When was the last time you went 24 hours without thinking to look at your phone? When was the last time you felt able to? As I emerged back into the real world after visiting Key of Dreams, the realisation I’d not glanced at a screen throughout was telling. If you want to really lose yourself in an immersive experience, mobile tucked away, notebook and pencil in hand, Key of Dreams has others beat.
Set across 24 hours – midday to midday – in Treowen house, an isolated 17th-century Welsh manor that’s every bit as atmospheric as you’d expect, this luxury blend of interactive theatre, escape room-esque puzzle-solving and branching narrative is, by its very nature, brilliantly absorbing and utterly exhausting, though not for the reasons I initially expected.
Key of Dreams is the latest experience from Lemon Difficult, the small British company whose team I spoke to previously for a behind-the-scenes look at how it was founded, and their take on how interactive theatre can offer the kinds of choices seen in video game storytelling. But it’s one thing to talk about an experience like this, and another to do it for yourself.
So, a couple of weekends ago, I made the trip to Newport and then on from there, into the countryside and the almost complete unknown. I’d done little research into what playing Key of Dreams would actually involve, and Lemon Difficult had not shared any mechanics or plot with me in advance. I knew the experience was heavily inspired by Lovecraftian weird fiction, blended in with the real-life history of Treowen house – neither of which I was familiar with.