Attending Boomtown on my own this year, with a free schedule to boot, I felt a craving to do something I’d never had the chance to do before. It was time to actually play Boomtown Story, to dive in to the alternate reality game.
While I have dipped my toes into the Boomtown Story before in small ways—doing side quests or playing minor characters—work, group commitments, and chemical indulgences had prevented me from dedicating myself to it in the past. But not this weekend. This Boomtown, I was going to tackle the big beast. I planned to complete the whole damn narative quest.
For those of you who’ve just discovered the concepts of music and parties, let me briefly explain Boomtown. It’s a massive festival in the Matterley Bowl near Winchester: one of the biggest live music events in Europe, and it offers even more in the way of dance music and DJs than bands, playing everything from the most commercial stadium drum and bass to the most obscure gabba and Frenchcore. But that’s just the bait.
Once they lure you in with the lineup, they keep you with the most intense visual production and theatre I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard Boomtown compared to Tomorrowland in Belgium and Fusion in Germany, but both are very different in approach and goal. Central to this immersive living theatre is a grand narrative stretching across the festival. Boomtown exists in a realm of its own, and while the festival is running, this realm is almost as real as the outside world.
To explain the Boomtown Story and tell an extremely long story short, the Town of Boom was founded 15/100/250 years ago (there’s a bit of a time warp going on) by the now-famous Nikolaus Boom. Many shady corporate takeovers, revolutions, and AI apocalypses later, the citizens, in a fit of blind desperation, voted for Elen, hero of the clowns, daughter of the wealthy, and the model the AI AMI was based on, to lead them. This was a mistake. Elen never wanted to rule, rejected power, and went back into hiding.
This narrative unfolds through immersive actors, paper documents, changes to the environment, and staged performances that convey the world of the festival to its attendees. Central to it all is what can be described, in video game terms, as the main quest, which takes you throughout the festival.
Split into six districts, plus several outlying areas, the city is home to a host of characters who may help or hinder your progress depending on who they are and how you interact with them. They range from the labourers and celebrities of the Gilded Age-inspired Copper County to the cultists and creatures of nature-themed Botanica, and the pirates, raiders, and clowns that infest the more folk and punk-inspired Oldtown and Area 404.
The first place one is guided to upon entering the city is Letsbee Avenue. Serving as one of two routes into the city—the other passing by the main Origin Stage and through the bleak, futurist Metropolis district—Letsbee is a bustling central high street and serves as a fantastic introduction to the world of Boomtown, especially for those not rushing to listen to big commercial DJs.
Lining Letsbee Avenue are a host of different businesses. The first likely to catch your eye is The Daily Rag. Run by editor Sketchy Background, her team of pun-named reporters and front desk Sandras, and funded by dodgy corporate sponsor Peter Vauge (whose helicopter sits atop their impressive offices), The Daily Rag is a more sophisticated operation with a bigger circulation than most real-world newspapers.
As many people’s first interaction with the world of Boomtown, the paper contains a mix of in-universe stories and adverts, as well as some less “in character” announcements and genuine procedural content about the event. It’s nostalgic to see hundreds of people walking down the street, perusing a newspaper and cool seeing people engage with the Boomtown story this way. It made me almost grateful for the complete lack of phone signal on site this weekend.
After picking up their copy of The Rag, people’s attention is inevitably drawn to the election coverage inside and the propaganda plastering all the walls. You see, after Elen refused power, the ruling classes of Boomtown thought it best to hold an election rather than once again descend into chaos and civil war. One candidate emerged from each district, and investigating this election was the crux of the narrative and gameplay.
Starting in whichever district you liked, players were naturally led into the story by investigating an election candidate more closely. This was clever—linking the initiation of the main quest with the instinctive desire to make an informed vote led me to start the quest, and get myself involved in the Boomtown Story without even consciously deciding to do so.
