Lifestyle
This L.A. escape room explores corporate greed — and shows how corruptible you really are
Word got out that there was a whistleblower wanting to meet. The company was suspicious, but this was the first overt notice that our place of work was corrupt. Should we investigate and see what ethics were being breached, or play dumb and stay loyal to the firm? We were divided.
I wanted to link with the informant — if something is amiss, we should know, even if it put our fast-rising career in jeopardy. But was that out of character for the avatar we had choosen?
This is the Ladder from Hatch Escapes, an interactive experience near Koreatown that explores corporate corruption. It opened this month and has become one of the most buzzed-about escape rooms in the country.
In 2018, Hatch Escapes debuted a highly regarded escape room in Lab Rat, a comedic horror show in which the roles of humans and test rodents are flipped. It’s a 60-minute game, with puzzles, an ending and, of course, a quest to break free. While it won praise for its mixing of digital and analog media, as well as its emphasis on storytelling, Lab Rat is still what many of us understand an escape room to entail.
The fictional Nutricorp is the center of the Ladder, a complex branching narrative that explores corporate greed.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Its follow-up, the Ladder, is not that.
For the past five years Los Angeles’ Hatch Escapes has been rethinking the escape room ground rules. The goal: to prove the an escape room is not mere entertainment but can, in fact, be experienced as a work of narrative art.
Think of the Ladder as a 90-minute interactive movie with puzzles, taking guests through five decades, beginning in the 1950s, in which they will play an exaggerated game of corporate life. Start in the mailroom, and work your way through secretarial and middle-management-themed areas, all the while mixing puzzles, games and choose-your-own-adventure-like choices.
You may find yourself playing a game of memory around digitally enhanced cocktail glasses, as our mid-level exec seemed more interested in company card perks than late nights with the books. Or perhaps you’ll choose to investigate a wall-long switchboard, listening to callers’ problems and trying to connect them with a solution. Elsewhere, in an area dedicated to the 1980s, Nintendo’s “Donkey Kong” gets remixed as “Bossy Kong,” with a suited villain rather than a gorilla trying to thwart our progress. The final room — the corner office — is group game chaos inspired by the popular collaborative video game “Spaceteam,” complete with fully animated windows overlooking a city.
That it incorporates a wide variety of games, puzzles, as well as film and animation — all of it designed to be in service of advancing a story — has made this escape room one that is redefining the medium.
The title screen for “Bossy Kong,” an ‘80s-themed video game in the Ladder.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Tommy Wallach plays “Bossy Kong.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“The Ladder, in terms of North American escape rooms, is definitely one of the top five most-anticipated games of the moment, propbably top two or three,” said David Spira, co-founder of Room Escape Artist, a website dedicated to the art of puzzle making. “It’s probably the most ambitious escape room I’ve seen, in terms of narrative.”
If all goes according to plan, wits will be tested but so will morals, as participants are graded on puzzle acumen as well as personal choices. Play ethically, corruptly or spend your time playing with the mini-golf-turned-shuffleboard floor in a middle-management office; the Ladder offers an abundance of choices, so many that it’s impossible to discover all its content in a single play-through. It’s ambitious, and it’s counting on guests to come for the puzzles, and stay for the story, almost aiming to be more akin to a real-life video game than a traditional escape room.
“We wanted to build something that basically would allow a group of 10 people to never stop doing something effective,” says Tommy Wallach, who co-founded Hatch Escapes with Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp.
Its puzzles and games are all optional. And before it begins, guests are likely to be given a warning: The Ladder’s puzzles are hard.
Then it’s time to turn a doorknob, which will trigger one of the Ladder’s multiple digital screens and ask groups to pick a character to portray — my team opted for a young hotshot of a narcissist who appeared eager to double-cross. We didn’t play true to his temperament, however, choosing often to toe the company line rather than align with any unsavory actors. Story moments, for which all games and puzzles will pause, are delivered via screens. Think of them as akin to video game cut scenes — that is, cinematic instances in which players can set down the controller.
We discovered hidden rooms — in one moment, a wall will essentially disappear to reveal a film noir-like scene involving a subplot with the FBI, albeit only if a group solves a particular puzzle — and tried our hand at a host of digitally enhanced games, some of which use lighting cues to remake a room. You’ll definitely want to approach the Ladder as if it’s a playable movie, as a 1950s mail room, for instance, is presented in black-and-white, playing tricks with color and grayscale. While we rose through the company ranks, our ending — there are multiple, as one doesn’t win or lose, per se — didn’t see us becoming the next billionaire; we lived a more solitary life, complete with a cat.
Designers Tommy Wallach and Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp at Douchie’s Bar, inside a ‘70s-themed room of the Ladder.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
After extended play-testing, the Ladder opened in early April. Wallach and Pettigrew-Rolapp are already in reflective mode. Each room (decade) features one core puzzle, which is directly tied to the narrative, as well as an abundance of mini-games. After about 15-20 minutes guests will move on, whether they solved the puzzle or not.
