The Ladder: A Hilariously Surprisingly Replayable Escape Room

Los Angeles
$69-89 per player
Hatch Escapes
90 minutes

The Ladder is an absurdist escape room from Hatch Escapes about a life spent climbing the corporate ladder. Your team plays an employee at the Nutricorp megacorporation, starting in the mail room in the 1950s and ending in a corner office in the high-tech 90s, with your appropriately-named colleague Stab Backner always one step ahead.

Despite their popularity, I don’t go to all that many escape rooms for all the usual reasons – cost, co-ordination, travel time, logistics, and so on – so I can’t tell how unique The Ladder truly is. From what I understand, it’s not that unusual to have multiple rooms, an hour-plus duration, good storytelling, Disney-level production quality, or even Hollywood actors. 

What is unusual is seeing all of those things in a single space, especially with this level of replayability and madcap humour, which I assume is why it won a Thea award this year, in the “Attraction, Limited Budget” category (The Ladder cost over $1 million to make, which really tells you something about budget sizes in the themed entertainment industry). 

It’s also refreshing that The Ladder isn’t based on an existing IP or brand, nor is it part of a chain. It doesn’t even involve the usual tropes of murder, fantasy, or sci-fi. Instead, it delights in the bizarre theatricality of work in a ruthless company, an escape room version of the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy.

Via Hatch Escapes. All other uncredited photos are by me.

We began in the office toilets. The mirrors transformed into screens, and Stab Backner (played by Jordan Belfi) welcomed us to Nutricorp in a delightfully nasty performance. We chose an avatar to represent our team by turning the sink taps, and then we were off to our first job in the mailroom. Since this was the 1950s, the room was painted entirely in grey.

Right after doing Stab a favour, an entire wall-sized pneumatic tube apparatus tumbled to pieces on the floor, requiring reassembly. Across the room was a grid of cubbyholes awaiting the parcels stacked on the floor, their destinations determined by a simple physical rotation task. A third wall held drawers whose purpose I never cottoned onto, and I think there was yet another task I’m forgetting to do with letters.

These tasks were all classified as “games”. Progression in the games earn teams money and determine whether their company will be successful. Because some of the games are endless and others are extremely difficult to finish, you earn money based on your incremental progress, which makes the whole thing feel much fairer.

Each room also includes a “puzzle” track. These are more like traditional escape room puzzles involving codes, deduction, logic, observation, and all the rest; the mail room’s puzzle track required two people to decipher instructions and flip light switches. 

This embarrassment of riches is why The Ladder strongly recommends teams of six to ten players, with at least three people tackling the puzzle track and the remainder split among as many games as they can handle. Since we were only five, we had to make do with two players on the puzzles, one of whom was me. I’m not sure I’d agree that the puzzles were “very tough” as their website claims, but I have the suspicion we were helped along our way – not just by our host appearing as a janitor occasionally to dole out hints in-character (they do this for everyone) – but with a few extra minutes here and there. After all, the time pressure is what really makes The Ladder tough: only 15 minutes per room. 

Since there’s little time to waste, The Ladder does the very unusual thing of clearly and non-diegetically signposting instructions for each game, along with the start point of each puzzle track. What’s lost in immersion is gained in comprehension, and I wish more escape rooms would follow suit. When you think of them as tooltips or contextual help in a video game, it all seems so obvious.

Our performance review from the 1960s

Whenever we completed a puzzle track, a voiceover or a video would play about a conspiracy and whistleblower inside Nutricorp. This invariably happened right before our time was up, at which point the lights dimmed, we saw our performance review, and a character invited us to make an ethical or personal decision by twisting a doorknob left or right, or similar. These came with strings attached: choosing to do good might provide a time and/or score penalty on the next room, while your choice in your avatar’s marriage partner provided unique bonuses – RPG mechanics crossed with The Game of Life.

The 60s moved us into the secretarial pool. This was dominated by an irresistibly tactile switchboard game involving an audio version of Memory: callers would ask to be connected to increasingly bizarre people, and players would remember or call out candidates to each other (e.g. “1015 wants the garage!” “Oh, I think that was 3027”). Another game was Boggle in the form of filing cabinets.

There were probably others but I was completely occupied with the puzzle track, which was contained entirely with a cupboard. Essentially the goal was to discover four different numbers through a series of pretty decent logic puzzles, and connect them on the switchboard. Solving it led to a spectacular flourish that continued the whistleblower story where an entire wall lifted up to reveal a parked car. It makes sense in the story!

By the 70s, we’d reached middle management. The room was bursting with character, one corner holding a mini-cocktail bar with some kind of drinking game that none of us played, another with a barcode-powered Guess Who? game, and a combination putting green/skeeball threading between the two.

Despite a hint from the janitor I abjectly failed to solve the puzzle here, related to identifying the whistleblower (I think). 

In the next room, Stab welcomed us to the information age. The time for fun and games was over, he intoned – then all the screens flickered to life with spins on classic 80s arcade games like Donkey Kong (“Bossy Kong”) and Robotron. 

While I found this to be the weakest room in terms of gameplay – I can play arcade games at home – the story, which felt a little thin earlier on, was now in full swing. Nutricorp was up to no good, we were juggling loyalties between the FBI and a whistleblower, and Stab had become a deliciously malevolent villain. To be fair, the other non-arcade games may have been more fun, which appeared to involve connecting cables between different types of computer ports in the ceiling.

