Room Escape Artist

Déjà vu across dimensions

Location:  Grapevine, TX

Date Played: October 15, 2023

Team Size: we recommend 1-4

Duration: We recommend at least 2 hours, though you can easily spend more

Price: $40 – $50 per player, less for children and military

Ticketing: Public

Accessibility Consideration:  The company’s website states “Our exhibition meets ADA standards and is accessible and navigable by crutches, walkers, wheelchairs, or scooters.” That said, there are some routes that are very narrow and/ or require crawling or climbing stairs.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

The Real Unreal was my second Meow Wolf outing, having first visited The House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe last April with my family. My kids had been enraptured by the reimagination of household familiarities into whole other dimensions, and we had all been captivated by the surreal escape from reality. Building off of that particular foundation, The Real Unreal mimicked what we loved about The House of Eternal Return… literally. Indeed, this review is more of an annotation to David and Lisa’s review of The House of Eternal Return, so if you haven’t read it, start there. The same observations apply because, to the casual wanderer at least, they’re the same experiences.

The layout of The Real Unreal was so close to the Santa Fe design as to perhaps be indistinguishable. There’s a house, there are alternate dimensions, and there are portals between the two… pretty much the same portals between the two. There’s neon seaweed, there’s a treehouse, there’s a space-altering piano, and there’s a retrofitted RV. If you’re seeing these things for the first time, splendid! If you’re seeing them a second time because you’ve been to Santa Fe… you’re seeing them a second time. For me, it was impossible to view these wonders with fresh eyes. There was still spectacle to behold, but its magnitude was diminished by the redundancy and hampered by inevitable comparisons.

Within these architectural similarities, however, most of the artistic vignettes differed between the two locations. Whereas Santa Fe struck us as an exploration of textures and building materials, The Real Unreal seemed more of an experiment in the interplay between lighting effects and relatively flat wall art. Textures still made appearances, but the effects were often more subtle. Regardless, the spaces upheld Meow Wolf’s surreal aesthetic, and we all walked away with new favorite areas to add to our Meow Wolf memories.

Going into The Real Unreal, I had hoped to invest more in the story and puzzling than I’d been able to in Santa Fe. My surface-level impression from quickly browsing the entry spaces was that the main story points were accessible within the first parts of the experience, giving me a list of trails to explore without too much initial reading. Alas, chasing after my kids prevented me from exploring those trails, so I regrettably can’t comment on how the puzzling progressed.

Instead, I can offer this observation of open-ended experiences like Meow Wolf. As the introduction to The Real Unreal explained, there are no “shoulds or supposed-to’s” in a world like this; we were theoretically free to have the experience we wanted. However, exploring this world with my kids made it starkly clear that you can’t have the experience you want here unless you’re with people who want the same experience. The distance between options is vast, requiring vastly different levels of focus and pacing. I certainly didn’t expect to complete the mystery with my kids in tow, but I quickly realized I couldn’t even begin to engage in the story at a deep level when the rest of my party was drawn to constant novelty and discovery. I had never encountered this problem within the narrow paths of escape rooms. It was definitely something to consider here.

Thus, at a surface level, The Real Unreal makes its charms and messages available without clearly expanding on what Meow Wolf is and can be. If you’re new to Meow Wolf, this place is a representative entry point to its wonders. If you’ve visited The House of Eternal Return, I suspect you’d need to have either a critical eye for art or some investment in the story here to find a new experience.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Story seekers
• Scenery snobs
• Any experience level

Why play?

• To explore other dimensions at your leisure
• To experience art from all angles

Story

Jared Fuqua, a 10-year-old boy, had gone missing after indicating that he might be able to find a cure for a sick friend. The community was mystified, but his mom insisted that the house had somehow swallowed him.

We didn’t have an assigned role in this story. Instead, we were observers, invited but not commanded to seek out plot points without any narrative motivation to do so.

Setting

We began our journey in the house where Jared lived. On the surface, the house appeared lived in and cozy, showing off family memorabilia and middle-class accoutrements. However, the simplest explorations led to marvels beyond this realm…

The Real Unreal is located within the Grapevine Mills mall, though unlike Omega Mart in Las Vegas, it doesn’t pretend to be a store front. Instead, the expert transition from mall halls to the experience’s front yard added to the feeling that we were entering an entirely different universe.

Gameplay

Meow Wolf’s The Real Unreal was an immersive art installation. It was not an escape room.

There was a mystery to follow with clear hooks within the opening scenes of the experience. We also encountered obvious story delivery points throughout our wanderings, but crowds and lines deterred us from investing in them.

Even though I didn’t get to pursue these launchpoints, I did accrue a mental list of next steps I would take in a hypothetical future visit. In this way, I felt more grounded than I did in Santa Fe, where we were quickly overwhelmed and deterred by stacks of papers.

Analysis

➕/➖ A large portion of this world’s layout was similar to The House of Eternal Return. Thus, it was every bit as glorious and idiosyncratic as that experience, but to patrons of both exhibits, the redundancy may be disappointing.

➕ It was delightful to discover unexpected vistas behind everyday objects in the main house.

➕ One central portal from Santa Fe was reimagined in an original and mindblowing way. I had specifically wondered if and how Meow Wolf would reinvent this experience. The result was novel in its own right while infinitely honoring the original.

➕ Lighting effects and variations played a prominent artistic role here, providing a distinguishing feature from Santa Fe.

➖ We visited during the Halloween season. A spooky overlay of Party City paraphernalia detracted from the artistic cohesion of several spaces.

➖ The Sunday morning crowds were a problem for me here even without engaging much in the story. The spaces came in a variety of sizes, and it felt stressful to try to absorb the meaning of smaller spaces whenever an influx of people invaded it. Sometimes we could out-wait the crowds, but some spaces were always crowded.

➕ The number of cross-references throughout the experience was mindboggling. One could easily spend multiple visits building deeper and deeper awareness and appreciation for these discoveries.

❓ The presentation of story materials felt approachable on the surface. However, each investigation quickly unfolded into extensive information whose depth was both impressive and overwhelming.

Tips For Visiting

• There is a huge parking lot for the mall that houses The Real Unreal.
• There is a cafe within this Meow Wolf, enabling visitors to extend their explorations across mealtimes.

Book your hour with Meow Wolf’s The Real Unreal, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.