Otherworld
2500 Grant Ave.
Philadelphia
Jan. 24, 2025
“This looks like a cute stretch,” my boyfriend said as he steered his leased Mazda along a straightaway of McDonald’s, smoke-stoned oil refineries and Powerball billboards before pulling into a light-polluted strip mall parking lot.
I opened the car doors and felt a flood of neon splash over me like dry water. A lambent sign spelling “O T H E R W O R L D,” the name of the immersive art museum we had driven an hour across Philly to visit, promised to lead us out of urban sprawl by delivering us into the city of ATAM.
“Is this it?” my partner asked. “This looks like Chuck E. Cheese."
"I’d rather go to Blue Grass Billiards over there,” he said, nodding to a wall of entertainment-occupied warehouses just south of us.
We hadn’t traveled through this tunnel-vision bleak space just to play pool, I insisted, leading him into the eerie fun house. I wanted to see what Otherworld, a 40,000 square-foot maze boasting “large-scale, interactive art, mixed reality playgrounds, and hidden passageways,” was all about. I’d read that the exhibit contained over 150 projectors, 55,000 feet of LEDs and over 1,400,000 addressable pixels. At least 150 different artists helped design the alternative world of ATAM, a “city of perfection and order” with “ancient theories and secrets” uncovered by subscriber citizens who pay to play the hands-on puzzles embedded in Otherworld’s architecture.
Plus, the immersive sci-fi show was self-branded as “The Ultimate Date Night Experience.” I’d been searching for a chance to spend some quality time with my man.
My boyfriend spends most of his down time shooting people on Counter Strike, reading litRPG, skateboarding and sleeping. I write stories for this website, watch television and also sleep excessively. The days of our lives might seem depressing, but it’s true: Escapism is as fundamental as expression.
Sometimes all we want is to be heard; other times we will give everything to go unseen. America is suicidal and our favorite vice is fantasy.
Otherworld melds multiple modes of escapist entertainment into a false society of fun. It’s expansive like a drug trip, but supposedly holds the narrative arc of a movie and the hands-on quality of a video game.
“They have no windows. We’re gonna get kidnapped. We’re gonna get killed,” my boyfriend joked. But once he stepped inside and saw the number of lights on display, his attention was transformed: “This place must use a lot of electricity.”
Pretty stuff.
At first, the lights were all I could see. We roamed through rooms that seemed like they were built for Instagram: There was a forest of flashing shrubs, several hallways of touch screens, and a tunnel that led us past an arcade cabinet into a built-out version of the video game we had just played.
The game feel was good, but there was too much going on to search for secret puzzles on top of taking in everything else. I wanted to learn about where we were through a relatively passive route; while my boyfriend hunted for clues, soft punched statues and climbed on the various swings and playscapes, I enjoyed faux terrariums and zoos that touted rare species of flora and fauna native to this new world. I strolled by foreign graffiti art and food stands with artificial menus.
There were a million details, but none of the dots connected. It was chaos.
The constantly shifting lights and loud noises put me on edge. My boyfriend leveraged several blind corners as jump scare opportunities. We finally entered a romantic room replete with real water falls… and I was hit by the metallic smell of chlorine gone wrong.
It didn’t take long for me to come to an apocalyptic conclusion: ATAM was a haunted house in disguise. I eyed my boyfriend with sudden suspicion. Was he my travel companion or a scare actor out to get me? Had someone laced my Gatorade or was this standard paranoia?
Just then, my boyfriend chimed in: “I think if we had dropped acid before this we would’ve had panic attacks. Glad we didn’t do that.”
Why don’t we explore separate routes? I thought silently before running off alone on my own unbeaten path.
Immediately I wandered into a room reverberating distorted ragtime and featuring a casket surrounded by skeletonesque sculptures donning white masks. An after-the-fact Google search taught me that the head of the casket contained a clue that I had overlooked — there’s no world in which I would’ve interacted with that particular prop.
“Wow, I don’t like this room.” My boyfriend had shown up. I realized something about his face looked different — he had turned sepia. Was this funeral parlor yet another photo-op?
From there, every turn I took got freakier. We crawled through a room covered in rainbow wigs. We followed the smell of Smarties and found Willy Wonka-type territory home to a giant monster with multiple nipples that we were supposed to milk by lifting different levers. “My one true god,” my boyfriend prayed as I spiraled out by staring intently at the number of Germ-X hand sanitizer stands smartly positioned by several doorways.
Eventually we tumbled out of Otherworld into a gift shop. “I feel like I should take a shower after being in there,” my boyfriend whispered. I could feel the bags drooping under my eyes. Two hours had gone by. I remembered that there was an option to purchase an annual subscription to the museum and decided I could use a shower, too. Make it cold.
I had spent my ticket to Otherworld running away from the demons that surfaced during my venture... as well as away from my boyfriend. Weren’t we supposed to have bonded over the course of the journey? Instead of working together, we tried to follow our own interests through a winding world of nonsense. But the stakes of the puzzles weren’t high enough to captivate a boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend) accustomed to high adrenaline gaming. And the narrative arc was too distant to pull me in.
The message of the artwork was either missed or incompletely expressed. I left the big box building only to breathe in more big box buildings just outside Otherworld’s door. I had not escaped on any level; even in the open air, I felt trapped.
My boyfriend was forever the optimist: “That was fun!” he declared.
“Wanna go play some pool?”
