Room Escape Artist

The Ladder is one of the best games in Los Angeles. Here are our other recommendations for great escape rooms in Los Angeles.

Pure Ambition

Location:  Los Angeles, California

Date Played: May 5, 2024

Team size: 4-10; we recommend 5-7

Duration: 90 minutes

Price: $95 per player

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration:  There are flashing lights. The Ladder is accessible for most chair users, but other teammates will need to do some of the game elements.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

The Ladder is an exploration of ambition expressed through its narrative, gameplay, and its very existence.

Under construction for more than 5 years and brimming with new ideas, Hatch Escapes took one of the biggest swings that we have seen in the escape room world. The Ladder isn’t massive in size (although it isn’t small)… it’s bigger on the inside. I’m struggling to think of a more complex escape game.

Hatch Escapes has asked a lot of us players. The Ladder wants us to follow a nuanced story spanning decades, while solving an assortment of challenging puzzles, tackling an additional layer of puzzles to make money, and on top of all of that is a system of character life choices that tweak the rules of the game for each team. It’s a lot, and we loved it.

Perhaps the biggest question about The Ladder is, “how replayable is it?” I cannot tell you exactly how many times we will ultimately replay it, but I can say this: As soon as we finished the game, we grabbed lunch, and then eagerly replayed it. And we want to play again.

There are strong video game vibes in The Ladder, structurally pulling from games like Outer Wilds, and using complex decision trees to control the outcomes of our many decisions, successes, and failures. I don’t know how many different outcomes exist in The Ladder, but it’s more than I will ever see, no matter how many times I replay it. Many of those outcomes may just be nuance and minutia, but it’s there, represented for each team nonetheless.

And that brings me to the biggest challenge of The Ladder: you will not play it perfectly the first time… and you almost certainly won’t on your second time either. It’s a hard game that asks you to be cool with it. The Ladder demands that you tell your inner completionist to grow up. It’s a massive departure from tradition in an escape room world where nearly every game is 100% completable by a sufficiently talented team. Personally, I find this kind of thing enticing. That initial sting of falling short was a bit shocking… but also exciting and new. Your experience may vary.

The Ladder was astoundingly ambitious and worth the wait. It’s hard to comprehend the depth of The Ladder until you’ve climbed. This game is worth traveling for… and you should play it while visiting RECON LA 24.

Who is this for?

• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Scenery snobs
• Best for players with at least some experience
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle
• Corporate climbers

Why play?

• Magnificent interaction design
• Numerous challenging and interesting puzzles
• The finest video production we’ve seen in the escape room world
• The details
• Novelty
• To play again and again

Story

It was our first day at Nutricorp, an Omaha-based vitamin company. The Ladder would take us through a 50 year career at the company, where our skills and our choices determined our story and outcome.

Setting

We began our career in the black and white 1950s. The first scene established the tone of the game and the other main character (besides us, of course). From there we entered the mail room, full of letters and boxes.

With each subsequent decade, we entered a new set, with a unique coloration inspired by the media of the era. Each space was fully designed from floor to ceiling and felt uniquely representative of the era.

Gameplay

Hatch Escapes’ The Ladder was a replayable escape room where we made decisions that impacted the characters, plot, puzzles, and outcome of the game.

The Ladder was composed of 5 decades, each with its own room. We only had a limited time in each room to solve as much as possible before the game would push us forward into the next decade.

In each decade (space), there were “story” puzzles and “money” puzzles.

We solved the story puzzles to progress the plot. However, if teams opt not to solve them, or are unable to solve them, The Ladder still moves the plot forward as time marches on, and players just have less agency. It’s important to understand that there will always be more to do than time to do it.

We solved the money puzzles to earn cash: we wanted to succeed in our career at Nutricorp.

The Ladder had a high level of difficulty. There were a lot of puzzles to solve. Teams have to decide where to focus, and how to divide and conquer in order to move the story forward and make lots of money. The story puzzles were well clued, but still challenging. Plus they required sustained focus in a frenetic puzzle-solving environment.

Core gameplay revolved around solving puzzles requiring observation, communication, and focus. It also involved developing our character, both their motives and who they would be in life.

Analysis

➕ The opening sequence was incredible. A beautiful blend of setting, story, and interaction design came together to set the tone and feel of The Ladder.

➕ The first gamespace, the 1950s was the full package. It felt great and played wonderfully. We were captivated, and when we were finished, we understood how The Ladder wanted to be played.

➕ The “buttons” to lock in narrative choices were embedded invisibly into the set. Genius.

➕ The sets for each of the 5 decades were on point. They felt of the era. We were wowed by the bold change at the end of the 1950s, and we loved every following transition. Furthermore, the gameplay in each set felt distinct, and matched the set and the vibe.

