both, but magic nonetheless.
— Allie Marotta

Flow Weaver — Stitch Media

Leading up to Flow Weaver’s release, I was excited to play it. My two favorite VR games are I Expect You To Die and The Room VR: A Dark Matter. Both are high concept escape room-like puzzlers, requiring a keen-eye and critical thinking to play. From the promo materials and trailers, Flow Weaver appeared to be a perfect peanut-butter and chocolate combination of those two games — I Expect You To Die’s stationary seating where everything is within “reach” paired with The Room VR’s focus on tone and genre worldbuilding.

On this high-level comparison, before delving too far into its specific play-by-play functionality, Flow Weaver is a worthy addition in the VR escape room game catalog.
— Patrick McLean, from his FULL REVIEW

Gremlin! — Mirror World Creations

I’ve praised Mirror World’s work before, especially the performance of Tristin Rutherford, the voice actor in both Gremlin! and The Midnight Market. But Rutherford was unable to shine in Gremlin!, and I think this largely comes down to the length of this bite-sized phone LARP.

Gremlin! takes place over 20 minutes, a very short amount of time to understand GoRknUT, the titular gremlin’s backstory, do (or don’t do, in my case) a magic trick, and resolve the LARP in a way that is satisfying for the player. Everything was incredibly rushed, and though the plot could have explained this it felt more like Rutherford was trying to tick all the boxes in our 20 minute call than the authentic frenzy of a trapped gremlin with a very short window to escape an evil witch.

In a Medium post, Betsy Eye, the director of Mirror World Creations, wrote that she created Gremlin! as a marketing gimmick — and that’s exactly what it feels like. Except, usually, people don’t have to pay $15 to be marketed to.

But more importantly, what I’ve sampled of Mirror World’s longer phone LARPs is better than Gremlin! I’d love to see Gremlin! expanded into a longer piece that allows Mirror World’s talented voice actor to take the player on a journey that is more enjoyable, more cohesive, and less rushed. After all, GoRknUTs deserves to break free — and there are many players who’d like to help him do so. But 20 minutes just isn’t enough.
— Cheyenne Ligon

itchy-O’s NOISE BATH series — itchy-O

Whether you’ve been practicing meditation for a long time or you’re one of those people (like me) who never really got the hang of it, itchy-O’s new guided meditation streams are worth checking out. Described in Denver Westword as a project made just for their “very special fan base of spiritual misfits,” the Noise Bath Series is meant to be inclusive and accessible to everyone and “free of any dogma or ‘ick’ many of us find when searching for tools to practice meditation.”

This is best experienced as a solo activity in a comfortable space free of distractions with low lighting. Headphones or earbuds are “recommended” by itchy-O, but I’d say they’re required for full effect. During the meditation sequence, at first glance, not much happens on screen; just a colored rune from itchy-O’s ancient, mystic lore pulsating and rotating over and over again. But with my eyes closed and my face close to the screen, the back of my eyelids lit up in perfect synchronization with the ambient noise filling my ear canals.

After guided breathwork, body scans and an “anchoring” sequence, the narrator stepped away to let me focus on the audio frequencies while continuing to simultaneously look at them strobe through the back of my eyelids. This second half of the noise bath, less structured and more free flowing, gave me the same relaxed and gratifying sensations I get during savasana, while the other-worldly buzzes and hums invoked an extra terrestrial awareness that had me floating through space in my mind.

Noise Bath Sessions are available for $15 per session OR you can gain access to them all (plus a whole lot more, including love letters and holiday cards from itchy-O) when you join their Patreon at the Entropic Benefactor level for just $6 per month.
— Danielle Look

Room Service: The Witching Hour — Cafe Nordo

This sweet and spooky treat from Seattle’s Cafe Nordo brings to mind a night of 90’s VCR game mischief for the gothically inclined. While the puzzles aren’t so difficult that die-hard puzzlers will be fully satiated, there are delicious devils in the details.

