How An Immersive Shakespeare Experience In NYC Wound Up Feeling Like Real-Life Elden Ring

gamespot.com:

There's a moment relatively early on in Elden Ring where you have the chance to stumble upon an elevator which, if you decide to hop on it, will take you on what feels like a journey to the center of the earth. The ride is minutes long. The further you get, the more it starts to feel like you probably made a mistake--especially as the elevator shaft opens up to reveal a whole night sky and sprawling ruins in the distance. It's beautiful. It's terrifying. If you're anything like me, you probably chanced upon this part of the game on your first day with it and were immediately consumed with the feeling of «I shouldn't be here, I did something wrong.»

But that's the beauty of a game like Elden Ring. Even if your suspicions are «confirmed» by the video game logic of running head-long into a monster that can kill you just by looking at you wrong, the game never actually forces you to stop or turn around. You've got a horse you can summon pretty much anywhere, and there's ample space to maneuver or simply to run. You can just keep going, even though you know, absolutely, that you took a wrong turn somewhere. It feels like you're getting away with something, which makes the next few subsequent discoveries hit even harder because that minutes-long elevator ride was just the beginning. The ruins spiral into more ruins which spiral into more ruins which open up into ancient cities. Nothing is going to stop you. It's a dizzying feeling of being both completely under your control and completely out of it. It is, simply put, «immersive.»

This is an experience that is almost entirely unique to video games. Places like theme parks have certainly tried, with varying degrees of success to capture it--«immersive» hotels, like the Star