Pressure Project 2 – Escape Otherworld
Posted: February 8, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »I’ve been to Otherworld some years ago so I was excited to go back. It’s a really strange space, but that’s what’s interesting about it, especially when I was able to find patterns or “figure out” a room. There were a few rooms that drew my attention at first. One was the mush-room (really funny joke). What I found interesting in it was the cow room, which had a very Legend of Zelda puzzle in it. Basically, there are six colored levers attached to a machine that itself is attached to the cow’s utters, and there is an order in which you need to pull the levers in order to get some effect. It was interesting to see how people would solve this puzzle, if they did at all (and a lot didn’t, mostly because they didn’t stay in the room long enough to realize that anything was afoot), but there were two notable instances. Sometimes what would happen is someone would be pulling random levers and then they would pull the correct one and something different would happen. In a few cases, people just started pulling levers to see if anything would happen, which lead to finding out that if you pull the levers in a certain order they don’t make the cow angry. Through trial and error they figured out the combination and the cow did fun things.
An image of the cow doing fun things!
However, some people also noticed this panel on the back wall with lights of different colors that would come on in a certain pattern. Someone then put together that the color of the lights was the same as the color of the levers and from there they found out that the light pattern was the order of the levers, which is not something I noticed at all but was really neat.
The interesting hint light panel that I didn’t notice because I’m not a true gamer
The room I actually want to talk about though because I can’t stop thinking about it is one of the first ones that people encounter. It’s right in the beginning and it’s this plainly sci-fi looking room with a bunch of panels and buttons.
This is the panel room, I stole this image because I didn’t have any good photos of this room and I didn’t expect to be talking about it but here we are: https://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/inside-columbus-otherworld-an-immersive-choose-your-own-adventure-sci-fi-art-installation/Slideshow/12234210
At first, I wasn’t really interested in this room. For starters, the first button I pressed made all the screens display a rick roll, and I almost cried. In general, most of the panels weren’t related from what I could tell. Some of them had small games, like one had a game where you have to time pressing a button to cause a system overload. Some had videos that showed a scientist talking about Otherworld itself, which are interesting from a lore perspective but weren’t super interesting from the experience side (most people just watched them, which isn’t very interesting to describe haha). There was one panel that I saw a kid playing with that had a camera view of another room, specifically the mouth cave room, and when the button was pressed a sound effect would play like a burp. That I thought was very interesting. I tried playing with the panel myself, apparently you can change the sound effect played by turning this knob. What I wanted to know is if those sounds were being played to people inside the mouth room. Anytime one of the sound effects was played I stared intently at the panel to see if anyone would react. Unfortunately, basically no one had any sort of interesting reaction, so I couldn’t really tell if the sounds were going through. I went to the mouth cave room myself to see if I could hear anything (I probably sat in that room for like 10 minutes too), but I didn’t hear any noises. I don’t know if this was because no one was playing sounds or because the sounds aren’t being projected, but I’m like 90% certain that the sounds matter. Even if it doesn’t, people that I saw using the panel had sort of a devious way of playing, like they were messing with others in the experience.
The original room, and a little about how it works. Not super complicated all things considered.
Regardless, I started to think about this room as a sort of control room, for the whole experience really. I didn’t see any other panels in this control room that linked to other rooms, but I started to think about what it would be like if this room was connected to all the other ones and in a reverse Five Nights at Freddy’s or regular Hunger Games sort of way, if you could make different things happen in other rooms. As I was just exploring on my own, I started to see places where the room could definitely have jump-scared me in a haunted house sort of way. As I was looking through drawers in this room, I felt like this guy could have jumped out and grabbed me.
Similarly, while I was in this gothic/lovecraftian spider room, I had a chilling moment where I thought I remembered this bloke being an animatronic that moves around, but it was still. Then, when I turned around to focus on a different part of the room, I heard it move, and just as a turned around I could just barely see it move before it stopped again and never moved the entire time I was there. What if people could mess with others in these really minute ways? It would be kind of horrible, but it would be fun
it looks like a Bloodborne boss ngl, this thing scared me
The devious room where you play nasty pranks on people
I also started thinking about some of the puzzles I saw and some of the ways I saw couples collaborating in these rooms, and then a different idea came into my head. It happened while I was trying to explain what Otherworld was and one of my friends said: “It’s like an escape room except the goal isn’t to escape.” What would Otherworld function like as an escape room of some sort? The person in the control room is almost like the game master. I also remembered this strange moment where in the aforementioned spider room, the antique phone started ringing, some random guy came in, answered it (as if he knew this phone would ring), and then left. Aside from the fact that it was weird, it could be interesting to have connections between the rooms; maybe the phone is connected to the room with the bats, and you have to speak into one of their ears to communicate with the spider room phone? What if Otherworld was this Toolmaker’s paradigm fever dream where each person was put in a different room, and they had to figure out how to communicate with each other? It would be interesting to see a place like Otherworld or Meow Wolf with this alien aesthetic, but the goal is the solve some greater puzzle instead of the puzzle being an optional thing or the room interactions being disconnected.