Escape Zoom

The Isklander trilogy mixes detective games, video calls and immersive theatre

We’re on a video call with an older woman who’s not quite sure how to use the platform, her choppy Internet connection causing the audio to stutter and fall out of sync with the video feed. It’s a familiar situation but what the woman is telling us is, fortunately, rather less so. Her neighbour, Ivy, has gone missing. And, as you dig into the recent history of Ivy’s employer, it turns out she’s not the only one.

This is the starting point of the Isklander trilogy, a series that exists somewhere in the space between immersive theatre, escape rooms and videogames, and which plays out entirely within a web browser. To find answers to its mysteries, you need to scour characters’ Facebook and Instagram profiles, break into email inboxes using guessed-at passwords, and deploy your search engine of choice to track down relevant web pages (some of which have been built for in-universe companies, others tucked into the actual sites of businesses and institutions). Watching an old BBC news clip on YouTube that seems to confirm the conspiracy at Isklander’s heart, we find ourselves wondering, not for the last time, what exactly is real and what isn’t.

Watching an old BBC news clip, we wonder, not for the last time, what exactly is real and what isn’t