QuakeCon 2025 Part 2: Meow Wolf Revisited

As promised, this post will be way more positive. In fact it could be, dare I say, really unreal? Ahem, clearly I didn’t spend enough time working on that one. I’ll show myself out now.

After exploring The Real Unreal at Meow Wolf last year we knew that we would be returning. If nothing else the vastness and non-linear layout of the place lets you experience things differently every time you visit again, kinda like watching Inception. But this time around I managed to convince the other two couples in my group to come along, though sadly only one could make it because the other had their flight delayed about half a day (looking at you American Airlines). But I payed a bit more attention to the starting house and the contents inside and there is indeed a story behind everything. A young boy named Jared Fuqua vanishes in his own home via a portal in his kitchen fridge after he learns that a cure for his sick friend (who could very well be imaginary) might exist in another dimension. Curiously enough in looking through the videos on the family laptop on the dining room table his mother seemed to think the house actually swallowed him up. And some say kids have overactive imaginations, lol. I’m sure I’m missing at least some plot elements but for a concept inspired by a child’s imagination, it’s a damn good one in my opinion. What better reason to do something than to help a dear friend? And the journey itself is like the Vulcan philosophy “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” meets Adventure Time.

As near as I could tell I don’t think anything changed in the exhibit from last year, which is good because for something of this scale I still think I’m gonna need another outing or two to fully notice (and grasp) everything there is to see. But perhaps because of that I didn’t take as many photos as I did last year. Nevertheless there is still a good bunch and I’ll post them again in a giant photo wall below. As I mentioned before though, after entering the house there is no linear progression to the exhibit as evidenced by seemingly two-to-four ways to get to any of the main areas. For example, you can take the refrigerator portal to the hub and choose where to go from there, or you can enter another hallway from the garden shed in the house’s front yard. And in all honesty with how insanely big the entire thing is, I can’t even remember the path I took, and that’s not even accounting for any double-backing and looking for other paths to take from place to place, so a step-by-step description of where I went wouldn’t even be all that useful since I can guarantee your path would be different. And it should be different. The path that I took versus another doesn’t result in a different outcome of the story, just a different order of experiences. So don’t take the path that I did, take your own, and if you revisit Meow Wolf again take yet another different path. You’ve got a bunch of different ways to experience the same story, and that’s what makes this place so much fun.

This place also tickles my inner sci-fi nerd in some of the best ways. Multiversal stories have always fascinated me when they explore alternate accounts of a well-known and established character’s (or characters’) history. “What if?” is always at the center of every science fiction story and The Real Unreal definitely plays into that by asking the question “what if realities collided?” One of the prime examples of that is the RV area. The fact that it’s fused with a rock wall aside, the entire thing looks like it and at least fifty other things from completely different places on earth phased into each other like the phase cloak from Star Trek TNG: The Pegasus Project. There are hot dogs, bubble bath soap, a cactus, a TV with a documentary on, and a child’s hand-drawn depictions of some kind of bipedal creature. You could find any of these things in various places, but in the RV they’ve all come together in one place so you have hot dogs dressed up as cowboys soaking in a bubble bath in a pot on a stove in the RV, the TV documentary is going on about some kind of not-quite-Bigfoot creature, and bits of cacti are fused into parts of the RV’s structure. A literal collision of reality.

You encounter the RV at least a little way into your tour regardless of which path you take, so it doesn’t serve as a segue after you leave the house. It’s more akin to someone else encountered the same phenomenon as Jared but much more dramatic. Going from memory the options you have to leave the house are through the fridge in the kitchen which leads to the fridge hub, a side door inside the garden shed outside leads through some paths of UV-reactive floating seaweed (for lack of a better description), a tunnel that’s really only big enough for kids to fit through is connected to the back of a clothes washer, and there are a few other paths connected to the upstairs bedrooms. Like I said, you’ve got a lot of paths to choose from and each one takes you on a very different path, and those paths cross at several points along the way in areas that could be considered hubs of sorts.

Connecting the larger areas you’ve got all manner of hallways and winding paths that have themes ranging from standard earth-based construction to something completely out of science fiction, and of course various degrees of in-between. Ultimately a few of my favorite areas are what I call “UV New Orleans” and the “Time Warp Lab”. While I got plenty of pictures from “New Orleans” I somehow neglected to take anything of the Time Lab, and for that I must hang my head in shame. I did capture plenty for both areas last year but next time I’ll be sure to go a little crazier with my camera app.

In all we spent a bit less time this year compared to last but that was because we opted to cut it a little short due to a large group of young children pretty much running amok. They weren’t doing anything bad, and they certainly didn’t ruin anything for us, but most times groups of 10-year-olds are noisy and this was no exception. But we all thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the two in our group that got to experience The Real Unreal for the first time.

So with that I present you with the photo dump of Meow Wolf 2025.