Touch everything.
I wasn’t intentionally trying to visit every Meow Wolf location. It just sorta happened. I’d be in Las Vegas for a conference and pop over to Omega Mart, a grocery store that stocks secrets behind the shelves. Or I’d have a long layover in Dallas and fit in a stop at The Real Unreal, the lovely home of a family with a penchant for accidentally opening interdimensional portals. With each visit, I became addicted to Meow Wolf’s out-there brand of environmental storytelling.
For those unaware, I probably sound bonkers. Let me back up. Meow Wolf is the name of an artist collective that started in 2016 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Located in a former bowling alley, the original location is called House of Eternal Return. When visitors enter, they are met by a full-size Victorian-style house at night. Inside, all is not what it seems. The refrigerator door opens to a secret passage, and there’s something peculiar stashed under the living room stairs.
House of Eternal Return was hit, drawing more than 400,000 visitors and grossing $6.8 million in revenue in its first year. There are now five Meow Wolf locations, including Las Vegas’ Omega Mart; Denver’s Convergence Station; and Grapevine, Texas’ The Real Unreal. With immersive atmospheres punctuated by interactive elements crafted by teams of artists and designers, each location is part art exhibit, part escape room, part scavenger hunt, and completely wacky.
The most recent outpost opened in October 2024 in Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood and marks Meow Wolf’s most ambitious project to date. Located in a former steel factory, Radio Tave is the first location to be set in a workplace, a fictitious West Texas community radio station called ETRL. The locale inspired Meow Wolf artists to craft an audiovisual extravaganza featuring a mimicking wind-chime forest, weirdo sound booths, and a kinky honky-tonk jukebox.
For visitors who look hard enough, the Meow Wolf crew has woven an amorphous narrative about ever-expanding vortexes and psychedelic sci-fi happenings across the five locations. (A sixth is set to open in an old Los Angeles movie theater in 2026.) Easter eggs are frequently added to reward die-hard fans. For example, there is a recording at Radio Tave of a character who exists in Santa Fe’s House of the Eternal Return being interviewed by the ETRL staff.
The overwhelming amalgamation of surrealism begs the question: How exactly are you supposed to experience the mind-bending entirety of Meow Wolf?
“It does not matter,” Susie Cowan, the senior creative producer of Radio Tave, tells me. “I mean, if you want to start in Santa Fe because that’s where it all started, that’s cool, but you don’t need to go through them in the order that they were built or anything like that.” Whew! What a relief.
As someone who has explored every Meow Wolf location, I feel uniquely qualified to provide advice on how everyone can have the best time ever in one of the group’s spaces. (I’ve even been to Factory Obscura, a similar concept in Oklahoma City not operated by Meow Wolf but that does feature a live video link connecting it to House of the Eternal Return.) Without giving too much away, here are my top 10 ways to have an enriching visit to a Meow Wolf.
