experiential design and creative technology
experiential design and creative technology
The Ladder is unlike any escape room you’ve ever played before.
Get ready to embark on a 50-year career at Nutricorp, an Omaha-based vitamin company with more than a few dark secrets to hide. Each room of The Ladder represents a decade—from the rockin’ 1950s to the less rockin’ 1990s—and features both scored games and puzzles. Your score (i.e. how much money you’re making) will allow you to raise a family or hire a secretary, while solving the super-tough and fully optional puzzles will allow you to make choices that change the story in fundamental ways…and might even grant you access to a whole secret room.
Featuring a 90-minute runtime, 5 playable avatars, 8 different sets, and nearly a dozen different endings, The Ladder has been designed to blow your mind not once, not twice, but as many times as you care to visit.
Will you play as a hero or a villain? Will you make your first billion or wind up penniless? And did you ever figure out what was in that mysterious pneumatic capsule? Well, you know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed…you’re probably a talentless hack.
Or maybe you should try again…
Now open at Hatch Escapes. Book your experience here.
The Ladder is the most technically complex, high-budget escape room in Southern California, and among the most high-tech and high-budget immersive gaming experiences in the United States. Awkward Dog founder Matthew McClain served as Lead Creative Technologist on the project, developing a custom, fully-networked show control system to unify over a dozen unique scored puzzles, custom Unity applications, DMX lighting, pixel mapping, reactive audio, and in-game score and choice tracking to create a seamless gameplay and narrative experience for audiences.
The Ladder opened in April 2024 after five years in development. In 2025, The Ladder was honored with a THEA award alongside other themed entertainment such as Ghibli Park's Valley of Witches, Zootopia Land at Shanghai Disney Resort, and the Las Vegas Sphere.