Once a district quest line is started, the characters in that district send players on various missions. Typically, this works well: go to a place, get a thing, do a dance, solve a mystery. Sometimes they’re simple fetch and delivery quests, but often they require a bit of creative thinking. Failure is possible, but normally the actors will try to help you, especially if you get into the spirit of it.
One thing many groups do is take tokens to use as bribes- different tokens will work for different actors- some like a little ethically sourced trinket, while others might want a shot of tequila. If you really impress them, they might even give you some Boomtown Bucks- the in-universe paper currency, the real world value of which fluctuates between less than the paper it’s printed on and more than a pound when traded in the campsite.
Completing a district’s quest line typically grants access to a secret room where you learn additional storyline details, crucially including a piece of “dirt” on the district’s election candidate—evidence showing they’re not all they seem. After completing a quest line and receiving this evidence, players are prompted to take it to one of two places: the Temple of Zero or Boomtown Technical Support in the Transition Station at the centre of town.
Either location, it turns out, is a front for The Network. The designated “good guys,” The Network operatives at these locations task those who bring them evidence of a candidate’s corruption with recovering dirt on the other five candidates. Once one has recovered the dirt on all six, they’re to be admitted to the Temple of Zero to meet The Network’s leader, a sentient mycelial network known only as Iona.
Elements of this questline are absolutely fantastic. The Betterverse, a “VR IRL Experience” based in Metropolis and central to local candidate Aurora Venturestone’s business, is an absolute trip. Following a glitchy briefing by a frankly terrifying AI lady and putting on an illuminated visor that messes with your night vision, you find yourself in a dark wood with a desperate tribesperson, searching for icons on the floor to resurrect a dead god.
After the deity is brought back to life, you’re face to face with a lady wearing slatted shades, who claims to have been stuck there since 2010 and is desperate to see Skrillex at the Lion’s Den. She’s confined by a creature I can only refer to as Baskethead. Your party battles Baskethead by throwing plastic balls at him in what feels very much like a video game boss battle.
Following Baskethead’s defeat, you emerge—confused and mentally battered—onto a stage, where scripts are thrust into your hands. You’re to portray the district leaders in a silly play about poisoned champagne and Aurora convincing Rufus the Red, chief clown of Oldtown, to join the Betterverse.
This all sounds brilliant, right? And it kind of is. Betterverse is an absolutely jaw-dropping immersive theatre experience, and it’s only one of several.
In Letsbee Avenue, infiltrating the party of business, BLEP, and finding the dirt on their candidate, Patrick Khan, requires proving yourself by working hard and getting jobs at at least four of the businesses along the street. You could find yourself delivering papers for The Rag, running about for the Postal Posse, or getting up to definitely-not-dodgy activities with the Soap-ranos laundry before being invited to become a member of the party. Once you’re in, you get to attend a BLEP meeting, where it’s revealed the party plans to demolish the neighbouring district, Botanica, to build a health spa.
This pales compared to the dirt revealed in Copper County. You can discover movie mogul Edna Von Vanderhaus’s plan by becoming an actor and starring in a flick filmed with her production company. After filming, a serious-looking censor, disgruntled by Van Der Haus’s policy on “freeing the knee,” reveals she intends to convert all of Boomtown into a set and gives you the evidence to prove it.
Examples of Success
Boomtown Technical Support at the Transition Station was a standout. They were incredible at guiding people who were dissatisfied with their district’s election candidates, staying enthusiastically in character while giving folks the clues they needed to proceed and sign up with The Network. It was a highly immersive experience—I felt like I was meeting a secret agent in a bustling marketplace.
In general, when actors had the time and weren’t overwhelmed by crowds, they were brilliant. I understand the challenges they face, especially when dealing with swarms of festival-goers. Even I, just wearing an interesting costume and an artist wristband, got swarmed a couple of times, despite not being involved in the official story.
