Big Little Loop: SXSW’s ‘Westworld Experience’ (The NoPro Review)
Hit the streets of Sweetwater in this in deep dive into HBO’s stunning immersive activation.
There’s a charming microbrewery in Austin, Texas with rustic wood siding and large, modern glass windows, and for the week it’s been decked out to resemble the hotel level of Delos’s Westworld compound. Blank white human heads are mounted artfully on the walls, a player piano plunks out strains of Radiohead tunes, and a team of large Westworld branded buses fill the parking lot and most of the street. Delos employees in immaculate, minimalist white outfits help the line move along, assisting people as they sign their waivers, take an I.D. photo, and get their wristbands: white, or black.
On the roof of the restaurant there is a crowd of people in cowboy hats, also white or black, although they don’t necessarily correspond to the wristbands they’re sporting. As soon as I make it up there, a calm, cultured voice over a loudspeaker informs us that black wristband holders (that means me) should follow their concierge to the buses — but I don’t have my hat yet. I make a beeline for a discreet table in the back of the bar area manned by two Delos employees who ask me my name, squint at me shrewdly, then hand me a black hat.
So that’s how it’s gonna be.
The chartered buses are very nice on the inside, all heavily shaded windows, black leather seats with a black satin Westworld pillow nestled into them, and of course a brochure for the park.
The traffic can make the travel time fluctuate to anything between 20 to 45 minutes but frankly, my dear, who gives a damn? In the last minutes of the ride, as the town comes into view, a Delos sizzle reel plays, welcoming us to the park and inviting us to Live Without Limits (except don’t touch the hosts, and don’t break anything). The video’s smooth voiceover invites guests to fall in love, be a hero, become a villain.
“Become yourself. We won’t tell.”
Exiting the buses, guests are sheparded into an abbreviated version of the experience hosted at SDCC and NYCC: We pass through a black curtain into a gleaming room with guns in glass cases and hats on the wall, a recreation of the induction room Jimmy Simpson’s character goes through in Season 1. We open the same wooden door he did, and step onto the opulently appointed train car that takes guests into the park. In this version of the event, of course, it’s stationary and we walk through it, chatting with a few amiable hosts along the way, before stepping down from the caboose to the platform at the mouth of Sweetwater’s main street.
The town of Sweetwater isn’t exactly sleepy, but then it isn’t exactly real. As one of the first to arrive, I can see hosts spooling up into their dialogues and action loops for the evening, populating the streets and open doorways, ready to entice guests into conversation and adventure. Horses stamp idly at hitching posts. Ambient music floats into the street. As more guests enter the park, the streets and saloons will become positively bustling, and as the town’s time-telling bells are rung at regular intervals throughout the evening, drawing us ever nearer to the conclusion of the loop that we find ourselves in, things pick up and get downright rowdy. If that sounds like a lot, you’re not wrong. Much like the show, the experience of the park unfolds in levels, over time, and you can enjoy the ride or try to — sometimes literally — dig deeper.
The town is made up of destinations which the hosts recommend to you based on their personal concerns and what questions you may ask them. All of these places have secrets and clues to some larger mystery, and all of them have at least one host that seems to use it as a homebase, while others pass through, engage in scenes, and move on. Some of the hosts tell stories about people gone missing, or about strange rumors they’ve heard about a bright white room and red lights, that people go into and don’t come back from. Some are wholly involved in their personal dilemmas, and try to enlist your help in resolving them, or will warn you in no uncertain terms to stay out of their way. Much like Sleep No More, you can choose to follow a host on their narrative journey, physically trailing them through the experience or abandoning them for another story. Unlike Sleep No More, you can have lengthy one-on-one conversations with the hosts and even be given tasks to complete. If pressed, everyone will give up some gossip you can use, either to glean more information from someone else or possibly secure a reward in the form of a metal coin to be used as a drink token or souvenir, it’s entirely your call.
The Mariposa is where you can find saloon girls and gambling and a player piano. Ros is the madame, having replaced Maeve who moved on a spell ago, and she mostly keeps an eye on her girls and on the fights that break out at the blackjack table. Other hosts come to drink, brawl, and confront each other about the unfolding drama of the evening.
