Meow Wolf Denver’s real story is an elaborate scavenger hunt. Is it worth solving?

Meow Wolf Denver’s Convergence Station can feel like a hurricane of weirdness. Its twisting loops propel visitors from room to room with vividly colored sculptures, environments and theatrical tricks that are as bizarre as they are unique.

And yet, the Denver tourist magnet that has welcomed 1 million visitors since Sept. 17, 2021, is also peddling a story along with its immersive art. The underlying narrative, which took years and dozens of creatives to craft, is meant to drive people through the four floors and 70-plus exhibits of psychedelia at 1338 First St. It also gives the whole thing meaning.

Well, it’s supposed to. As anyone who has delved deep into the story at Convergence Station knows, grasping it — let alone getting to the finish line — requires curiosity, time and patience. That tracks with the company’s “maximalist” aesthetic, offering more stimuli than any one person could digest in a visit. And it’s created a thriving community of sleuths from Reddit, Facebook and elsewhere who catalog every last puzzle and “state change” (the latter being the lights and sounds triggered by experimenting with buttons and levers).

“We’ve heard from friends that the experience is completely different when you’re trying to solve the story, versus just walking around and taking it in,” said Camille Ramirez, who was visiting Meow Wolf Denver on Tuesday from San Diego. “It gives a purpose to the madness.”

Ramirez sat at a small wooden desk in Meow Wolf’s Library room, flanked by a classic (and wonderfully functional) ’90s PC, scraps of paper and bizarre imagery plastered on the walls. A few feet away were thick, house-made books on pedestals, filled with pictures and invented languages and charts illustrating abstract ideas.

“It’s a very confusing puzzle you have to figure out, but it does seem like it’s all leading to a big ending,” said Connor Kane, who traveled with Ramirez from San Diego — and who’d spent about two hours on the effort at that point.

The concept goes like this: At one point in the past, four separate worlds leaked out of their respective dimensions and landed on top of one another — or converged — causing widespread amnesia. The four worlds represent the installation’s four main attractions: Eemia, or the Ice World; Numina, the Forest World; the Ossuary, a subterranean world; and C Street, an urban cyberpunk dystopia.

Even if you’re not invested in the schtick, the story may just find you. Convergence Station employs creative operators, or actors who play alien characters, who can give clues and direct scavengers down meaningful paths. They could be roaming C Street, carnival-barking at passersby, or lurking inside a psychic’s card-reading shop. All of them play it to the hilt, with grandiose accents and zero winks to be found (beyond the fact that it’s all basically ridiculous).

Convergence Station features the work of 300 different local and national artists, all of whom were encouraged to follow their creative whims, so tying it together feels acrobatic. But hidden around Convergence Station are dozens of clues to the narrative, which can be collected and synthesized using an optional QPASS.

That $3 card (on top of the $30 to $44 admission) acts like a digital record of your scavenger hunt, and you’re supposed to “boop,” or tap it, against any one of the interactive touch screens that grace most rooms. Mercifully, you can leave and return with the same card, and the system will remember your progress. A single one is enough for a whole group.

The QPASS takes you even deeper into the conspiratorial characters and settings, through constellations of mems (or memories, which are currency here) and not-so-subtle social commentary. The larger mystery unfolds in overlapping, non-linear ways, sending you to one spot only to double back to the previous one.

One woman from each of the converged worlds (a.k.a. The Forgotten Four) has disappeared, and it’s your job to figure out what happened to them. That’s all while divining the schemes of Oleander, the story’s ostensible antagonist and QDOT’s Super Conductor General. He’s trying to create a singularity called The Last Stop, and that doesn’t exactly sound like a good thing.

QDOT, by the way, is the Quantum Department of Transportation — a.k.a. the shiny lobby of Convergence Station — where visitors take multiple stairs or elevators to reach the different worlds. They often start on C Street’s movie-like stretch of blinking lights and side shops, all of which lead to other areas, but there’s no one way to do it.

The QPASS isn’t even necessary to follow the story, according to Andy England, Convergence Station’s exhibition technology engineer. Visitors can pick up old phone receivers and dial in-house numbers. They can listen to podcasts on jury-rigged cassette players. And they can read every last word of the tens of thousands of lines of story sprinkled throughout in books, posters, graffiti, fake newspaper articles, and framed pictures.

After some self-directed detective work, England led me to a secretive (but still open to the public) room behind a seemingly pedestrian tableau. There, the narrative culminated in an ending that can break either good or bad, depending on your choices. Like the rest of it, the story is open to interpretation. But it does, at least, have a meaning and a coherent climax.

“The QPASS is sort of a guideline and it helps you along, but it’s not the entirety of the story,” England said Tuesday. “The more you observe, the more it unfolds.”

Before I delved into the narrative it seemed precious and nebulous — the work of balloon-headed creative writers with zero outlining or editing. Why do I need to be reminded that a credible future always looks interminably bleak? That various made-up factions have united to oppose each other in these converged worlds?

But after spending a couple of hours with it this week, I started to appreciate the complexity and thoughtfulness of the lore, which often synchs up with and informs the visual experience. Some visitors will continue to find it cutesy and disposable, as I used to, or not even be aware of its existence. Convergence Station is intimidating enough without being asked to solve a multiverse puzzle or learn a new language.

But it’s completely optional. And anyway, plenty of folks are sick of solving puzzles and learning new languages on laptops in their living rooms. Convergence Station’s elaborate story brings them together in real life.

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