The Santa Fe based arts collective, Meow Wolf, opened their 60,000 square feet Convergence Station exhibit in 2021. This Denver location, the third permanent Meow Wolf immersive art installation, is located in a purpose built structure at the intersection of elevated highways near Mile High Stadium.
Convergence Station is part art installation, part escape room, part fun house, part adult playground.
The cost to enter for non-Colorado residents is $45-59 (depending on the day, as of December 2023) plus $3 for a QPASS card that will allow you to play along with the story.
Spoilers Ahead
There are a lot of similarities to Omega Mart in Las Vegas. Like I did in my post on Omega Mart, I will explain the basics of the “story” of Convergence Station as I understand it.
The fun of visiting is that you go in and find out everything for yourself. So I would suggest that if you haven’t been yet, stop reading and go visit. You will have a much better experience.
If you have already been and didn’t quite get the point and would like to hear my perspective, then by all means continue reading.
Layout
After going through security, you enter the lobby area, which looks a bit like an airport terminal. Stop by the Information Desk to purchase your QPASS for $3. The RFID card allows you to interact with the exhibits and participate in the story. While Convergence Station can be experienced without the QPASS as a walk through art exhibit, by using the QPASS you get to participate in a scavenger hunt that where you become part of the fictional worlds. If you are with a group and you want to work together, you could easily just purchase one card.
C Street
Once you have your card, take the C-Line elevator to the 4th floor. This will transport you to the heart of C Street, a gritty futuristic downtown city.
There is a ton to see on C Street, and it is my favorite “world” in Convergence Station. The city is completely open to walk through. Visit the theater, launder mat, psychic, bodega, cyber cafe and all the other locations.
Make sure you head downstairs to the Pizza Pals Playzone.
There are amazing details all around and secret doors that lead to additional rooms with interactive art. In one room you can pop up like a prairie dog amongst a cow and bison.
Continue to explore the three floors of C Street. At some point, you’ll find yourself entering one of the other three worlds.
Eemia
Eemia is described as an “ice city” but the thing that you’ll notice first is the neon cathedral.
Step inside to play the organ. Sit in one of the Transformer-like robots. Or check out the caves on the far side.
Numina
This alien forest reminds me what I imagine the world of Avatar would look like (not having ever seen the movies). Bridges crisscross the canopy. You can interact with the environment with your QPASS and the large canons around the canopy.
Ossuary
The underground maze of tunnels is made up rooms that include a sauna, library, and power plant with a sassy vending machine.
Story
You can enjoy all of the worlds without diving into the story. But if you choose to purchase a QPASS, you can become part of the narrative. Throughout the three floors of the exhibits you will see two different types of machines.
The first, and most important, are smaller machines with the QPASS logo (which happens to be the same as the BOP kiosks in Omega Mart). You tap your QPASS on the logo of the machine to download a “MEM”, or portion of a memory, to your QPASS card.
Your task is to collect 16 MEMs, four each from four different women (The Forgotten Four) that disappeared during the Convergence that took place some years ago. Look for their missing posters around C Street.
Once you have collected the MEMs for one of the Forgotten, you will unlock a full memory and will get to see an animated movie memory from that person’s life.
Through collecting memories, you will get messages from a mysterious whistleblower. This whistleblower, it is revealed, is an employee of the nefarious QDOT named Chya.
Chya needs your help to stop QDOT General Oleander from engaging The Last Stop which will erase all memories.
The second machine you will use is the ATM; a larger version of the QPASS kiosks.
The ATMs are where you can get messages that are sent to you by various characters to your QPASS, read the news, and review your collected MEMs.
Once you have collected all the MEMs, you must then communicate with the slime. The slime you will see on the wall also have tap points for your cards.
Unfortunately during my visit the slime network was down, so I was encouraged by a staff member to instead just go back and tap more of the kiosks. It turns out that during the Convergence, all four of the Forgotten had their memories converge into a new being — Chya.
More clues, including a poem delivered by a character named Cecil at Gyre on C Street, lead me to talk with the robot that works the concession stand a the cinema.
Finally I was told I had enough of the MEMs to go to the control room located behind one of the stores on C Street.
Once I tapped in there, the entire control room took over with a message from Oleander. He had been using Chya to collect the memories so he could open his portal to The Last Stop.
Fortunately the beings of Numina were able to stop Oleander before destroying all memories.
Putting together the memories in the control room and stopping Oleander appears to be the final mission of Convergence Station. After that the only other mission I completed was helping the robot at the cinema communicate with the sassy vending machine in the power plant.
The stories at Meow Wolf are always quite abstract. Convergence Station seemed to have less interaction than I experienced at Omega Mart, but I may have missed some items. Still I spent about 3 hours going through the story and installations.
Did you find any additional parts of the story that I missed?
