Pushing Buttons: Why the closure of Disney’s Star Wars hotel isn’t the end of immersive gaming

The $350 million Galactic Starcruiser will shut this year – but experiences that combine the real world with online gameplay could still fly

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Next month, Disney’s immersive Galactic Starcruiser “Star Wars hotel” in Florida will shut down, less than two years after opening. Best known for being horrendously expensive – $4,809 for a couple for two nights, or a mere $1,500 a person if you fit four to a cabin – most have dismissed the Starcruiser as yet another of Disney’s recent spendthrift follies.

When I heard the news of its closure earlier this year, I rushed to book one of the remaining cabins. My path into the games industry was by playing alternate reality games (ARGs) that mixed real-world actors and events with online gameplay; I’d go on to make ARGs such as Perplex City and, more recently, augmented reality games like Zombies, Run! Even though I hadn’t been impressed by the Starcruiser’s marketing, I was desperate to see what an estimated $350m budget had produced.

From the outside, the Starcruiser is a low, grey building baking in the Florida heat, only a Star Wars logo betraying its identity. But inside, it really is as if you’re on a spaceship. Every “window” looks out to a synchronised view of space, every staff member will refuse to acknowledge the existence of Disney World, and even the wifi portal is operated by “Chandrila Star Line”. The attention to detail is astonishing: when you take a “shore excursion” to the nearby Galaxy’s Edge park, it’s on a shuttle that docks seamlessly with portals at either end.

Perhaps you’ve been to escape rooms or dressed up for a Punchdrunk show or a LARP. The Starcruiser bears similarities to all of them – the engineering room has multiplayer puzzles where you rewire cables and muck about with levers, and it’s rare to see guests out of costume. But for me, the closest comparison is to a video game, thanks to the Starcruiser’s Datapad app and the RFID wristband every guest wears.

Throughout the voyage, you receive a constant stream of messages in your Datapad from characters like the First Order’s Lt Croy and the smuggler Raithe Kole. Like in an RPG, you can choose who to help by fulfilling their missions, with plenty of opportunities for you to betray and double-cross them. Missions include searching for contraband in the ship’s cargo bay by scanning codes, breaking Chewbacca out of the brig by hacking a terminal, and even manning the ship’s weapons against a First Order fleet.

Your choices and interactions contribute to each character’s trust and familiarity in you, determining your individual path through the story. Actors are aware of your status, too: “Lt Croy” would greet me by name and tell me to keep up the good work, which was deeply impressive and very unnerving. Kathryn Yu, co-founder of the Immersive Experience Institute, told me, “There are other experiences that have components of the [Starcruiser] but I’m not aware of anything else that has the whole package,” citing its professional actors, ship-wide narrative, and stunt-laden finale.

With 100 cabins, the Starcruiser isn’t a solo experience. Everyone pursues their own missions simultaneously, so the Starcruiser has to shuffle people between group events to avoid bottlenecks, like automated matchmaking in multiplayer games. Disney’s designers are more than aware of the parallels, with a GDC talk by creative director Sara Thacher and narrative design lead Anisha Deshmane referencing not only RPGs and non-player characters (NPCs), but also massively multiplayer online games (MMOs).

The Starcruiser’s creative and technical achievements haven’t transcended its financial challenges, however. Rumoured plans for multiple Starcruisers around the world were also cancelled, making you wonder if the entire venture was yet another “low interest rate phenomenon” where tech and creative companies splashed cheap cash on long-shot bets.

I’m not so sure. Disney may have gone too big, too quickly, but they’re right to spot a potential convergence between video games and the real world. A few days before I visited the Starcruiser, I went to The Nest, a 90-minute immersive experience in Los Angeles that’s best described as a real-world version of Gone Home and Firewatch. In it, you explore an abandoned storage unit while listening to tapes left by its former owner, solving ingenious puzzles and answering phone calls in order to progress.

It was surprisingly touching, and at $60 a person, it cost way less than the Starcruiser. If Disney ever tries again, it would do well to build confidence among doubtful punters by starting with more affordable immersive experiences. No matter how much I enjoyed the Starcruiser, I know it’d be a struggle to convince friends to join me.

I resubscribed to Netflix last month with the intention of playing Oxenfree 2 but got completely waylaid by Laya’s Horizon, an utterly charming 3D flying wingsuit game from the creators of Alto’s Adventure. You glide down a mountain packed with beautiful vistas, cliffs, rivers, wind tunnels and updrafts, eventually landing (or crashing) at the shore. There’s plenty of structure if you want it, like races against “windfolk” and challenges to fly under bridges, but I enjoyed it most as a chillout game. If you ever unlocked the birdsuit in Pilotwings 64, you’ll know exactly what I mean – and this is the game for you.

Available on: iPhone, iPad, AndroidApproximate playtime: Unlimited

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A question this week from reader Laura about educational games for adults:

“I’ve picked up some coding logic from the Zachtronic published games, but I would love to find more games where I was picking up real-world knowledge at the same time as gaming!”

There are a ton of great games that’ll teach you everything from logistics (Factorio) to playing the guitar (Rocksmith+), but my favourite has to be Kerbal Space Program. If you look past its cute mascots, you’ll find an incredibly deep yet surprisingly accessible simulation of orbital mechanics. It turns out that getting things up into space and making sure they stay there isn’t as simple as building a huge rocket, though it’s definitely fun trying that too. Just don’t get me started about plane change manoeuvres and docking in orbit … Bonus XKCD comic.

Adrian Hon is a game designer and author of You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. Keza MacDonald will return next week.