Via Hatch Escapes

There was even a computer terminal in this room we used to manipulate the metagame itself, entering codes for bonuses and spending money to shortcut the puzzle and unlock a secret room. I won’t spoil it other than to say it was very much worth the effort.

It’s hard to see him, but that’s Stab in a video call taunting us

Finally, the 90s. Stab had become CEO at Nutricorp, while we’d been poached to run rival megacorporation Vitamind. There were no puzzles left to solve – our battle against Stab was now waged through a Spaceteam-style co-operative game: each player manned a station controlling different aspects of Vitamind’s operations (e.g. knobs to set advertising spending, switches to manufacture products, etc.). Stations also had a little display showing commands, but crucially those commands were for operations on other stations, so everyone was continually yelling, “Change neckties to plaid!” or “Set password policies to lowercase only!”

The display showing commands sits above the control panel. Via Hatch Escapes.

The onboarding for this room was lacking, however. “Is this Spaceteam?” I asked, upon inspecting one station. I wasn’t sure, because the instructions seemed to suggest a completely different single-player game of hitting flashing buttons – and maybe it was, to begin with. But a few minutes later, as I was debating this with a teammate, a voice from the escape room host confirmed, “Yes, it is Spaceteam.” 

Since everyone had played Spaceteam before, we did fine and had lots of fun. But what if we hadn’t played before? There might’ve been instructions somewhere, but I missed them. Maybe our problem was that we were only five players and there were so many stations and switches it wasn’t at all clear that the commands we were seeing actually corresponded to things someone else could do rather than being part of another puzzle. When I mentioned this to another escape room designer, he suggested directly assigning players to stations, spelling out the game rules, and starting with a more limited selection of commands and controls. No doubt the janitor would’ve stepped in if we remained confused, but that’s not ideal.

Of course, we triumphed over Stab. Even better, we’d earned over a million dollars during our career, meaning our team’s company was officially a success. Coupled with our High Road ethical choices and our puzzle successes, we unlocked the Messiah ending, told through a gut-bustingly funny epilogue that dove head-first into absurdity, leaving us on an absolute high.

Our epilogue video

The Ladder is an incredibly polished production. For all its complexity, I didn’t spot a single technical issue or rough edge. All the games and puzzles instantly registered success or failure without a moment of lag. Even with a million dollar budget, that’s deeply impressive.

But I’m more interested in how The Ladder is explicitly designed for replayability. The vast majority of escape rooms can be completed in a single session; exceptions like Doors of Divergence are rare. Even if there are different combinations of puzzles available, the story rarely changes based on player choice. I don’t want to exaggerate the depth of agency in The Ladder – it’s not like you get entirely different rooms based on your choices – but I’m curious enough to play at least one more time. And of course, I’d actually get to play the games rather than the puzzles.

Replayability is a direct answer to the biggest challenge in the escape room business, which is that unlike bars or restaurants or shops, your happiest customers have zero incentive to return. Even if you have multiple escape rooms, eventually they’ll burn through all of them.

Because replayability is so rare, The Ladder goes to great lengths to educate players that this is even an option. One side of our score card highlighted every decision we made and all the ones we didn’t, along with the eight endings left unseen. The flowchart on the other side showed how to achieve them:

The card also came with a 20% off rebooking code, tips for return visits, and a special secret code to enter on the 1980s computer terminal. In fact, since one of our team had played before, we’d already selected a New Game Plus-style “nepo-baby” avatar with a 10% score bonus.

I am not enough of an escape room business expert to know how replayability pencils out. If physical space is at a premium (e.g. high rent rates) and you’re able to carefully plan and produce everything such that you can produce 2x the amount of gameplay for 1.5x the cost of a non-replayable room, maybe it makes sense. If space is much cheaper and you don’t want to be locked into a single story, it might not.

It also depends on your ability to market your experience. While gamers might appreciate replayability, I’m told that some escape room fans were frustrated by The Ladder because they couldn’t see everything in a single 90 minute session. But my hunch is that as escape rooms get longer and deeper, and frankly, better, and their technology and software stack keeps maturing, we’ll see more replayability because it’ll be easier to dynamically update their story and gameplay rather than build something entirely new. I know of at least one story-focused escape room with a much lower budget than The Ladder that’s designing a sequel playable in the same room as the original.

And this gets to what’s so interesting about the genre as a whole. Escape rooms are one of the few types of immersive experience that have their own widely-understood label. At the same time, experiences like The Ladder and And I Met E barely resemble traditional escape rooms any more. You aren’t escaping from anything; you aren’t even really solving anything. They’re more like “co-operative puzzle-solving under time pressure in a contained physical space”, which is dangerously and excitingly vague. Maybe this hazy distinction is why Bridge Command, an immersive theatre/spaceship simulator show, has to deal with players who assume it’s an escape room and expect it to adhere to the genre’s conventions. Is The Nest an escape room? Not really, but I can see why people think it is.

The Ladder is a fascinating expansion of what an escape room is, borrowing ideas as easily from role playing games as it does from cinema and theme parks. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t: for example, it never quite made sense to me that my team was collectively represented by a single unspeaking avatar. But its madcap satire of corporate America is an absolute joy and points toward just how much storytelling and gameplay potential remains in escape rooms.

Me, Robin, Dan, Margaret, and Sara

I previously wrote about Hatch Escapes’ tabletop puzzle game Mother of Frankenstein: Volume One, which I found just as interesting as The Ladder, though less accomplished in its execution.

I also wrote about The Nest, a fantastic storytelling-focused immersive experience hosted at Hatch Escapes.