This week I went to Denver to see my friend Kaska but also to go and see Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station in Denver. Meow Wolf, for those that don’t know, is a kind of art house/performance troupe that runs a series of difficult-to-describe “interactive art museums” at various spots around the country. I’d heard of them many times and went for the first time to the one in Las Vegas, Omega Mart, about 4 or 5 months ago, and I’ve made it my goal to get to see all 5 of the existing ones, as well as the 2 new ones when they open. I’m about to talk through my experience at Convergence Station and compare it to Omega Mart, but let me just say before I do: everything Meow Wolf does is amazing and you should absolutely go see it, right now. If you happen to be lucky enough to live in a city where they have a facility, go immediately; if not, make some travel plans. The work they do is almost unique in America; the combination of art, storytelling, interactivity (both digital and analog) and whimsy is something worth supporting.
With that said, I can’t help but feel that Convergence Station was…well, a bit of a let down compared to Omega Mart. To be sure, CS is still a total 9.5/10. I went back for a second day. There are things that are done amazingly well there, sometimes even better than at Omega Mart, but then there’s one key aspect - arguably the most important aspect of the experience, to me - that didn’t stack up.
But first: Convergence Station is amazing. It’s the only Meow Wolf facility that was custom built to house the experience, and it shows. Omega Mart, for all its wonder, is obviously cramped a bit, and the introduction/entrance to the show in LV is a little janky because of it. CS feels like what it is: a fun, paid-for museum experience. There’s an extensive lobby and gift shop, an entire cafe, a coat check; the whole first floor is devoted to what I would call the “meta experience”, which I’m sure helps a lot with families and people not used to the Meow Wolf “thing”. OM in Las Vegas is built into a whole set of experiences called Area 15, so they don’t fully control the experience. CS is a custom-built experience. There is a ton of space inside, and everything felt very accessible, even when it got busy on a Saturday. While at OM there were often queues for interesting parts of the experience, CS never got too busy. There are way, way more of the “boop” terminals that use NFC cards to move the narrative story forward.
And the art is, as always, astounding. The huge soaring vistas of Numina, the weird catacombs of Ossuary, the odd slightly-off urban C Street; all are amazing. There is a tiny Japanese-style cyber cafe, a security room with CCTV cameras, an automated popcorn-making concession robot outside a functioning movie theater, some time machine Deloreans, and room after room of funky, cool abstract art. There’s a room that consists entirely of moving black and white patterns on the walls, a room of just Himalayan masks, and an entire area devoted to a fake 80s-style chain pizza restaurant, complete with super creepy mascots. The place is astounding, and every inch of it is made over in the art style of Meow Wolf.
And…yet. I had way more fun at Omega Mart. Let me explain what my bias is, in coming to these installations: I love narratives. I come from a background of participating in ARGS, Alternate Reality Games, like I Love Bees or Marble Hornets. I love the idea of a story-within-a-story; think the Da Vinci code, or even Sixth Sense, or Fight Club: a story with a surface that hides a deeper, twistier tale. Omega Mart is this, quite literally.
-WARNING WARNING WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD-
From here on out, I’ll be talking about the narratives of both OM and CS. If you haven’t been to either of them, and you enjoy discovering stories on your own, you’re going to want to skip these parts. Go see them, both! And then come back here.
So, Omega Mart is, quite literally, a false front: a seemingly-normal-ish grocery store hiding a deep dark secret. And not figuratively; they are literal secret tunnels and false doors that lead you to the back of the story, narratively and physically, where you uncover conspiracies, fight evil, find your way through a story, make choices, and ultimately wrap up loose ends. It’s a tight, intricate narrative about the quest for power leading people astray and causing them to harm their loved ones. One entire subplot deals with the coming of age of a young woman who thinks she might be a lesbian and is also trapped - quite literally - in a tiny small town. There’s an evil corporation, a bunch of environmentalist homesteaders, ancient space aliens - it’s great. And more importantly, even when it gets very funky, it is very human and relatable. The story of the young woman, whose mother is the CEO of the evil corporation, growing of age and finding her own way, is deeply resonant. And the environment supports it: all the art (well, 90% of it) is there to support the narrative. The homesteader town is fully rendered, with tiny cottages in a desert, complete with ads, protest posters, diaries hidden on the computers, etc. The “factory floor” feels urgent and corporate and modern, pipes sluicing things from one place to another. Almost every nugget of information you find relates to some other piece somewhere else.
By contrast, the story of Convergence Station is…loose, at best. Before arriving, there are a number of videos available to prime you, narratively, for the experience, and they are all themed around the idea of a transportation/travel company that can take you between worlds, done in the style of travel brochures. The overarching corporation (which, yes, is ultimately evil) is called QDOT and is a transportation company that runs trains. A lot is made of the Quantum nature of things and how time can get out of order. Memories are brought up; that you might forget things when you get on the TRAM, their version of a train that takes you from Station to Station between the worlds of Numina, Ossuary, Earth, the Immensity and Eemia.
When you arrive at the physical site, this metaphor continues; the bottom floor is made to look like a light rail station, with clean signage in different languages, some invented, and signs for “TRAMS” to various destinations. It all feels coherent, narratively. We’re introduced to two main characters: the evil bad guy, and his sort of doctor sidekick. All good.