➕/➖ The musical scoring was excellent. However, we would have liked more distinct soundtracks for each decade, to help us know when it was.

➕ Throughout The Ladder, we experienced video content that was fully integrated into the narrative. It played on screens, but these were a part of the world and it never felt like video interludes. The video production was top notch. Hatch Escape minded every detail, including aging all characters through the 50-year storyline. The video production work was astounding.

➖ In the 1980s, we didn’t understand when the introduction ended and our time in the decade started. The introduction blurred into the gameplay too much.

➕ While the story was a tale of cutthroat corporate zeal, the writing was very funny. With this juxtaposition, the tone landed perfectly.

➕ The plot points also balanced the difficulty of the gameplay. As we designed our story arc (what side would we take? did we want a family?), these choices dialed the difficulty up and down in different ways. As players, we had agency, both in who we’d be, and how hard the game would be, which were intrinsically linked. When we played, Hatch Escapes was still fiddling with these knobs, ever so slightly, to dial this in perfectly.

➖ We played The Ladder soon after it opened and we could tell that the gameplay had been refined linearly. The 50s and 60s felt well tested, but in the later decades, the gameplay didn’t feel quite dialed in yet. We encountered a ghost puzzle in the 1970s, an un-clued puzzle in the 1980s, and lack of sturdy hardware in the 1990s. In general, later puzzles suffered from issues such as similar components or difficult angles and other minor things that made the solves just that much harder, and not quite as clean as earlier in the game. We know that a number of these issues have already been addressed.

➖ Even in the decades where every puzzle solved cleanly, there were opportunities for additional indicators to help with interaction design. Hatches Escapes has mitigated a lot of the lack of intuitiveness with written instructions, but additional success indicators for different props would go a long way toward eliminating extra reading and player confusion.

➕ The Ladder fully supported a large team. We played as a team of 6 experienced players and every player was always busy. In fact, we wanted more time in every room. There was a lot to solve. The variety of styles of tasks, challenges, and puzzles was impressive. Everyone had their hero moment! To the completionists, know that you will not solve everything in your first visit; you aren’t meant to.

➕ In each decade, a calendar showed the passage of time. Time keeping was essential in an escape room such as this one that pushes teams forward based on time rather than puzzles completed. The timekeeping was thematic and entertaining.

➖ When we played we were told we could not get hints in the later decades. This added pressure to an already high pressure environment. Hints would make every decade more fun.

➕ The high attention to detail was… everywhere. For example, we loved discovering that one money puzzle would help us with a story puzzle, if we paid close attention. Everything was interconnected.

➖ While the set was gorgeous, there were visible screws, cracked edges, and areas for further refinement.

➕ The Ladder has many different endings, and no matter what choices you make, the ending will deliver resolution to your story. We watched a handful of them, and they were all hilarious, narratively satisfying, and exceptionally produced.

➕ On a replay, the team unlocks more gameplay. There is another avatar available, and that’s not the only thing. Seriously. There’s a really exciting bonus to unlock late in the game.

❓ It can be hard to fully enjoy and appreciate each set given the immense time pressure for the gameplay. On the one hand, that contributes to The Ladder being a truly replayable game. The more players return, the more they can relax. On the other hand, it’s possible to leave feeling too rushed and disappointed. Calibrate your expectations appropriately.

Tips For Visiting

There are lots of ways to play this game. Teams don’t need a strategy, but it was helpful to go in with one.

The puzzle content is challenging, even for experienced players. Play hard.

For our first play-through, we assigned 2 people to solve the story puzzles in every decade, while the other 4 players tried to make as much money as possible through the other games and puzzles in each room. The story puzzle players would pull other teammates in to help them as needed. We will admit that we didn’t solve every story puzzle through to completion on our first play. We expect 3 would probably be the optimal group size for the story puzzles for most teams.

We strongly encourage playing a second time with the same team. Then it’s up to you whether you trade roles, so that every player experiences more of the game, or stick with what you know, finishing any story puzzles you didn’t get to and trying to earn more money on games you’ve already figured out how to play and puzzles you’ve already figured out how to solve. You’ll also have the story knowledge to decide who you want to be… to play out a different narrative, maximize your score, or even handicap your money making in the name of narrative choices.

Leave time to find street parking.

Check out our REPOD episode with Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp and Tommy Wallach, the creative minds behind (and owners of) Hatch Escapes,

Update 1/29/25: If you want to hear more about The Ladder, back us on Patreon at the “Search Win!” level to get access to a Spoilers Club episode about this game. Reality Escape Pod co-hosts David and Peih-Gee take a deep dive with the creators, spoilers and all.

Book your session with Hatch Escapes’ The Ladder, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: Hatch Escapes comped our tickets for this game.