The Coronado is a grander hotel with live music and food, an expansive patio and seating area, and an imposing host who throws his weight around until he has a sudden, stuttering breakdown, falling to his knees and begging an invisible assailant for mercy before freezing, standing, resetting himself, and calmly beginning again. Most of the other hosts seem oblivious to this, but you’ll hear others talking about the strange breakdown if you eavesdrop on them later.
The post office has postcards you can keep or send and, if you check with the postmaster, a letter with your name on it. Some of the letters send guests on missions to find a person or item, some are simply world-building in nature and set you up for a specific, personal interaction with a host (mine put me at odds with the sheriff, even though I am a model of civility and totally mostly law abiding). Some letters advise guests to check the lining of their hats for a secret, revealing blood-spattered seating cards with a name or designation of them, for example: Delos Board Member, Table 2. The effort spent making the letters personal must have been immense, but the payoff is magic. The postmaster’s wife is also a gossip, and readily fills anyone who asks in on the finer details of the dispute that seems to be coming to a head on Sweetwater’s streets.
The sheriff’s office hosts wanted signs of the park’s guests — you’ll recall the I.D. photo taken before boarding the shuttle — and a jail cell to hold them in when their friends inevitably turn them in for the reward. Not everyone winds up on the wanted board, but everyone receives a digital copy of their wanted poster. The deputy of the town is want to hang around the building’s porch and makes him an easy source of information, but he’s more amenable if you’re wearing a white hat. I managed to charm him while wearing a black one, and so received my first coin.
The blacksmith has two blacksmiths in it, pretty much, but something else, drastically out of place, if you take a closer look: a sheathed samurai sword is mounted on the wall. If you ask them about its craftsmanship they shrug and say, “Doesn’t look like anything to me.” If you ask them about Dolores Abernathy, however, one of the pair is happy to tell you that she left town with Teddy a while back and they ain’t heard from them since. He’s pleased to go on about how he’d like to leave town himself, maybe, and try a life elsewhere. He even tried to take the train, once, but he doesn’t think it goes anywhere. He snuck aboard, fell asleep, and woke up the next day in the same exact spot in Sweetwater station. It’s one of several interactions you can have that hint at the hosts having some awareness that all is not right with their world.
Another is when a samurai in full armor wanders into town. None of the other hosts can see him. He finds his way into a hidden saloon at the back of the park and seems to be trapped there for a while, confused, before taking to the streets to make his way aimlessly around town before eventually disappearing. There are no clues or secrets or hidden things the samurai leads to, it’s just a samurai, being there, and it is completely awesome. Asking the blacksmiths about his armor or the lawmen about seeing a strange figure from Japan on the streets yields blank stares or confusion. If the inclusion of the samurai is anything other than a fun easter egg, it implies the walls between Delos’s carefully curated worlds seem to be crumbling.
The bank has hidden wealth and a deeply unfriendly proprietor, who becomes increasingly hostile the more guests try to dismantle parts of the bank to find the hidden coins. Possibly the meanest sonuvabitch in town, and that includes the actual bandits, gunslingers, and drunks, the banker can be swayed by a good story, but not all the time. My own attempt was going well when we were interrupted by a technician in a white plastic jumpsuit and hand-held control panel. She froze his motor functions, put him in analysis mode, had him drop his accent, and then did a brief diagnostic. She returned him to functionality by having him tell the gathered audience a story of his own, after which he promptly kicked us all out.
The town photographer, stationed in a large parlor across the street from the Mariposa, performs his services for free and has assistants who dress the guests with props and costume pieces, perhaps the smartest response to the need for an event photo booth ever implemented.
The barbershop is run by two actual barbers, performing actual barber services. Watching them perform these services with old timey implements is hilarious, but they’re very good at what they do, and actually being able to get a shave or have your hairstyle touched up is an easy but extremely effective way of making guests feel as though their park experience is more real, somehow.
