The immersive game is THE reason why The Overlook Film Festival is a can’t-miss event. There are many film festivals, but there’s only one that included a weekend filed with murders, clues, a witch hunt, and me being gagged, zip-tied, and accused of being a serial killer.
The game kicked off 4 years ago in Colorado, and back in 2015, my wife and I, along with dozens of players, were able to successfully stop a cult ritual from unleashing evil on the world during the Stanley Film Festival. Flash forward to November 2016, when Garret Weaver, a person central to the events of 2015, started emailing us. From that email on, we received a steady supply of email updates, clues, and we were also mailed items that would play a part in the game at The Overlook Film Festival.
At the start of the festival, players are required to sign a waiver, attend an orientation, and choose a player level. There’s the "Hunter" tier for active players who would like to focus on the game over anything else, a "Player" tier for those looking to participate at a more casual level, and a "Lurker" tier for those interested in receiving email updates.
My wife and I went the Hunter route, and, like many of the players in the game, we immediately set out to explore the Timberline Lodge for clues. It wasn’t long into the festival before players started finding messages in their rooms, receiving troubling emails and texts, and learning of a suspected serial killer on the loose.
To give you an idea of the length that Bottleneck Immersive went to set up this immersive world, “WANTED” flyers were posted all over the hotel, members of the Cascade Enforcement Agency were patrolling the grounds during festival hours, and multiple businesses at Government Camp (a nearby community) got in on the fun. A short shuttle ride to Government Camp provided players with a new location for clues, dead bodies, and special items (if you knew where to look or what to say).
Throughout this game, different players had different experiences, depending on how they played and who they talked to. Some people chose to follow and believe a private investigator, while others turned to Cascade Enforcement, an archivist at the lodge named Alex, or Mark, a former archivist in Colorado who was instrumental to our success in 2015.
On Friday night, this resulted in players split between two different experiences in Government Camp: those who wanted to follow Alex, the archivist, and others who followed private investigator George Basta. Each side was lead into a well-orchestrated encounter, and in my case, we followed Basta on the trail of the killer and found multiple people tied up and gagged. It was up to our group to find clues that would allow us to free the captives and get them out of harm’s way.
The theme of Saturday was “Witch Hunt,” where player distrust was at an all-time high when it was believed that one of us was the suspected killer, and our goal was to prevent a final kill from taking place that night. This all led to a final event where six players (myself included) were zip-tied, gagged, and lined up in front of the rest of the group. We had to state our case for not being the killer and players would vote on who they thought the real killer was. Thankfully, and probably due to the fact that we’ve seen too many horror movies, most players were not convinced that any of us were the killer and turned their attention to Cascade Enforcement and their questionable security tactics.
As the group started to question Cascade Enforcement, it was revealed that the final murder took place, and Carlip, one of the leading members of Cascade, ran off before anyone could catch him. A video began to play, with Carlip revealing that he’s part of the group responsible for the killings, and he called us out for our inability to work together and prevent the murders.
At that point, we all rushed to the location of the final murder, where representatives of “Sanity October” stepped in to clear up the crime scene, assured us that everything was under control, and asked us to go about our business. One message we decoded before the festival even started was “Beware Sanity October,” and this was our first official introduction to this (likely sinister) organization.
The game looked to be over for the night and we all headed to the closing night party, still keeping an eye out for one last surprise. That came at about 6:00 in the morning, when Sanity October and Cascade Enforcement broke into our room, took cotton swabs to our mouths for DNA samples, and told us not to tell anyone. Clearly this is just the beginning for the mysteries of Mt. Hood and Sanity October, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us at the Timberline Lodge next year.
I can’t stress enough that this is a team game and the players were a huge reason why this game was successful and so much fun. Everyone I encountered was friendly, helpful, and excited to decipher the next clue. This isn’t a game that you “win,” so the social experience is extremely important. I’ve made friends for life thanks to the immersive horror game, and I have a feeling that our GroupMe room for the game will keep going strong leading up to next year’s meet-up back at the lodge.
Bottleneck Immersive has created a game unlike anything else I’ve encountered, and their passion for the game and players is immediately apparent. With Bottleneck having little prep time onsite, sleepless nights, and a rabid base of players ready for the next clue, it is a massive undertaking to run a game of this nature over the course of the festival, especially when you consider that they need to modify the game on the fly based on what players are doing.
Following the end of the festival’s Immersive Horror Game (for now), I sat down with Bottleneck Immersive’s Dylan Reiff to talk about this year’s game:
What were your biggest takeaways from the immersive game two years ago? I can tell you really thought about what worked and what didn’t from seeing the changes this year, specifically the addition of the Hunter and Player tiers, daily email reports, and creative ways of telling players that the game was over for the day.
Dylan Reiff: Well, that's good to hear. I definitely learned a lot about mob mentality and crowd control, and I think this game in a lot of ways was a response to that. How do you take what's good and what's bad about those things and create a world to explore those themes? The challenge is that we don't necessarily have a huge staff, but we have a lot of people who want to play. We want them to have that energy and to feel excited, but we can't let it be uncontrolled and it can't be chaos. A lot of the mechanics and thought that went into the design of this year's experience had that in mind.
