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A new Punchdrunk show is always a big deal. And blessedly, they’re becoming increasingly common. After the eight-year gap between 2014’s The Drowned Man and 2022’s The Burnt City, the immersive theatre legends fired out another two in the form of 2024’s Viola’s Room and this, their latest, Lander 23, with an unnamed National Theatre collaboration due next year. But every one still feels like an event, not least because nouveau Punchdrunk is given to startling reinvention, after years of spectacular but essentially similar shows. Now you genuinely never know what they’ll do next.
Although it’s been running since November, you won’t find any official reviews of Lander 23 out there, as the current run of the computer game-derived live action sci-fi show has been deemed ‘early access’, AKA a work in progress. However, after some negotiation the company was happy to let me in to report back some impressions.
It’s a mission-based ‘stealth exploration game’ divided into two halves
Really very different from anything Punchdrunk have made before, Lander 23 sees you put in a team of four, which is then subdivided into two groups of two. Sent to an alien planet to harvest a resource called Radiance, you get roughly an hour of game time, following 30 minutes of scene setting and tech stuff. Half of your mission time will be spent in a ‘landing craft’, manning a console that allows you to track the other half of your team, who will be making their way through an abandoned colony trying to find and harvest the Radiance. The craft team directs the away team via radio mic, steering them towards the resources and away from hostile roaming guards (who are played by masked actors). At the halfway point you swap so everyone has a go at both.
It’s very definitely ‘a game’ rather than ‘a play’
It’s objective based, and while there are no prizes there is a scoring system and a leaderboard to show how much Radiance each team harvests. It’s a bit like a sci-fi version of the classic 1980s/1990s kids’ gameshow Knightmare, except everybody has a go at being both advisors and dungeoneers. It helps that both sides of the game are very fun: frantically shrieking instructions at the away team (‘Not that right! The other right!’) is pretty much as exciting as being on the planet itself.
It doesn’t require a massive skill level
The away team can nominally die if they get spotted by the guards three times. Other teams definitely did lose ‘lives’ when I played (there’s an announcement when they do so). But I don’t think anyone was actually eliminated and the impassively helmeted, searchlight-wielding guards seem to be fairly forgiving, so long as you’ve at least made some effort to hide. You don’t really need any wacky skills to succeed at Lander 23: simple common sense and spatial awareness are the biggies. Some people might find the gameplay easy, but the challenge then becomes racking up as high a score as possible by collecting Radiance faster than everyone else.
Being in the old Burnt City set is quite cool
A few eyebrows were raised when it was announced that Lander 23 would make use of the set to 2022’s The Burnt City, still erected in Punchdrunk’s giant Carriageworks base in Woolwich. Is this not a slightly cheap idea by the company’s usually lavish standards? When you’re there it makes sense. The maze-like town is so perfect for the game that it would seem almost perverse to tear it down and spend vast sums of money on an equivalent. And though there are odd moments of deja vu as you stumble into what was once some exotic Trojan bazaar, you're so focussed on your mission that you don’t really have time to examine the details.
It’s definitely a work in progress
As a game, it feels pretty rock solid. Maybe there will be more added to it, but it really works. In theatrical terms, it has a ways to go. There are some fun cyberpunky bits of design, but you have little sense of the world you’re in, or who the guards protecting the Radiance are supposed to be. Even the titular mystery regarding the fate of the crashed Lander 23 craft is barely touched upon. We’re told there are cassette tapes scattered throughout the set that you can play to glean a bit more lore, but to be honest I was too focussed on the mission/scared of the guards/intimidated by the scale of the set to look for them.
I briefly caught up with Punchdrunk boss Felix Barratt afterwards and he says he’s created reams of lore but has been focussed on getting it to work as a game: he admits that fully realising it will be a massive and lengthy job. He says the goal for the current run is ‘to get a basic coat of gameplay that engenders that sort of childlike sense of raw adrenaline’. The next challenge is ‘how do we start to tell a story on top of it, and we're only we’ve literally scratched probably like one percent of the surface of what we want to do.’
Should you wait until it’s definitively finished? Honestly, I wouldn’t if you’re interested in it as a game. As a work of theatre: there’s clearly a lot more that can be done, but I don’t imagine it'll be finished anytime soon. The ideal version of this show is a fusion of frantic action and rich storytelling that would surely be incredibly difficult to actually stage. But if anyone can pull it off, it’s Punchdrunk.
Lander 23 is at the Carriageworks in Woolwich, booking until May 10. Buy tickets here.
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