Did, Wallach and Pettigrew-Rolapp wonder, the team go too heavy on narrative? Will players follow the story line or opt to simply play games? And with so much to do in each decade, will guests want to come back to complete more, or will they feel overwhelmed?
“Our initial thought was that we’re trying to move this art form forward,” Wallach says. “We are doing that with this room, though not necessarily in exactly the way we thought we would. We thought we we’re going to try to get into more serious or better storytelling — more involved characters. I don’t think what’s the Ladder achieves. What it does achieve is trying to solve some other escape room problems. Replayability is one of them. Can we create something people want to come back to in the way people want to come back to Disneyland, because it’s not solved and done?”
It’s surprising to hear Wallach say the Ladder may not achieve all of its narrative goals. Storytelling, after all, is what helped build the Hatch Escapes reputation. In addition to Lab Rat, the company created the take-home “Mother of Frankenstein,” which is part novel and part puzzle tabletop game. Hatch is also home to the Scout Expedition-created exploratory, live-action game “The Nest,” a patient, interactive narrative in which participants discover one woman’s life story.
“When they came out with Lab Rat, it was the kind of game that across the country their reputation preceded them,” said Room Escape Artist’s Spira, who is based in New Jersey. “We knew we had to get back out to L.A. to play that game. It was pushing on a lot of boundaries that very few people were — they were pushing on narrative and building message into game play.”
While one could just play the Ladder and bypass a lot of the story, doing so would mean missing much of the nuance in the experience. Puzzles, for instance, build on one another, and characters in a switchboard game, which contains more than 100 cues, may appear later in another challenge — perhaps one in which a vintage computer coldly instructs us to decrease the corporation’s headcount. But the Ladder does raise an intriguing question: Do fans of puzzle games actually want more story?
Tommy Wallach demonstrates an escape room puzzle located in the Ladder.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
It is, admits Wallach, difficult to do. Guests who come to play, for instance, may not be primed to watch multiple videos advancing a plot.
“The canvas is so small. You have so little time to develop characters. Getting people to stop and listen to a story is almost impossible,” Wallach says. “I’m empathetic to it, but you can’t tell a better story unless you give me some room to tell you a story. That balance is harder than expected.”
And the Ladder is counting on players to want to experience a little story with the game play. Part of the reason it took five years to construct is that the Ladder is custom-built and cost more than $1 million to complete. It’s a premium escape room experience, with per-player costs typically ranging from $75 to $95, depending on the day. “Everything is bespoke,” says Pettigrew-Rolapp. “There is literally nothing off the shelf. The scale of what we’re trying to accomplish required that, and there are no experts in this. Every person who worked on this had to learn as they go, because nobody has done this before.”
It’s early days, but the Ladder is finding its audience. It has been largely selling out about two weeks in advance, at the time of writing. Wallach is optimistic and confident.
He believes the adventure will continue to sell out. “It needs to sell out, but it will,” he said. “I really do just think it will,” Wallach says. “We see maybe a tenth per week of what a Broadway theater sees in a day, and those tickets are $200 per person and not $95. But we’re going to need a couple good years before we’re like, ‘Everything is wonderful again.’ ”
Hatch is already garnering national attention for offering a boundary-pushing experience. It’s a winning start, and likely means that the only company being run into the ground is the fictional one at the heart of the Ladder.
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Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Joshua Green, of Columbia, Md. Think of a popular film franchise with many sequels. Hidden in consecutive letters inside its name is a place mentioned multiple times in the Bible. Replace that place with a single letter and you’ll name a Major League Baseball team. What franchise and team are these?
Answer: “The Avengers” –> (Detroit) Tigers
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This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Name a famous actor of the past, seven letter first name and seven letter last name. Remove three consecutive letters from him last name and the remaining letters in order will be the well known lead character from a long running series of films. What actor and character are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, May 21 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
Lifestyle
For Tory Burch, a 20-year fashion career is a sport driven by endurance, discipline and grit
Clarke wears Tory Burch multi screw heeled sandals and Gemini Link pendant necklaces.
This story is part of Image’s May Momentum issue, which looks at art as a sport and sport as an art.
It’s 2 p.m. on a quintessentially balmy Los Angeles afternoon when I spot fashion designer Tory Burch in the lobby of the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel. She’s wearing oversize sunglasses, a crisp collared shirt, an even crisper pleated navy skirt and leopard-print pumps. I start walking over to introduce myself, but a fan gets there first. This would happen several times during our meeting at the hotel — wherever Burch goes, a small flock of admirers form.