The churchyard has a lot of tombstones and a couple of shovels, but only one grave worth digging up: “Dolores Abernathy” is written on a wooden cross, positioned beneath a flowering tree. Guided by clues in their letters or cryptic statements from hosts, guests get their hands dirty by robbing Dolores’ grave. Arnold’s tin maze is buried toward the top, but there is more deeper down, including one of Dolores’ paintings, a landscape with three horses galloping across it, but the horses are blank. These sorts of Easter eggs abound in the experience, but don’t necessarily lead anywhere.
There is one major secret that all guests are meant to eventually discover, and that is housed in the white clapboard church building with a number pad on the door. The code is available in a few places — as a riddle you can suss out, or an answer you get from a glitching host when you ask the correct question — and punching it into the keypad grants you access to a dark room with rough walls, almost like a cave. Pressing a hidden knob set into the wall causes the back wall to slide open, and reveal the ultimate secret of the park: Behind a glass wall, the imposing white Drone host stands in a sleek black room, surrounded by various metal implements. For fans of Westworld, this is thrilling to see in person. As a narrative device, it explains some of the stranger comments and rumors you hear from the park’s hosts. Finding the drone is its own reward, and the ultimate conclusion of most of the paths of clues you can delve into and follow. This is great if you get their on your own, but regrettably once the first group opens the door, it loses some of its fanfare. A line forms, and the whereabouts of the secret room spread quickly. Still, it’s cool to see, and there’s enough happening in the park at all times that finding the room doesn’t need to be the climactic moment.
The various narrative threads all converge, after all, at a certain point in the experience. The bandits have been planning a bank robbery; a young girl’s honor has been the subject of heated debate; the man responsible for putting it into question is the target of said young girl’s earnest admirer, as well as her caretaker, and they both go gunning for him; and the gruff lawman trying to keep the town from boiling over finds himself talking one of them down in a large, public spectacle where a lot of pistols are drawn. If you’re standing in the right spot in the crowd, you can see the bank robbery happen while everyone is distracted by the standoff. If you’re standing on the other side of the square, you can see the lawman get shot in the back just as he seems to have saved the day.
It’s the only gunshot that goes off throughout the entire experience, and the reaction is huge and genuine, followed immediately by stunned silence as two of the bandits rush out and lose their damn minds: How many years have we been coming here? I did it! I did it! I finally beat Delacourt! I can’t believe your girlfriend missed this. Hope the baby shower was worth it!
As they retreat, gloating and exhilarated, the town doctor reveals herself to be a Delos employee by shutting down all of the hosts, wiping their memories with one command, and setting them “back to one.” The characters you’ve been following and talking to and helping for the last two hours walk blank-facedly back to the places you first encountered them, and then the bell rings again, it’s a new day in Sweetwater. (Well, it’s the same day in Sweetwater, but they don’t know that.)
As far as immersive experiences go, SXSWestworld implements some key mechanics that elevate it significantly. The cyclical nature of the experience offers the chance to explore the park in different ways. Guests can stay as long as they like, giving them the opportunity to have a purely narrative-focused experience; a mission-seeking, task-based experience; or some combination of the two. With no time limits and a repeating loop, every side of the story gets to be seen, a rarity for any immersive theatrical experience. The inclusion of drink tokens gamifies the experience, rewarding behaviors and engagement, another trick that’s difficult for most shows to pull off. Implementing these things is tremendously costly, and most productions, particularly ones with lengthy runs, would have no way of supporting those costs. I have no concept of what the budget HBO had to create SXSWestworld was, but it must be staggeringly high.
The caliber of the performances was also exceptional. Actors perform for hours on end, improv splendidly, and navigate a time table complicated by interruptions from guests. I was fortunate enough to attend the experience twice, and the night of the press preview, hosts were far more available for conversational detours or even physical ones, walking you around and showing you places. Sunday afternoon, the guest count was much higher, and many of the hosts were more tightly choreographed to their narratives, less able to deviate and engage. This isn’t a knock against the experience, it’s just another aspect of the performances and production management to be impressed by.
This is the second iteration of a phenomenal immersive activation from HBO. If there is a third, and it tracks with the ambition and quality of the first two, don’t be surprised if it includes actual androids making your wildest dreams come true and letting you live, for a little while, without limits.
Westworld returns for its second season on HBO, on April 22.
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