Another strong point of the Boomtown narrative was the “happenings.” These big set-piece theatre events, held twice daily in each district, helped outline the plot in spectacular fashion. From the clashes between pirates, clowns, and the Van der Graffs over gentrification in Oldtown to The Collector—who eventually won the election—opening a portal to another dimension and battling emerging tentacles, these events were a visual feast.
The election itself had a fascinating outcome. The Collector’s win was particularly interesting. Given the choices, I’d take a crazed wizard opening a portal to hell over one of the capitalists or their pawns any day. I look forward to seeing if the Collector can unite the rest of the districts against The Network, and where his future portals will lead.
Challenges and Frustrations
However, I can’t praise the brilliance without some massive caveats. The “main quest,” again using video game terms, is horribly “buggy,” to the point of frustration. For all you gamers out there, it can broadly be compared to a Bethesda game on release—think *Fallout 76* levels of mess.
While in theory, the gameplay runs and actors are out for six hours between one and seven, often when I got to a quest location, I found it was closed, with no sign of how to participate. This was particularly frustrating when I had been sent there by a previous actor.
Metropolis was particularly bad for this. At 1:15 pm on Sunday—prime questing hours—it was deserted, with all the venues closed off. While it’s completely unreasonable to expect the cast to perform non-stop for the whole six hours, leaving important quest hubs unmanned during questing hours is extremely demoralizing and frustrating for participants. I was literally approaching anyone in an interesting outfit, asking if they knew anything—most of them turned out to be punters, just as confused as me.
The Temple of Zero had a similar issue. The required destination for finishing the main quest, I arrived at 2:30, said the password to the man on the door—he reacted in character but added they’d be just five minutes.
More than an hour later, the temple opened, and somehow, I was standing towards the back of a massive queue, most of whom didn’t know why they were there or, indeed, needed to be there. Had I just royally screwed up my timings, or was something going wrong inside? It certainly felt like it. Quite quickly, the staff started rejecting anyone who hadn’t completed the quest and speeding through the finale with much larger groups than intended due to time and numbers pressure.
I couldn’t stick around to confirm, as I had to rush off to catch one of my favourite bands, but with the temple closing at 5 and a big queue still behind me, I’d wager a fair few folks missed out on the ending they rightfully earned. Throughout the festival, hatches were closing with long queues all the time, so there’s a good chance some who spent an enormous chunk of their Boomtown chasing quest goals might have been left disappointed.
Closing doors on people who’ve been waiting—often for close to an hour, often only for a tiny bit of interaction and a vital slip of paper—comes across as incredibly disrespectful to those who, while doing it for fun, have been working hard to complete these tasks, and may have spent tens of hours doing so. Waiting for nothing like this is such a disappointing feeling that I could see it putting someone off wanting to play the game ever again.
This, essentially, leads me to my main complaint. The quest, at least at its worst pinch points, is essentially oversubscribed by a factor of about five. Standing in a queue of 200 people, waiting for your chance for a “secret meeting” with the Old Man of Oldtown in the Den of Disorder, really undermines the activity. For a game where getting into it is everything, the hour-plus queues at pinch points can absolutely ruin the sense of immersion the festival works so hard to achieve.
Now, some of these pinch points, like the Betterverse, are amazing and very worth the wait, and as the queue can be explained away in-universe, it’s not as devastating to immersion. However, in other places, when you’re supposedly an important agent on a critically important secret mission, hitting a queue of more than ten minutes just immediately breaks immersion.
Suddenly, it was completely obvious I was just a customer in a theme park, following a generic scavenger hunt. I found myself losing interest in staying in character. By the time I finally reached the interactive section at the end, I just wanted to get everything over with as quickly as possible, mostly for the benefit of everyone behind me. This is, to put it mildly, a pretty shitty experience.