Burch is in town for the Fashion Trust U.S. Awards, where she was recognized with the designer of the year award. Ever since she took back creative control of her brand about six years ago, Tory Burch is back at the center of the American fashion zeitgeist. Compared to the resort-ready tunics and preppy Reva flats that embodied Tory 1.0 in the 2000s, Tory 2.0 has evolved into a “weirder,” more innovative version of itself. Think: a jersey dress with knotted ruching in an unexpected shade of green, or leather mules with an inverted heel that makes you look twice. While the Tory customer of the past felt neatly aligned with the country club aesthetic, the Tory customer today embodies a modern sensibility of polish and dynamism. You could easily imagine these clothes on a marketing exec at the office, a buyer at fashion week or an author on book tour.
There’s no doubt the “Tory-ssance” is in full swing. During New York Fashion Week, my TikTok page was flooded with behind-the-scenes clips of model it-girl Alex Consani getting ready for Tory Burch’s runway show. On the nouveau fashion blogs of Substack, women exchange styling ideas for the brand’s signature pierced mules. And on the streets of L.A. — from Sunset and Rodeo to Melrose and Wilshire — colorful Tory Burch logo sandals abound.
Clarke wears Tory Burch Mellow Mary Jane jellies, Gemini Link pendant necklace, and printed asymmetric viscose dress.
We sat down for tea at the Polo Lounge and talked about her design instincts, what women actually want to wear, freaky footwear and how a long career in fashion is its own kind of sport.
Viv Chen: Hi, Tory, it’s a pleasure to meet. Congratulations on receiving the designer of the year award from Fashion Trust U.S. this week. What does that kind of recognition mean to you at this point in your career?
Tory Burch: It’s a huge honor, and to be recognized by your peers is even more special. Being in that room and meeting some of the up-and-coming new designers, the creative energy was just palpable and super exciting to take in. I love what Tania [Fares] has built to support emerging designers.
VC: I heard you got to dress Pamela Anderson.
TB: Yeah, she presented the award to me. Pamela and I met through our boys, so it was very special because we have a friendship and I admire her so much.
VC: This award feels like another marker of the “Tory-ssance.” There’s been such a compelling story over the last few years about how you’ve reinvented the brand to feel fresh and relevant again. How do you see that evolution?
Clarke wears Tory Burch beaded heel sandals and cotton jacquard shirtdress.
TB: We’re just starting in many ways. When I first started the company 20 years ago, it was very much a creative journey. As time went on, I was also running the company and became the CEO. After a certain point, managing both was not doable. About six years ago — it was probably the one silver lining out of COVID — I had the opportunity to reset and give up my role as CEO. Now, 100% of my time is dedicated to the creative process. It’s something we’re still very much in the process of — not at the peak. I still have a lot I want to do.
VC: You redesigned your Rodeo Drive store last year. What is it about the L.A. market that influenced the design decisions you made?
TB: First of all, it’s really funny because a lot of people think I’m from L.A. I love the casual elegance of L.A. I’m very outdoorsy, I’m very sporty, so there’s a lot of things that I relate to from a design standpoint. And I’ve always been obsessed with interior design. It wasn’t as much about L.A., but it was more about using the light here. We opened up the top of the store with skylights, so it had shapes that the front of the store brought in with the light.
VC: You seem to have unlocked what women actually want to wear. Tell me more about your design perspective.
TB: I like an ease and a realness to what we do, but balanced with creativity and innovation. So it’s taking things that are classic in spirit, but then giving a strangeness to it. Like something where you look closer and see an interesting fabric or different stitching. I like tension.
Melissa wears Tory Burch pierced strappy heel sandals and printed silk dress.
Clarke wears Tory Burch Hank ballet sneakers.
VC: I want to talk about footwear, because you’ve designed some major hits. The Reva flat was such an iconic shoe in the 2000s. And now, your pierced mules are fueling the contemporary rise in “freaky footwear.” What is it about footwear that is such a powerful category for you?
TB: I’ve always loved footwear. When I started with the pierced [mule], I was looking at toe rings. I thought, how do you incorporate the concept of that into a mule? It was like an exercise in architecture. Ever since I’ve taken back the reins of the creative process, I’ve focused on how footwear makes your leg look and how it feels. The Reva is interesting because it was meant to be a foldable shoe to throw in your bag, but also something you could walk in all day.
VC: What shoes are you wearing today?
TB: I’m wearing the pierced pump.
VC: How do movement and women in motion factor into how you design? I’m thinking about Tory Sport, which I think was ahead of the curve of the athleisure boom.
TB: We started in 2015. It was me and a very small team starting with what I felt like was missing in the market — which was great-looking clothing that was not restrictive, but also technical. Something you could move in from morning until evening. I also saw the prevalence of streetwear and the way women were dressing at the time.
VC: Culturally, when we talk about fashion designers, we focus on skills like creativity and artistry. Whereas in the language of sports, we talk about endurance, discipline and grit. Do you view your 20-plus year career in fashion as its own kind of sport?