The Witching Hour is a tongue-in-cheek ritual romp shipped with drinks and dessert. Postal regulations mean that the national Room Service options are shipping mocktails, but the Fairy Mine Pine (a particularly delightful gluten free Chocolate Chess affair) is a stellar offering, and your own liquor cabinet can pinch hit if need be. Yet the real standout here is the ephemera.

Cafe Nordo’s Room Service team has built out a charming mythology across the puzzles, handouts, and videos that make up the narrative of The Witching Hour. A fun world of fairies and fears which is anchored well but the quality of the graphic design and other elements inside the box. While the tone is delightfully comic, the commitment to the bit is absolute. A word to the wise: make sure to advance the video every time you are given the opportunity to do so — each “spell” (puzzle) has a bit of incidental music to accompany it, the page for which also holds links to hints if you need them.
— Noah Nelson, Full Review forthcoming

TM — Ontroerend Goed

This 1:1 interactive experience with Belgium company Ontroerend Goed starts off sounding like a cult initiation with requisite personality questionnaire and goes to unexpected places; the screening criteria for who is allowed to join “TM” begins like a strange, somewhat alarming interview and ends up as an exploration of, well, everything. The company is also to be commended for their use of the platform Ohyay; kudos to the design and technology team who has managed to strip away almost all of the “chrome” around a webcam-driven experience such that it is nearly impossible to tell what moments are live with an actor and what scenes are recorded. (Zoom could never.) — Kathryn Yu

The Visitation — Stephanie Fleischmann, Christina Campanella, and Mallory Catlett

The Visitation is a location-based sound walk in Harlem, New York that uses a mixture of music, poetry, and historical context to present a mystical interpretation of a one-antlered deer that appeared in Jackie Robinson Park in 2016. The narrative is geolocated to the park using the app Gesso; the timings were generally on point and the user experience was quite seamless. I thought that the strongest moments of the experience were when the story was connected to specific points in the park, such as when we heard where the deer entered and exited the park and saw photographs of the deer within the app. The ending was particularly sweet, in which we were led in front of an apartment building that bordered the park, where we told a vignette of a woman who lives there who had a dream about the deer and remembers the day that it died.

However, there were numerous weaknesses that detracted from the overall experience. It was confusing when the historical narration shifted from Jackie Robinson Park and the surrounding Harlem neighborhood, to the history of North Brother Island, a small uninhabited island between the Bronx and Rikers Island. The tenuous connection was the possibility that the deer stopped at the island while it was swimming to Manhattan. The symbol of deer was used as a connecting thread; the sound walk cited deer in Greek mythology, indigenous traditions, and a painting of a deer by J.W. Audubon. This thread at times seemed a bit random, especially when the historical context left the neighborhood.

There were a number of songs about different peoples’ experiences of the deer (presumably based on real encounters during the deer’s 2016 stay). The songs were delightful, but per the audio instructions the listener was often left standing or sitting for a few minutes while listening to the song, which was too long. The music would have been stronger if it had been interspersed with the narration as sound design, or presented as an album to listen to while walking around the park. Last, I think that it was presumed that the audience would care about the deer, but not enough work was done to make the listener understand why this was such a momentous occasion and why it made such an impression.
— Alexa Burke

We Still Fax — ANTS Theatre

The premise of WE STILL FAX is that an alternate dimension which never developed the internet is reaching out to us for help — therefore, all the communications must come via telephone or fax. God help me, I thought we’d left this relic in the 90’s where it might be consigned to a dignified and dusty place in the annals of technologic history. But no: along with its continued usage in American healthcare even in this the year of our Lord 2021 (which I’d be surprised if UK-based ANTS Theatre would even know, given how advanced the NHS is), one is now sitting in my house, bolted atop a mysterious clear case sporting several tempting buttons, padlocks, and complex antennae. I want to touch everything and nothing and I can’t wait to get started.
— Shelley Snyder, from her FULL REVIEW

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