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.
Understanding one of the world’s oldest civilizations can’t be achieved through a single film or book. But recent works of literature, journalism, music and film by Iranians are a powerful starting point. Clockwise from top left: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, For The Sun After Long Nights, Cutting Through Rocks, It Was Just an Accident, Martyr!, and Kayhan Kalhor.
NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
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NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
Few Americans have had the opportunity to visit or explore Iran, an ethnically diverse nation of over 90 million people which has been effectively shut off from the United States since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Now, with a U.S. and Israeli-led war on Iran underway, the ideas, feelings and opinions of Iranians may feel less accessible. However, some recent books, films and music made by artists and journalists in Iran and from the Iranian diaspora can help illuminate this ancient culture and its contemporary politics.
These suggestions are just a starting point, of course — with an emphasis on recent works made by Iranians themselves, rather than by outsiders looking in.
Books
For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy
There are quite a few excellent titles that deconstruct the history of Iran from ancient times through the rule of the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Iranian Revolution. But there are far fewer books that help us understand the Iran of 2026 and the people who live there now. One standout is the National Book Award-nominated For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising by journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, which chronicles — almost in real time — the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, during which Jamalpour was working secretly as a journalist in Tehran. In 2024-25, Jamalpour (who is now living in exile in the U.S.) and I spent a year together at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace fellowship for journalists; her insights into contemporary Iran are among the best.
Gold, by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori
If Americans are familiar with Persian poetry at all, it may well be through popular “translations” of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi done by the late American poet Coleman Barks, who neither read nor spoke the Persian language and detached the works of Molana (“our master”), as Iranians call him, of references to Islam. (Instead, Barks “interpreted” preexisting English translations.)
In 2022, Iranian-American poet, performance artist and singer Haleh Liza Gafori offered the first volume of a corrective, in the form of fresh Rumi translations that are at once accessible, deeply contemplative and immediate. A second volume, Water, followed last year.
Martyr!: A Novel, by Kaveh Akbar
This 2024 debut novel by Kaveh Akbar, the poetry editor at The Nation, is an unflinching tour-de-force bursting with wit and insight into the complications of diaspora, the nature of identity in a post-War on Terror world and the inter-generational impact of the 1979 Revolution on Iranians. The protagonist, the Iran-born but American-raised Cyrus Shams, has struggled with addiction, depression and insomnia his whole life, and is trying his best to make sense of a world at the “intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness.” As with so many other of the titles here, fiction and fact are woven together: the story centers around the true story of the U.S. downing an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.
The Stationery Shop: A Novel, by Marjan Kamali
Marjan Kamali’s 2019 love story is the wistful tale of a young woman named Roya and an idealistic activist named Bahman, who meet cute in a Tehran store in the 1950s, but whose planned marriage falls apart due to turmoil both familial and political, as Iran’s democratically elected government falls in a U.S.-British lead coup that ends with the installation of the Shah. Roya flees to the U.S. for a fresh start, but the two reunite in 2013, wondering: what if life had spun out in a different direction?
Movies
Coup 53
This 2019 documentary directed by Iranian film maker Taghi Amirani and co-written by Walter Murch recounts Operation Ajax, in which the CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered the removal of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and installed a friendly ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place. (The Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution.) As Fresh Air critic John Powers noted in his review, “What emerges first is the backstory of the coup, which like so much in the modern Middle East is predicated on oil. Shortly after the black gold was discovered in early 20th century Iran, a British oil company now known as BP locked up a sweetheart deal for its exploitation. Iran not only got a mere 16% of the oil money before British taxes, but the books were kept by the British — and the Iranians weren’t allowed to see them.”
YouTube
Cutting Through Rocks
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s film Cutting Through Rocks is up for an Oscar this season after premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. This inspiring documentary follows Sara Shahverdi — a divorced, childless motorcyclist — as she campaigns to become the first woman elected to the city council of her remote village, and who dreams of teaching girls to ride and to end child marriage.
YouTube
It Was Just an Accident
The latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi — who has officially been banned from making films in Iran — is 2025’s It Was Just an Accident. Panahi, who has been jailed multiple times for his work and was recently sentenced again in absentia, has said in interviews that his inspiration for this brutal – and shockingly funny – thriller was people he met while in prison: an auto mechanic named Vahid finds himself face-to-face with the man who he is fairly certain was his torturer in jail, and eventually assembles other victims to try to confirm his suspicions. Fresh Air critic Justin Chang called It Was Just an Accident “a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage.”
YouTube
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
This 2024 thriller — shot in secret by director Mohammad Rasoulof — centers on a family whose father, Iman, is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. But it soon becomes clear that his job has nothing to do with actually investigating. Iman, his wife, and two daughters come to suspect each other in our age of mass surveillance, as the city streets below erupt into the real-life Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
YouTube
Music
Kayhan Kalhor
One of the primary ambassadors of Persian classical music has been the composer and kamancheh (an Iranian bowed-instrument) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. Although music, like poetry, has been central to Iranian culture for centuries, all kinds of music were initially banned after the 1979 revolution. Since then, however, Iranian classical musicians have ridden many looping cycles of official condemnation, grudging tolerance, censorship and attempts at co-option by the regime.
Despite those difficulties, Kalhor has built a thriving career both inside Iran and abroad, including winning a Grammy Award as part of the Silkroad Ensemble and earning three nominations as a solo artist. Back in 2012, I invited him to our Tiny Desk to perform solo. “Didn’t know I could have goosebumps for 12 minutes straight,” a YouTube commenter recently wrote; I couldn’t put it any better.
YouTube
Saeid Shanbehzadeh
Among Iran’s 92 million people, about 40% of come from various ethnic minorities, including Azeris, Kurds and Armenians among many others. One of the most fascinating communities is the Afro-Iranians in the Iranian south, many of whose ancestors were brought to Iran as enslaved people from east Africa. Multi-instrumentalist and dancer Saeid Shanbehzadeh, who traces his ancestry to Zanzibar, celebrates that heritage with his band, and specializes in the Iranian bagpipe and percussion.
YouTube
The underground metal scene
Despite ongoing restrictions on music — including the continued ban on female singers performing in mixed-gender public settings — Iran is home to a thriving underground scene for metal and punk. Though it’s fictional, Farbod Ardebelli’s 2020 short drama Forbidden to See Us Scream in Tehran — which was secretly filmed in Tehran, with the director giving instructions remotely from the U.S. via WhatsApp — gives a flavor of that real-life scene and the dangers those artists face.
YouTube
Sen. Tillis To Kristi Noem
ICE Killings Are Like Dog You Killed
Published
Fireworks on Capitol Hill … Sen. Thom Tillis ripped into DHS Secretary Kristi Noem during a congressional hearing … comparing American citizens killed by immigration agents to a dog she killed.
Check out the video … the Republican Senator from North Carolina says Noem has shown terrible leadership and decision-making as Trump‘s DHS Secretary.
AP
Tillis says the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE and Border Patrol remind him of a passage from Noem’s book … where she recalls killing a dog she brought on a hunting trip.
Noem said the 14-month-old dog, Cricket, was misbehaving … so she led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her.
X/@DHSgov
Sen. Tillis told her straight up … “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. Not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”
In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.
Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.
Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.
She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”
Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.
“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”
“No way!” she gasped.
It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.
I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.
“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”
“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”
Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.
Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.
Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”
Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.
She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.
“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.
Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”
Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”
That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”
Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”
Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.
“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”
As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.
Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”
I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.
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