Beyond being massively overstretched, the Boomtown Story is also very easy to break. Lose a vital document, and you could find yourself having to repeat a substantial section of narrative, including the associated queues again. In the end, I had to cheat several times, using my artist wristband and press pass to “noclip” my way backstage and scavenge the papers I’d been cut off from by a closing hatch in 404, and after failing to pick up any hint of how to progress the plot in Copperwood.
Actors, especially those who aren’t part of a district’s core team, are also typically poorly informed about the goings-on of the quest. While they normally do a good job avoiding breaking character and adding to the immersion, finding a background character who can give you useful information is often more a case of getting lucky than knowing what to look for. This lack of widespread knowledge about the game mechanics also means characters often tell people the wrong thing, leading to enthusiastic questers bashing their heads against unsolvable problems or finding themselves in catch-22 situations where they can’t progress to get item B without item A, but need item B to get item A.
The only thing stopping the entire Boomtown story quest from collapsing into unplayable misery is the willingness of the human actors to adapt, play around, and change the rules as necessary. While, possibly due to the actors forgetting during the cult service, I didn’t manage to find the documents needed to complete the Botanica section of the quest, strategic use of the day’s Daily Rag and a soil sample taken from inside the Mother’s Temple was enough for the Network operative at the Transition Station to send me onwards to the next destination.
Honestly, without access to the “cheat codes” I had, and without collaboration from other players, I doubt I would have been able to finish the quest. On your own it takes the full three days, at least and you won’t see any bands during the daytime. Indeed, it was only through randomly being invited to join someone’s Betterverse party that I beat Metropolis at all.
In addition, it seems worth noting the whole thing appears to have been designed to be completed with the aid of an app. This clearly was thrown out the window as soon as it was realised there would be no phone signal on site, and sensibly I heard no mention of the app from any of the actors but how it wasn’t figured out that it wouldn’t work beforehand strikes me as a bit ridiculous.
Final Thoughts
In my humble opinion, the entire Boomtown Story main quest needs to be re-optimised, top to bottom, to massively reduce the amount of time people spend waiting. Make things that can be self-service, engage in more parallelization, and avoid pulling small groups into tight spaces unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you do so, minimize the time they’re in those spaces.
The Den of Disorder and the Temple of Zero, in their current forms, essentially do not work. The demand is too high, and without a serious rethink to improve capacity, they should probably be removed from the necessary pathway to complete the quest. Indeed, if the quest was designed so that any one stage was skippable, this could also help a lot. At the moment, the experience is almost entirely ruined by pinch points caused by small group interaction in small rooms. Skipping these, while sad, would keep the all-important sense of flow going.
Even the Betterverse, despite being a fantastic experience with an in-universe explanation for the queue, could do with being substantially shorter. While the theatre performance bit is fantastic fun, I’d prefer it be cut, or put somewhere else, and the experience be accelerated instead—perhaps use the two other rooms to run duplicates of the same thing for multiple groups. Without a massive drop in interest in the story, I can see increased parallelization as the only way these small-room, small-numbers encounters can be kept while tens of thousands of people try to follow the quest.
Despite its enormous flaws, I was still left very impressed by the Boomtown Story’s main quest. Utterly janky and occasionally broken it may be, but nothing in the whole world can be compared to it. The fact it can even be completed is a testament to how much work the actors and participants put into bodging it and improvising on the fly.
However, the Boomtown story is arguably best when you abandon the main quest entirely. Indeed, I had the most narrative-related fun when I dropped trying to be the protagonist of the quest and instead started setting my own goal—in my case, getting published in The Daily Rag. So many people obsess about the official questline that it’s sometimes forgotten that Boomtown is supposed to be a role-playing game first and foremost, and the big scavenger hunt is just there to enable less creative souls to really get into it.
I’d recommend people try playing the Boomtown story’s main quest—it’s an incredible experience—but I’d also only recommend completing it once. It’s equal parts an exercise in amazement and frustration. I’m both proud and pleased to have done it, but hell, you’d have to pay me a lot of money to get me to do it again.