Room Escape Artist

Press 1 to choose your own adventure

Location: at home

Date Played: June – July 2026

Team Size: 1

Duration: up to 180 minutes of experience-at-will content

Price: free (with a suggested donation between $3-9)

REA Reaction

As fans of immersive and interactive entertainment, our options for booking are limited by time slots, money, and distance. I’m happy to report that our options have changed with Our Options Have Changed. This asynchronous telephonic experience from Flux Theatre Ensemble operates on a donation model and allows players to immerse themselves 24/7 in a branching phone tree filled with pre-recorded options and a few narrative twists. 

With a cell phone, I explored the exaggerated zen of the Holistic Wellness Network’s meditative practices. I selected a menu option and did breathing exercises alongside an almost-comedic parody of a wellness expert. The tone toed the line between sincere and mocking that never really hit either. But at some point, the slow burn led to some obscured narrative threads that split off in ways that felt exciting and shocking, while others offered different tonal shifts in the same performative and exaggerated font. When taken in whole, Our Options Have Changed tackles post-COVID paranoia, social conformity, and individuality in ambitious and nuanced ways. I admire the swings Flux Theatre Ensemble took, even if they didn’t always land or connect.

On the interactive front, player agency mostly manifested in the form of which menu options to explore, prompting another pre-recorded performance. Some sections implied or promised something puzzley or based on triggered SMS interactions. Regrettably, these moments did not come to fruition. Per a conversation with one of the creators, this appears to stem from separately-crafted segments by a diverse writing team. The experience still tackled the requisite story beats. However, without Flux Theatre Ensemble landing the handoffs and promised interactions, certain moments that should have been triumphant felt confusing and world-breaking. This conflict between game mechanics and story can be remedied. When the fixes come to fruition, they will elevate the player experience.

I truly enjoyed the novelty and convenience of having an experience that fused adept audio performances, a layered story, and light player agency to create an on-demand, self-paced choose-your-own-adventure. Asynchronous audio adventures could prove to be fertile ground for creators of physical experiences who want to extend their worldbuilding and their offerings without devouring booking slots or physical space. Callers are standing by.

Who is this for?

• Story seekers
• Dystopian fiction fans 
• Newbies
• Any experience level
• Anyone who thinks wellness experts might be hiding something
• Players who appreciate story but are actor-adverse

Why play?

• You love immersive storytelling
• You’re curious how to build a rich experience that isn’t labor- or cost-intensive

Story

Social unrest threatens the fragile systems essential to modern society. Good thing All For One Foundation’s Holistic Wellness Hopeline is here to help… right?

Setup

After filling out a brief web form to get my living ticket to Our Options Have Changed, I received instructions on how to call the in-world Holistic Wellness Hopeline. I had 24/7 access to this pre-recorded experience. While automated text messages marked progress points, the system never saved my spot, making detailed notes a necessity.

Gameplay

Flux Theatre Ensemble’s Our Options Have Changed was an asynchronous audio-based immersive theater experience optimized for cell phones with a low level of difficulty.

Progressing the story required patience and curiosity while navigating through a series of pre-recorded messages on a phone tree.

Analysis

➕ Flux Theatre Ensemble pulled off a layered immersive experience that required little-to-no staffing after production. Its tip-based pricing and prerecorded structure made it a very accessible experience. More creators should explore asynchronous experiences in alternate mediums.

➕ True to its name, options and tone changed throughout the experience. The writers crafted a dynamic experience; they’re the real deal.

➕ / ➖ The diverse cast of voice actors played their parts well, depicting characters that intentionally leaned into exaggerated archetypes. They landed nuanced beats when the story demanded it. However, these parodic performances straddled the line at times between seeming to wink at the audience and being unaware of how over-the-top they were. I believe this was intentional, but it took nearly 30 minutes into the experience before contrasting performances assuaged my wariness.

❓ The experience asked me to engage in breathing exercises, meditation, or thought experiments at times. There was no human waiting for me to speak or act, so I didn’t consistently engage. Goofy as it is, I’d advice players to go along with the exercise, as playing along will boost immersion when the interactivity itself is limited.

➖ A number of times, a tantalizing option that begged for more than a press of a button led nowhere. After emailing one of the creators, it turns out a cast of writers wrote discrete chunks of the experience. Flux Theatre Ensemble intended to further develop and connect branches of the narrative. But during my play, certain elements remained uncompleted. The experience prompted me for key interactions, yet I was met with no reaction on the end of the line.

➕ / ➖ Certain narrative strands plunged me into the depths of the phone tree. I loved how much more narrative lurked below the surface. However, progress didn’t save, so — aside from taking notes of where each option took me — retracing my steps meant spending a considerable amount of time listening to certain entries several times.

➖ Several promoted features were not functional during my play. A Twitter/ X hashtag promised to enable callers to seek help; a search revealed no usages of the hashtag. A donation link encouraged participants to donate, but the link didn’t work. 

❓ Our Options Have Changed marketed itself as a choose-your-own-adventure story with a variety of possible endings. I’m a big fan of making my own meaning from a story. However, the lack of one definitive end of the experience left the story feeling incomplete. I felt like I just decided that I found an ending without truly knowing if something more conclusive and cathartic remained hidden.

➕ Beneath its ironic facade, Our Options Have Changed hid a meaningful message about empowering oneself to affect small and large changes in the world.

Tips For Players

• Space Requirements: a clear and open mind
• Required Gear: a cell phone that can receive calls and texts; while not required, headphones and some notetaking system are highly recommended
• What to Expect: One could make surface-level comparisons between Flux Theatre Ensemble’s Our Options Have Changed and Candle House’s Lennox Mutual (review coming soon). Both experiences present themselves as companies committed to their customers’ wellbeing. Both are delivered telephonically. However, the similarities end there. Our Options Have Changed delivered a focused tale with a pre-recorded phone tree and SMS messages, ensuring a homogenous experience of which its reach is limited only by awareness and interest. Anyone expecting the sprawl, customization, and interactivity of Candle House’s telephonic works will be disappointed. But that’s missing the point of this decidedly different experience.

Buy your ticket for Flux Theatre Ensemble’s Our Options Have Changed, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.