Then, you get on the “TRAM” (which, it turns out, is just a big elevator; kind of disappointing tbh) and you “get off” at C Street, the hub of the experience and….all that narrative vanishes. Instead, you find yourself in a kind of conjunction of somewhat overlaid settings; the urban setting, the icy setting, the weird plant setting, etc. You’re given to understand that the currency of the realm is memories, which can be extracted somehow from you and traded around as Mems to buy things. There’s some loose effort made to back this up, with a kind of convenience store that takes Mems to buy snacks. The whole quantum time thing is pretty much thrown away. You begin “booping” your little narrative NFC card at these various terminals. The whole thing about a “transportation company”? Kinda gets lost. You don’t take a train between worlds you just…push through a door and there you are. In fact, the story describes that all the areas between the different worlds are kind of physically conjoined in which case…why is there a train company? You don’t need a train.
Pause for a moment: this is one of the best parts of the Omega Mart experience, which uses the same physical boop system. In that world, you have to boop at a specific terminal first, signifying your “first day on the job” at the grocery store, where you go through new employee training and start getting introduced, narratively, to the underlying tensions of the place.
Conversely, at CS, you can boop anywhere you like to start, and all that really happens is you start…collecting memories. From people you never heard of, and who turn out to mostly be of no importance whatsoever. As you kind of boop around, randomly, exploring, various folks you never heard of reach out to you and loosely explain that…”something” called the Last Stop might be happening, and might be evil. It’s a slow burn at best.
Also, at OM, every boop terminal has a specific meaning. Some advance the story, some give you quizzes, some play a movie. At CS, they (almost, with one exception)…just give you Mems. Most of the time, you can go to any one you want. Sometimes you do have to be in a specific area of the exhibit to advance the story, but oftentimes you don’t. Also, at OM, they rarely make you go back and boop the same terminal twice, and when they do, there’s a narrative reason for it. At CS, if you wait 5 minutes, you can boop any terminal again, and it will just give you another Mem. There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between.
Also, at OM there are many computer terminals spread around, each of which is unique and belongs to a specific person and shows their unique desktop with interesting narrative content. At CS, there are only 2 or 3 of these, and (with one supercool exception for the Japanese cyber cafe), they’re kind of generic.
And parts of the CS story just…make no sense. The story loosely centers around a single cataclysmic event that brought about the Convergence of these 5 worlds, and 4 women that got caught up in it. We learn their stories, which are well done and interesting, and we start to care about them. Then we just…give up on them, and meet a new person, who contacts us and says she has “interesting information”. Who is this person? Why do we care? No idea. It turns out, of course, that this person is the key to the whole thing, and actually represents all 4 of the women at once (?), but this is very loosely explained and even more loosely motivated.
And the ending…oh, the ending. I actually went back to CS a second day because I didn’t have time to get to the ending and wanted to see it and I was…underwhelmed. As an artistic work, it’s really good; a very anime-style movie about sci-fi and evil and good and it’s flashy and cool. But (like some anime) it just kinda…makes no sense. The characters act in unmotivated ways, the guy who saves the day is someone we barely know, and the whole thing just sorta…stops. For various technical reasons related to the ending not being very well explained, I ended up “failing” the story the first time, and had to redo it (which they allow you to do, which is nice), so I ended up seeing both endings (good and bad) and they are….almost exactly the same. Most of the deep narrative content about the good ending is delivered to you after the fact in a text message/email from the doctor sidekick who tells you, in text, what a great thing you did and how you saved the world(s).
I dunno. Maybe I’m being too harsh. I loved so many things about Convergence Station - the cool urbanity of C Street, the amazing self-playing band, the awesome anime style, the idea of a travel department between worlds, the nutsy pizza parlor - but the narrative payoff is so loose and lacking. I can’t help but wonder if some of it is designed to respond to the logistical hurdles of Omega Mart; for example, because the story at OM involves specific terminals at specific times, there often was a line to get to the next part of the story. That rarely happens at CS. But what’s lost there is context; a character may tell you a part of a story at OM that involves where you are physically standing, and because that can’t happen at CS, the story writers are forced to make everything…kinda vague. It ends up feeling like a really cool avant-garde art museum with a sorta half-baked attempt at a story which, again, is still better than 99% of the entertainment out there, but feels like such a letdown compared to the masterpiece that is Omega Mart.
And the art…as cool as it is, it doesn’t really serve the narrative. At one point, off of the main C Street, I wandered into a room which was filled with puppets and blacklight paint, a kind of circus gone mad. It was very cool and….made no sense, narratively. Why is it there? What’s the point? There were no hints. And the cool black-and-white room I referenced earlier; yes, very neat, but…why? Is it a portal between worlds? A tunnel for the TRAM to go through? No idea. It’s just there. By contrast, almost everything at Omega Mart is tied into the narrative; when you go from the grocery store to the backroom, you go through a tunnel, where everything starts out looking like grocery products and slowly warps its way into abstract shapes. Cool, and narratively satisfying.
Again, I do not want to make it sound like Convergence Station is not worth visiting. Even if it was just a loose collection of amazing art with no narrative at all, I would go: the narrative is icing on the cake. But, oh, what icing it is! And this icing is a little…bland.
