The Final Day of the 2023 Southeast Tour

Maineville, Ohio – Monday, June 19th, 2023

I had planned on a couple hours at Kings Island the next morning for early entry, mostly to get some laps on Banshee and Orion, but heavy morning rain showers made it seem likely I’d mostly be standing around, soggy, looking at weather delay signs. Instead we took the opportunity to sleep in after more than two weeks of hectic travel. I figured at this point I’d be exhausted—an earlier itinerary draft was pushing closer to three weeks¹—but while the late morning was appreciated, I actually felt like I could have kept going even longer, if professional and domestic duties didn’t require my return home after the Juneteenth federal holiday this Monday.

Instead, our day started around 11:00am with a short drive across the Little Miami River behind Kings Island into neighboring Maineville, Ohio for an early lunch at Cartridge Brewing. Located in the former Peters Cartridge Company factory complex that had been manufacturing munitions since the 1860s, it recently was renovated and reopened with a pizza restaurant and brewery on the ground floor. The rain had mostly stopped by the time we arrived.

I got a flight of beers to sample from their on site brewery. We also ordered a couple of their Detroit pan-style pizzas. (I wish I could describe them in more detail but it took me over two years to write this report.) It was a lot to eat, but this time we didn’t have to worry about wasting leftovers on the road as we’d be able to take them home that evening.

Satisfied, we headed back on the road for about an hour and a half drive northeast to the final destination of the trip (and the airport from where I’d be flying home) in Columbus, Ohio.

Otherworld

Columbus, Ohio

Otherworld is a 32,000 sq. ft. immersive art experience that opened inside a disused strip mall sporting goods store in 2019; a second location opened in Philadelphia about a month after this visit. If you were to compare Otherworld as an east coast variant of Meow Wolf, you’d be pretty close. Both let you explore at your own pace a maze-like network of phantasmagoric art rooms, where the wonder and astonishment at what you find beyond each new threshold is the principle thrill on offer. Even still, there are a few differences. Whereas Meow Wolf has a maximalist Dada-esque surrealism that envelopes you like a warm goofy hug, Otherworld takes many similar design cues but skews a little more cool and sci-fi. Meow Wolf contains a depth of hidden backstory to uncover, while Otherworld is more about the visual experience, with a more conspicuous use of technology and interactives. But perhaps the biggest difference isn’t even found inside: so far Meow Wolf has occupied purpose-built or high-traffic venues in affluent Sun Belt communities, whereas Otherworld rehabilitates abandoned, dirt-cheap big box real estate along the Rust Belt.

Both business models seem to make a lot of sense, and I’m happy they’re both staking out their own niche. For what it’s worth, I thought Otherworld compared favorably to Meow Wolf. While it’s less ambitious, it was also less anxiety-inducing to try to see and do everything in a single visit (especially as I had a plane to catch that afternoon), but still had more than enough to feel it was worth the time and admission price. Whether Columbus audiences will continue to show up once the novelty factor has worn off, I suppose time will tell. Four years after opening, there wasn’t any clear halo effect from the increased foot traffic into Otherworld, as the rest of the mall around it continued to look abandoned, with shuttered storefronts and cracked pavement extending all the way down. In that regard, once you leave the parking lot behind and step through the shaded doors, Otherworld certainly lives up to its name.

In a lot of regards, the new phenomenon of immersive art experiences has been one of the most significant and encouraging developments in the past decade of themed entertainment design. They check a lot of boxes of what I’ve been asking from themed attractions: championing unorthodox creativity that eschews expensive hyperrealism to support artists within lower-cost, sustainable business models that can bring custom regionalized experiences to smaller communities where they’ll have outsized impact.

There are also a few things I wish could be different²: they’re complete black boxes, cut off from the world outside, totally man-made with zero connection to nature or its own location. Also, almost as quickly as they started, we’re already seeing the establishment of predictable tropes shared in the design, where unbounded neon weirdness is deemed sufficient at the expense of more culturally literate work. The business model already seems based on fairly thin margins, and I worry it may be propped up on fads more than fundamentals. It wouldn’t entirely surprise me if in another decade, the spat of immersive art experiences from the late 2010s to early 2020s ends up going the way of the heavily themed restaurants of the 1990s, hopefully with a handful of the better examples surviving for posterity.

Now, into Otherworld. Beyond the dark minimalist lobby, you enter the experience through a red curtain hallway with an infinity mirror effect on the far end, and hidden doorways along either side as the first set of portal choices. If I were to guess, the Black Lodge’s red room from Twin Peaks seems like an obvious point of inspiration, and honestly the Lynchian theatrical motif does work well as a simple but effective point of entry. It’s not quite the House of Eternal Return, but it’s much better than some other immersive art experiences that just throw you right in without setting the stage first. I could wander for a while, but always appreciated coming back to this hall to remind myself how it all connects.

Beyond that hallway, there’s not much point in trying to describe Otherworld in any sort of sequential order. Some areas definitely lean more into a clean sci-fi space aesthetic.

Others are much more grungy and earthly, even feeling a bit like a Halloween haunt attraction in places.

I particularly liked this nightmarish Max Fleischer-esque area. It included an interactive trunk that, if closed, would change the yellow lighting, causing the colors to drain from the rest of the room, the record player to slow and warp, and the inflated plants to all wilt.

This child’s bedroom is friendlier (despite containing enormous monsters), and includes a digital interactive coloring wall.

An odd laboratory and alien museum of sorts feels like something that might fit into a Meow Wolf hidden narrative, although it wasn’t immediately clear how deep the backstory went.

Step through this large hole in the wall into a psychedelic forest. Very Avatar/Pandora-esque.

At the farthest point in the back was this large underwater space that included an interactive projection wall and floor.

There are some sections that are just abstracted patterns of neon and blacklight which appear, well, otherworldly.

More interactives are found throughout the experience. This one of a bull deity being milked had different colored levers attached to the hose on each udder. A pattern matching game has you pull them in the correct sequence; you’re rewarded with a brief light and music show and the bull moos.

Shoot at these floating 8-bit bricks, bang on these drums, or do… something with this wall of lava, among other games. I suspect more of the interactives had a “win state” similar to the bull milking one, but I didn’t play with them long enough to figure out exactly how.

A few other odds and ends found throughout Otherworld Columbus.

A lot of the arts are now subsidized by attached alcohol sales, and Otherworld is no exception.

Perhaps the best way to get a feel for Otherworld is to take a video walk-through. Once I got the lay of the land I was able to film this fairly comprehensive walking tour before it was time to head to John Glenn Columbus International Airport and fly back home to LA. What an incredible two weeks it had been…

Back: Kings Island