I saw Meow Wolf in Santa Fe
I won't deny it: one of the bigger reasons we went to Santa Fe - besides wanting to go on a road trip and see Desert Shit - was to visit Meow Wolf. Santa Fe isn't the closest Meow Wolf location to LA, but we were not particularly interested in visiting Vegas. Going to the oldest location seemed like a cool idea, too.
It was interesting! The exhibit itself was not in great repair, but it's so visually compelling that I found that interacting with even the broken rooms was a great experience. It's such a feat of visual excess that there's always something to look at - and frequently something to touch. I did have a great time. If you're reading reviews online that say the exhibit's in bad repair, I personally would disregard them. You can have a great time simply walking around the place and looking at shit. (The first time you go, anyway. I am not sure it would be as rewarding for me a second time.)
We arrived pretty early, while it was still fairly empty. By midday it was packed, mostly with families and kids. The kids didn't harm my experience. The exhibit is huge, and it's easy to wander away into your own weird corner of the space. I was able to find an empty room pretty much any time I wanted to... and I found the yelling and running kids pretty charming, actually. It really does feel like a gigantic playground, and I felt like the kids belonged here a little bit more than I did!
Though I was drawn to the narrative stuff in the space, I decided to disengage from it. The narrative props are unsually massive, wordy documents. There are magazines, entire cookbooks, and TONS of journals and letters. There is simply not enough time to read them. Even worse, they're mostly crammed into the rooms closest to the entrance of the exhibit, which are often the busiest. The only time I really wanted to read a book to solve a puzzle, I had to wait patiently for fifteen minutes for another woman to stop reading it.
The experience also comes with an app that you can use to access additional videos about the story... but it's impossible to listen to them in the exhibit, because almost every room has (sometimes very loud) sound. There's also a lot of yelling from other guests! So I ended up cruising through the exhibit by just glancing at text storytelling. Now and again, I snapped a photo of a document I thought I'd like to read afterward. So far, I haven't read any. I think the only thing I read all the way through was that document I waited for the woman to drop.
It contained a secret code that I needed in order to solve a puzzle in a different room. When I used that code to open a locked door, I discovered that it just contained... thousands and thousands of additional words of storytelling across three separate journals! Oh no!! My reward for doing a ton of sitting and reading in the middle of a colorful playground was just more reading.
There's a lot I liked in the scraps of story I bothered to engage with. Most of the documents didn't seem worth reading, but that one day planner I had to read to get the code was actually extremely funny. I also liked that the "plot" of the exhibit hinges on an immortal pet hamster that has plagued three generations of a family. Finding tiny, dimension-hopping immortal hamsters throughout the space was a lot of fun. I also thought that the exhibit's "framing narrative" - a single family home pierced with tons of secret doorways leading to other dimensions - was really, really compelling. It is tons of fun to open up a fridge, a washing machine, or a closet and discover that it leads somewhere unexpected.
I get the sense that this exhibit (the oldest one the brand has, ten years old this year) may have taken heavy inspiration from the structural techniques used in videogame stories. I am not sure that it took the correct lessons. Interactive experiences of all kinds struggle to budget the audience's attention across exploration, puzzle-solving, story-comprehension, and whatever else is going on in the space. Text has the disadvantage of requiring sustained concentration and memory. It will always be the hardest thing to put in a space full of neon visual excess!
Funny enough, they seem to have understood this... because the weirdest, most arcane element of the plot is communicated through video kiosks. But these videos are so long and low-energy that I found myself unable to stand around and watch them all the way through, either. I'd hang around for a few seconds, see a new concept come up on screen, think "Ahh, okay, I guess that's supposed to be related to what's happening in here," and walk away. Doing this did not harm my experience.
In the end, story really is the tiniest part of the exhibit! You do not need to "follow the story" at all to enjoy yourself. I found only two other guests obviously attempting to understand the story - two guys in their early twenties who appeared to be reading some kind of online wiki on a phone while they were walking around. Even they were struggling to figure out who some of the characters were.
I do understand why a space like this needs story. A story is a promise of intentionality! It is a guarantee that an interactive experience was planned, that it has a framing logic, and that it can be understood. A warehouse full of weird rooms is just an "instagram museum". Sure, a warehouse art exhibit can tell the story of a family getting sucked into other dimensions physically, without text. Those doors to other galaxies communicate something all on their own. But story really seals the deal! Text makes a promise. It says to you: we did this all on purpose! Here's what we were trying to do.
So I really do sympathize with the two guys scrolling up a column of text in the middle of the exhibit and asking each other, "Wait, who's Lucius?? Is he the bad guy??" On any day of the week, that might have been me! This time, for whatever reason, it simply wasn't. And I'm very glad that I was able to disengage and still enjoy myself regardless.