Globally Lauded Lockdown-Buster Launches in Australia & New Zealand

Praised by The Guardian and New York Times, this site-specific online thriller from multi-award-winning entertainment company, Swamp Motel, boldly reimagines the at-home-adventure experience for those who have grown tired of Netflix and badly-run Tuesday night trivia.

Arriving at a moment when both nations are in the throes of lockdowns, the three-part series – which features Plymouth Point, The Mermaid’s Tongue and The Kindling Hour – intuitively blends theatre, film, and gaming to create a very real (and very rare) shared live experience, no matter where you are. This is a home entertainment like you’ve never experienced.

Interactive and episodic, Isklander seamlessly blurs fiction and reality, harnessing the internet as a platform for site specific sleuthing, whilst combining the artistry of live immersive theatre with the thrill of an escape room. It’s a new form and frontier for gaming interactivity.

Taking participation to the next level, audiences are turned into live protagonists, who must hack into emails, scrutinise social media posts, make phone calls, and inspect websites on a quest to unravel conspiracies lurking just under our noses. Part puzzle game, part interactive movie, and part scavenger hunt, teams of up to six are tasked with solving a cryptic mystery – navigating a mix of live-action performances, newsreel footage, and fourth-wall breaking research – to investigate missing persons, murders, and clandestine conspiracies. Directed live by an in-character aid, each episode is an organic, real-time event with a ticking clock.

Renowned for their boundary-bending storytelling experiences, Swamp Motel is led by co-founders and creative directors, Ollie Jones and Clem Garritty, who have been collaborating for over a decade. The gritty first instalment of the trilogy was created in only six weeks as a response to the closures of entertainment and theatre spaces across the world in 2020. Since then, the series has evolved, becoming cinematic in scope, with a blockbuster production value and high-profile actors such as Dominic Monaghan (Lord of the Rings, Lost), leading to the film and TV rights being optioned by Gaumont UK – the studio behind cult shows Lupin and Narcos.

Swamp Motel co-founder Ollie Jones said: “Swamp Motel’s background came from immersive theatre, and what we really love is putting audiences at the centre of the story, plus we’re all gamers at heart, so we wanted to make something that combined these two passions. With Isklander we created something that not only blurs the line between gaming and theatre, but also fantasy and reality. Isklander is a living, breathing video game, full of live operators, pre-recorded content, and plenty of player interaction. Fact and fiction become eerily intertwined in this one-of-a-kind experience and we can’t wait for Australian and New Zealand audiences to experience it.”

A coup for audiences down under, the international smash hit that has enthralled and entangled legions of fans across the UK and USA, will launch in Australia and New Zealand on September 23.

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For tickets and more information, visit isklander.com