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Word got out that there was a whistleblower wanting to meet. The company was suspicious, but this was the first overt notice that our place of work was corrupt. Should we investigate and see what ethics were being breached, or play dumb and stay loyal to the firm? We were divided.
I wanted to link with the informant — if something is amiss, we should know, even if it put our fast-rising career in jeopardy. But was that out of character for the avatar we had choosen?
This is the Ladder from Hatch Escapes, an interactive experience near Koreatown that explores corporate corruption. It opened this month and has become one of the most buzzed-about escape rooms in the country.
In 2018, Hatch Escapes debuted a highly regarded escape room in Lab Rat, a comedic horror show in which the roles of humans and test rodents are flipped. It’s a 60-minute game, with puzzles, an ending and, of course, a quest to break free. While it won praise for its mixing of digital and analog media, as well as its emphasis on storytelling, Lab Rat is still what many of us understand an escape room to entail.
Its follow-up, the Ladder, is not that.
For the past five years Los Angeles’ Hatch Escapes has been rethinking the escape room ground rules. The goal: to prove the an escape room is not mere entertainment but can, in fact, be experienced as a work of narrative art.
Think of the Ladder as a 90-minute interactive movie with puzzles, taking guests through five decades, beginning in the 1950s, in which they will play an exaggerated game of corporate life. Start in the mailroom, and work your way through secretarial and middle-management-themed areas, all the while mixing puzzles, games and choose-your-own-adventure-like choices.
You may find yourself playing a game of memory around digitally enhanced cocktail glasses, as our mid-level exec seemed more interested in company card perks than late nights with the books. Or perhaps you’ll choose to investigate a wall-long switchboard, listening to callers’ problems and trying to connect them with a solution. Elsewhere, in an area dedicated to the 1980s, Nintendo’s “Donkey Kong” gets remixed as “Bossy Kong,” with a suited villain rather than a gorilla trying...