I thought the addition of the Pat character was a great way to deal with the fact that players will joke and will drink, but you were never going to get as crazy as Pat.
Dylan Reiff: There will always be bad behavior, and it can manifest in different ways. Sometimes it's just someone who is too intoxicated or just too excited. It’s not ill-intentioned, but it happens. So how do you create a warning system, almost? I thought that this character fit with his personality to break the rules in a soft way that could be reprimanded publicly. So you have a standalone character, but then there's this added function of him, that he's the one that is loud and interrupts, and then you tell him, like, "You gotta shut up man, that's not what this is about. We all have to be polite and listen."
What would you say was the biggest success of this year’s game?
Dylan Reiff: I'm very proud of our Friday night. I feel very good about that experience of forcing players to pick one of the two different group events happening simultaneously, with the goal of wanting players to be jealous of what others did, while also not wanting to imagine a world where they didn't just experience what they got to do at their event. I felt very positive about how those things came off, especially with the timeframe of the rehearsals.
Yeah, they went quite well. I had certain expectations based on the previous game, but that Basta experience on Friday was a big step up. It was really well-orchestrated and I didn't expect something as impactful at that location.
What was something that you planned that didn't go as well as expected?
Dylan Reiff: I had some side missions that I ended up cutting, just because I felt like the information wasn't seeding the right way to make it feel really connected with that particular story element. So there were definitely a couple of things that I was like, “Well, that's not where people wanted to go.” Like, they didn't want to explore that aspect of the thing that I had seeded. And so I felt like there was no real reason to have that element happen.
I wanted to talk about “Sanity October.” Looking at the fight we had against DEDI in Colorado, I was surprised that the cult aspect didn’t come up in player conversation sooner. I assumed that it's because there were a lot of first-time players.
We already know there is some kind of other force at play here, but were you surprised that that didn't pop up earlier in the game? Did you want that to be a bigger thread than it was?
Dylan Reiff: That is a thread that I am happy with where it's at, is what I'll say about that. There is definitely some interest in that from people who knew, and there was also some who knew from previous years. I was really happy and excited to hear the different theories that were starting to populate as the game went on.
I want to discuss day 3, which you titled “Witch Hunt.” There were certain pieces that were put into place and we still probably don’t know everything that everyone in the game knows, which I find really interesting. Some people were concerned that maybe players had too much information they weren't sharing. Do you feel that people were sharing the right amount of info?
Dylan Reiff: Well, Cascade said to share everything unless you're told specifically not to share. So it creates an interesting psychological dynamic that I thought was really interesting to see how it would play out, which is what you share versus what you don't. And, obviously, when you give a certain amount of people information, stuff's going to get out. The overlying theme of this year is trust, and I felt that it was a really interesting exploration of trust.
I was surprised that most of the group decided to not vote on a killer. The good thing is that they didn't say, “Cara is the Killer,” because there were events that made her look more suspicious than others. Did you have a separate path in place had mob mentality won and they all said, “Cara’s guilty”?
Dylan Reiff: I don't want to pull the curtain too far back, but we were open to the possibility. I was actually pretty shocked also that they weren't as “pitchfork” about it. We were expecting and preparing for different situations than that.
As someone who was in your serial killer lineup, I thought that was really great that you offered that experience. What I love about the game is that every player is involved in a really cool moment, even if they don’t all get the same one.
As I see it, there are multiple main characters now. We've seen some people deputized under Basta, while others were following Mark or Alex. It gives you the ability to cater different experiences to different people. And for people who may have felt like they were left out of the Mark experience, it seems like there's an opportunity in future years to give even more players unique experiences leading up to the event.
Dylan Reiff: Yeah, for sure, and I think we're purposefully creating enough entry points towards personalized attention that, depending on what you're excited by, whether that's texting back and forth with the killer all day or whether it's going to Basta's office, I feel like we're finding a really nice balance of enough ways to do it that you're going to have at least a couple moments where you really feel an intimate connection to the character. Because there is a finite amount of space and a finite amount of bandwidth for our team, we are very aware of never wanting to expand outside of our ability to make people feel special.
Have you already started planning next year’s event? What’s the creation process like for you?
Dylan Reiff: It's always a full-time thought process. I'll ramp up at certain times, but we definitely have ideas and tracks and stories already starting to formulate for next year. And then we'll start to ramp up once we decide, "Okay, what's fun about this story we're about to tell?"
They all live in the same story world, but they're all very different stories and different narratives. So once we know the focus, then it's time to explore it through the themes we want to get out of it. It definitely is a long process, but it's a very rewarding one and I think it's a pretty unique one. I don't know a lot of other people who get the opportunity or privilege to take an iconic space like the Timberline Lodge and get to use it as a canvas for a weekend.
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If my experience sounds like fun, I hope you'll join us at the next immersive horror game! To keep up with The Overlook Film Fest and Bottleneck Immersive, visit:
[Photo Credit: Drew Huntley, Cara Mandel, Rachel Walker, Jonathan James]
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