Melissa wears Tory Burch jelly heel flip-flops.
TB: I do. It is a sport, and there’s a physicality to it as well. I think some people question whether I still go to the office. I don’t think I’ve had lunch in the last 21 years. I can be at the office for 10-hour days, which is like an athlete where it’s about discipline and grit and endurance.
VC: Athletes always get asked about the unglamorous work behind the wins. What’s your equivalent of daily reps?
TB: The mental capacity you need to have. Sometimes I make 4,000 decisions in a day. I touch every product. But I’m also lucky in that my days never really look the same either, because I do so many different parts of the business — whether it’s store design, marketing or the actual design of different categories.
VC: Beyond your brand, what is the impact you are trying to make with the Tory Burch Foundation?
TB: We launched it in 2009 to support women entrepreneurs through mentoring, capital and community. We’ve committed to adding a billion dollars to the economy by 2030 through our fellows and entrepreneurs. We’re having a breakfast in three weeks honoring Anna Wintour. It’s our second fundraiser — last year it was Martha Stewart.
VC: What is the long game for Tory Burch?
TB: I don’t know that I’d sit and think about the long game as much as I think about trying to be present. I’m always interested in the zeitgeist and how we fit into that, but not necessarily to be on trend. I just am someone that has that curiosity to push things forward.
Viv Chen is a Bay Area–based fashion writer, and founder of the Molehill newsletter.
Photography Jennelle Fong
Styling Bin X. Nguyen
Talent Melissa Baltierrez, Clarke Brown
Nails Lila Robles
Videography D.J. Theriot
Lighting Assistant Phillip Acevedo
Dara and her song “Bangaranga” skyrocketed Bulgaria to first place at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest
Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images
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Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images
Bulgaria has won the 70th Eurovision Song Contest — the country’s first-ever win.
The achievement surprised many because Bulgaria wasn’t among the favorites to win in 2026. But with its catchy “Welcome to the riot!” refrain and bouncy vibe, performer Dara’s banging anthem “Bangaranga” bested 24 other nations for the glittery global musical crown at the finals on Saturday in Vienna, Austria.
Israel came in second, as it did last year. Ten competitors were eliminated from the original group of 35 in the semi-finals earlier this week.
In his appraisal of his 10 favorite Eurovision 2026 songs, NPR critic Glen Weldon called “Bangaranga” an “insanely catchy bop” and praised its “deep, profound, abiding grooviness.”
“Oh my god!” Dara yelled, as she accepted the Crystal Microphone, the event’s glass trophy, from last year’s winner, JJ of Austria.
As with other global cultural events, such as the Venice Biennale currently underway in Italy, the glittery annual songfest is intended as a display of goodwill and togetherness between nations. “In a world often divided, we stand united by music,” said host Michael Ostrowski at the conclusion of this year’s event.
Last year’s contest, held in Basel, Switzerland, saw record viewership, reaching 166 million viewers across 37 markets.
Israel prepared for ‘boos’
Eurovision has long strived to prioritize artistry over political antagonism. However, as with the Biennale, Eurovision 2026 found itself at the center of protests related to the war in Gaza.
Five countries — Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain — pulled out between September and December 2025 in protest over event organizer European Broadcasting Union’s decision to allow Israel to participate amid the ongoing war in Gaza.
In this year’s finals, Israeli singer Noam Bettan performed the romantic breakup song “Michelle” in French, Hebrew and English. Unlike in the semifinal, when the artist sang over chants of “stop the genocide,” Bettan was not booed — at least audibly. The artist told The Times of Israel last month he had been practicing performing in front of hecklers.
There were both anti- and pro-Israel demonstrations in Vienna this week.
Pro-Palestinian protests at the last two contests called for Israel to be disbarred from Eurovision over its role in the conflict, as well as allegations it attempted to manipulate voting to favor its entries. The European Broadcasting Union changed its voting rules in response. Among other requirements, contestants and broadcasters are prohibited from taking part in promotional campaigns by third parties including governments. Countries outside of Europe, such as Israel, participate in Eurovision because eligibility is based on European Broadcasting Union membership, not necessarily geographics.
A double standard?
Although Israel’s participation is the biggest cause of dissent in 2026, the country avoided being banned from the event.
That was not the case with Russia, which was disbarred indefinitely from participating in the contest soon after launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
European Broadcasting Union deputy director general Jean Philip De Tender defended his organization’s decision to allow Israel to perform, the European edition of Politico reported ahead of the contest’s final, because Israel’s public broadcaster KAN, the body behind its entry, is independent, whereas Russia’s state broadcaster, VGTRK, is run by the Russian government.
In a social media post on Friday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez decried the European Broadcasting Union for its “double standard.”
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