The Bunker
Created with
Broken Ghost Immersives
An immersive choose-your-own-adventure game. Somewhere between an escape room and a LARP.
You show up at what looks like a 1950s kitchen.
There’s a formica dining table and matching chairs, a counter, a range, and (of course) a vintage fridge fully stocked with Miller High-Lifes.
There’s a laptop with some sort of CV footage of you in the room.
A man in a hazmat suit enters the room.
He thanks you for being the top crowdfunders for The Institute for Human Survival. With your help, they have built a series of bunkers for funders to survive an apocalyptic event, should anything like that ever occur.
The lights flicker and go out and you hear the bombs fall outside.
Every “day,” your team must decide what to do to acquire more resources. You only have food and water for so long, so somebody will have to don a hazmat suit and venture outside of the bunker to explore the nuclear wasteland.
These encounters are treated like a tabletop RPG, where you narrate what happens to the Gamemaster, who tells you what happens next.
This is The Bunker.
There are also activities to help your team inside the bunker:
Chat with other bunkers via the DEBUNK intranet.
Play a card game to craft resources like more hazmat suits, water filters, and maybe a way out of this mess.
Find hidden objects and information in the set that may help your team.
Beware, your teammates who leave the bunker may act a little… differently when they return.
Your unique ending is based on your gameplay and decisions.
You can play The Bunker several times and have a completely different experience at each show.
There aren’t a lot of pictures for this one because the experience was so intimate. But here are some reviews:
“The true magic of The Bunker lies in its innovative form; it seamlessly incorporates everything from a tabletop card game to a tech-focused ARG, used as supporting devices to the greater choose-your-own-adventure style immersive experience.
The use of each of these tools to enhance the experience is strong to begin with, but the opportunity to use all of them at the same time, and as a means of strategizing with your team, is revolutionary.
By combining multiple formats in this way, The Bunker allows audience members to make their own choices in terms of how they want to interact with the narrative and with each other.”
“More than just about any immersive game that we’ve played, the choices that we made in The Bunker had immediate and logical consequences. We were never totally shocked when something happened because it flowed out of a decision that we had made either in that moment, or earlier.
The more each of us put into the game, the more the game gave back to us. Many of us had some wild experiences. The Bunker rewarded those of us who embraced the game and its fiction.
For those that showed up with their imagination and a willingness to play, The Bunker presented countless opportunities to explore within a strange world and build our own unique story.”
Team
Gamemaster: Ian McNeely
DeBUNK: Austen Anderson