Monday, October 14, 2019

Nightmare: I Can't See (Haunted House Review)


In the shadow of 1 World Trade Center is the doorway above for Nightmare NYC's I Can't See, Tim Haskell and Psycho Clan's latest Halloween immersive theater horror experience. I've attended every variation of Nightmare since 2009 when they unleashed Vampires, Superstitions, Fairy Tales, The Experiment, Killers and This is Real.

What I've always loved about every incarnation are the themes and dedication to making sure everybody who goes are immersed into a rabbit hole the Nightmare team creates and if you fully engulf yourself and play along you'll leave with a giant grin on your face.

I Can't See left that grin again.

I Can't See is an amusement park of sensory load management that challenges you to play along using your imagination all the while the Optics team makes the story seem too real. It's a clever play a long that hits you right away. The moment you walk in, I Can't See greets you with loving Optics research team and they play their part. You're briefed and then blindfolded twice while given headphones to listen to a fun story if teens doing teen stuff.

You enter with friends but it's a solo experience through and through. Listen to the prompts, follow the instructions and have your senses challenged. Touch and feel a variety of random story cues will make you jump, taste the developing scenes, smell them as well and hear the craziness.

Your sight is useless here and I imagined quite a scenario based on hearing character voices and descriptions. The story is a bit cliched but it has its moments. The ending has a good twist if you remember what you've been told.

I Can't See depends on you buying into the fact you'll need to channel your 5 year old self and imagine the story playing out while Nightmare provides you the extrasensory overload to get your chills on. You're not going to have actors jump out to scare you or see elaborate sets. So know going in, this is a theater for your imagination and you'll enjoy it.  It's like immersive podcast that challenges you just enough to get your other senses tingling, all the while avoiding "death" which may or may not come...depending on your wits.

I definitely couldn't see but I could hear my heart beating....fast.

The Vitals



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