We missed getting tickets for Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico when they re-opened after a closure for the COVID-19 pandemic before heading to Colorado. We therefore made sure we secured tickets a few weeks before coming back to New Mexico for the International Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque.
Stephen and I arrived at our timed ticket for 11:00am and prepared to enter what promised to be a fun, interesting, confusing and exciting time.
The House of Eternal Return at Meow Wolf is an interactive and immersive art exhibit and experience. Even if I showed you pictures of everything, and explained everything I thought I understood, you’d still be left with more questions than answers. I’ll give you a taste and encourage you to check it out next time you’re in Santa Fe.
Masks were required inside and there was a lot of hand sanitizer around since it’s an exhibit that needs touching, opening, crawling and exploring. You can also add 3D glasses to your ticket price to see parts of the exhibition in 3D under black light.
You enter the House of Eternal Return and you can go in any order and any direction. There are clues everywhere and things to read and ponder. The basic premise is that something happened to the family that lived here… but what? Each room and every object could hold a clue.
Who is this family and what happened to them? And what happened to their 40 year old family pet, Nemesku Q. Hamster? There’s room after room of things to look at. Doors to open. Places to explore and climb through. You really do have to try and open everything *cough* like the mailbox!
You never know when it might show you a clue to the riddle of the family, or you might find a sneaky view of Nimesku!
Stephen and I both disappeared through the dryer! You emerge in many other dimensions. Bermuda, Black and White, Mammoths, and much more.
There are also accessible doors to reach those hidden areas too, so no fear if you’re not interested in being swallowed by a dryer or climbing through a fireplace.
Make sure you don’t just open every door. But press firmly on different surfaces. You can even play a tune on a set of ribs and pipes!
After a while, the one constant I could find was Nimesku. Being 40 years old, he has obviously cracked the mystery of space and time. There are over 30 images of him or allusions to him throughout Meow Wolf and once I was thoroughly perplexed by the riddle of the family, I focused my energies on finding Nimesku Q. Hamster as often as I could.
It’s a surreal environment. You get twisted and turned but in the end we did enter and exit every room. We stopped feeling like we were seeing clues about the mystery of the family after we left the house. Once we were in the other dimensions it became very trippy and quirky.
There are some really great photo ops available throughout Meow Wolf. We entered thinking it was kind of like an artsy escape room without a timer. With stories that would unravel over time. We left feeling no closer to the answer as to what happened to the family in the House of Eternal Return. By the end, I mused that maybe creativity, art and music were the key to escaping entropy and finding new perspectives (dimensions) for how to deal with the confines of space and time, based on the clues I found throughout the House.
After we finished exploring the House of Eternal Return, we stopped at the snack bar to rest our minds and reflect on our experience. The chili caramel popcorn on offer was a tasty treat with a refreshing drink to pair with it.
I got chatting to the guys in the gift shop because I was trying to find a Nimesku Q. Hamster souvenir since he’s the consistent part within the experience that I connected to. Sadly, they don’t have anything (please get more fun hamster stuff in there Meow Wolf!), but I was told that if you find 10+ hamsters within the experience you can get a little prize at the front desk (I’m not sure if this is always available, so check before starting so you don’t feel disappointed) but I did indeed get two Nimesku Q. Hamster stickers for my efforts.
Overall, I had a great time. It was weird and wonderful and I can’t wait to go to Omega Mart in Las Vegas and Convergence Station in Denver (which opened 2 weeks after we left!) to see more wacky, weird and wonderful art by the Meow Wolf team.
My advice? Don’t go with any expectations. Don’t worry about “which way to go”. Just open stuff, be delighted finding hamsters (or whatever you connect to) in unexpected places and relax. If nothing else, appreciate the complete and total immersive experience and all the work that went into it by the talented Meow Wolf artists.
Stephen’s Take On Meow Wolf
I love puzzles and finding answers to mysteries. I was therefore looking forward to visiting Meow Wolf as it seemed like that was part of the experience, plus we’d had friends who’d visited Meow Wolf in the past and loved it.
By the time we left, I had mixed feelings about it, with disappointment being the predominant feeling. It wasn’t that Meow Wolf was a poor attraction – it just wasn’t what I was expecting.
Although there is a mystery element to it, I feel like you might as well completely ignore that aspect of the exhibit because it’s not something you’ll ever get to the end of. Like Shae said, we went into it thinking it’d be like an artsy escape room with no timer. In reality, there weren’t really answers to find. There were times we’d find clues or crack a code, but effectively it was meaningless. There was no proper solution to the overarching mystery. There’s no moment where you realize you’ve cracked the puzzle. There’s just a never-ending flood of information, colors, stimuli and randomness.
If you go to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe with the expectation that you’re going to a weird art exhibit with some vague theme running through it that doesn’t really make sense, you should have a great time.
It’s certainly a feast for the eyes and I do appreciate how much work the artists put in to House of Eternal Return. There are 70 rooms in House of Eternal Return, with each room being an art installation in itself. There’s an immense amount of creativity that went into this Meow Wolf location – it just wasn’t for me.
Address
Meow Wolf, 1352 Rufina Cir, Santa Fe, NM 87507
[…] leaving Colorado, Shae, Truffles and I headed down to Santa Fe, NM as we managed to get tickets for Meow Wolf, then we headed to the northwest corner of New Mexico to stay in […]