The Ladder: A Hilariously Absurd, Surprisingly Replayable Escape Room – mssv

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The Ladder: A Hilariously Absurd, Surprisingly Replayable Escape Room

July 6, 2025

10–14 minutes

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Los Angeles<br>$69-89 per player<br>Hatch Escapes<br>90 minutes

The Ladder is an absurdist escape room from Hatch Escapes about a life spent climbing the corporate ladder. Your team plays an employee at the Nutricorp megacorporation, starting in the mail room in the 1950s and ending in a corner office in the high-tech 90s, with your appropriately-named colleague Stab Backner always one step ahead.

Despite their popularity, I don’t go to all that many escape rooms for all the usual reasons – cost, co-ordination, travel time, logistics, and so on – so I can’t tell how unique The Ladder truly is. From what I understand, it’s not that unusual to have multiple rooms, an hour-plus duration, good storytelling, Disney-level production quality, or even Hollywood actors.

What is unusual is seeing all of those things in a single space, especially with this level of replayability and madcap humour, which I assume is why it won a Thea award this year, in the “Attraction, Limited Budget” category (The Ladder cost over $1 million to make, which really tells you something about budget sizes in the themed entertainment industry).

It’s also refreshing that The Ladder isn’t based on an existing IP or brand, nor is it part of a chain. It doesn’t even involve the usual tropes of murder, fantasy, or sci-fi. Instead, it delights in the bizarre theatricality of work in a ruthless company, an escape room version of the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy.

Via Hatch Escapes. All other uncredited photos are by me.

We began in the office toilets. The mirrors transformed into screens, and Stab Backner (played by Jordan Belfi) welcomed us to Nutricorp in a delightfully nasty performance. We chose an avatar to represent our team by turning the sink taps, and then we were off to our first job in the mailroom. Since this was the 1950s, the room was painted entirely in grey.

Right after doing Stab a favour, an entire wall-sized pneumatic tube apparatus tumbled to pieces on the floor, requiring reassembly. Across the room was a grid of cubbyholes awaiting the parcels stacked on the floor, their destinations determined by a simple physical rotation task. A third wall held drawers whose purpose I never cottoned onto, and I think there was yet another task I’m forgetting to do with letters.

These tasks were all classified as “games”. Progression in the games earn teams money and determine whether their company will be successful. Because some of the games are endless and others are extremely difficult to finish, you earn money based on your incremental progress, which makes the whole thing feel much fairer.

Each room also includes a “puzzle” track. These are more like traditional escape room puzzles involving codes, deduction, logic, observation, and all the rest; the mail room’s puzzle track required two people to decipher instructions and flip light switches.

This embarrassment of riches is why The Ladder strongly recommends teams of six to ten players, with at least three people tackling the puzzle track and the remainder split among as many games as they can handle. Since we were only five, we had to make do with two players on the puzzles, one of whom was me. I’m not sure I’d agree that the puzzles were “very tough” as their website claims, but I have the suspicion we were helped along our way – not just by our host appearing as a janitor occasionally to dole out hints in-character (they do this for everyone) – but with a few extra minutes here and there. After all, the time pressure is what really makes The Ladder tough: only 15 minutes per room.

Since there’s little time to waste, The Ladder does the very unusual thing of clearly and non-diegetically signposting instructions for each game, along with the start point of each puzzle track. What’s lost in immersion is gained in comprehension, and I wish more escape rooms would follow suit. When you think of them as tooltips or contextual help in a video game, it all seems so obvious.

Our performance review from the 1960s

Whenever we completed a puzzle track, a voiceover or a video would play about a conspiracy and whistleblower inside Nutricorp. This invariably happened right before our time was up, at which point the lights dimmed, we saw our performance review, and a character invited us to make an ethical or personal decision by twisting a doorknob left or right, or similar. These came with strings attached: choosing to do good might provide a time and/or score penalty on the next room, while your choice in your avatar’s marriage partner provided unique bonuses – RPG mechanics crossed with The Game of Life.

The 60s moved us into the secretarial pool. This was dominated by an irresistibly tactile...