A fragile young woman obsessed with an old mechanized box containing an ancient (and possibly deadly) artifact calls upon a clairvoyant, a paranormal investigator, and a parapsychologist to assist in unlocking its secrets. No, it’s not a new AMC series, or an upcoming summer blockbuster—it’s Visitations, the new immersive-theatre experience by The Mission Business, creator of last year’s epic bio-horror theatrical extravaganza, Zed.TO.

As with Zed.TO, the audience is very much at the heart of the action in Visitations, exploring rooms, decoding messages, solving puzzles, and trying to prevent a catastrophe—or perhaps being used to bring one about. The more you bring to the experience, the more fun you’ll have in return.

The creepiness starts well before showtime, as the artifact—known as the Sabbaticus—starts to make its presence known to those that it has “chosen.” Everyone can watch an eerily effective interactive preview trailer that gives a taste of what audiences are in for, but those who purchase the pricier tickets are treated to three unsettling pre-show surprises that touch on the show’s exploration of the intersection between the technological and the supernatural. (We’ll refrain from spoilers, but will note that we were able to extend one of these interactions to well over an hour, at which point a particularly chilling response made us step out for some air.)

Once participants arrive in the Drake Hotel lobby at their appointed hour and are informed of how the evening will proceed, they’re ushered into the evening’s starting point and immediately plunged into a situation fraught with intrigue, conflicting agendas, thinly veiled hostilities, and intimations of conspiracy. After an appropriately startling moment (even more so if you’ve brought your cellphone), the group is divided into teams. Each one goes off in a different direction, and the narrative adjusts depending upon each leader’s own goals and the order in which locations are visited.

As befits a thriller where ageless entities may be seeking out their victims by modern means, a few of the technological aspects were bedevilled by opening-night glitches, occasionally forcing the cast to push things forward with some inelegant workarounds. And while each of the performers was strong individually, a number of the confrontations between them rang false, offering more information than insight, more invective than grounded emotion. The production was on its strongest footing when it relied on simpler, more practical effects, clever characterization, striking imagery, and thoughtful storytelling. This was particularly evident at the climax, which didn’t quite gel theatrically (particularly in a smallish room with unforgiving sightlines) and required a blurt of exposition to get us through to the more effective final moments.

However, most of these were fairly minor issues—ones which will likely be addressed over the course of the production’s run. As it stands, Visitations is an energetic and entertaining rumination on “the ghost in the machine,” the unnatural power that communications technologies hold over us, and the aspects of our humanity that we sacrifice as we allow technology to become an object of worship in our otherwise secular lives. Fair warning: this production requires a fair bit of physical activity and engagement from its audience. The evening never gets truly frightening, but it features a selection of loud sounds, bright lights, sudden darkness, flights of stairs, mildly icky gory bits, and an unfortunate encounter (soon to be abbreviated, we hope) with an overactive fog machine.

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Today In Theatre at Drake Hotel