Step through an unmarked door on the east side of Columbus and the rules of physics quietly stop applying. Furniture climbs the walls, hallways bend into secret passages, and rooms react to your footsteps with light and sound like the building itself is alive. That’s Otherworld, a sprawling immersive art museum built by roughly 40 local and national artists over two years before opening its doors in 2019.
Spread across a converted warehouse space large enough to hold 2,000 people, Otherworld packs in more than 40 distinct scenes, each one a completely different world with its own color palette, soundscape, and rules for how you’re supposed to move through it. It draws obvious comparisons to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return, but this one has its own strange, homegrown Ohio personality, and it rewards curiosity over passive sightseeing.
What Makes It Worth The Trip
The entire point of Otherworld is that you’re not just looking at art, you’re inside it. Floors light up in trailing patterns as you cross them, walls respond to touch with sound, and hidden panels and drawers throughout the space conceal extra bits of story and detail for anyone willing to poke around. Crawling through tunnels, squeezing into odd nooks, and pressing your hands against glowing surfaces are all part of the deal here.
No two rooms feel alike, which is a big part of the appeal. One space might drop you into a bioluminescent forest, the next into a glitchy digital dreamscape, and another into something that looks pulled from deep space. That constant shift in scenery keeps the momentum going and gives the whole visit a choose-your-own-adventure feel, since there’s no single required path through the building.
Plenty of the rooms double as genuinely great photo backdrops, with saturated colors and inventive lighting that make for standout shots without much effort. At the same time, a handful of visitors have pointed out that some sections lean more toward walking through a pretty hallway than truly interacting with anything, so it helps to go in treating it as an art walk with interactive bonuses rather than a wall-to-wall interactive playground.
Atmosphere & Décor
Everything happens indoors, inside a single large building that’s been completely transformed room by room, so there’s no natural light to break the spell once you’re inside. The mood shifts dramatically from one scene to the next: some corners feel calm and dreamlike with soft glowing color, while others are loud, saturated, and almost overwhelming in the best way.
Because the layout is nonlinear, the space has a maze-like quality that makes it easy to lose track of time and direction, which seems to be exactly the intent. Secret doors and passageways connect rooms in unexpected ways, so backtracking or wandering in circles is part of the fun rather than a flaw.
Other Considerations
How much does it cost? Standard admission runs $30 for adults, with a discounted $25 adult rate Monday through Friday before 5 p.m. Seniors and military pay $25, while kids’ tickets are $20.
How long should I plan to stay? Most visits land somewhere between one and three hours, with two hours being about average depending on how thoroughly your group wants to explore every nook and secret passage.
Is it good for kids? Families do bring children through regularly, and the crawl spaces and touch-reactive rooms tend to be a hit with younger visitors, though the maze-like layout and darker rooms are worth keeping in mind for very young kids.
Is it worth the price? Ticket prices run a bit higher than a typical museum visit, and that’s a fair trade-off given the scale of the build and the number of artists involved, though it’s the kind of place best enjoyed by actually engaging with the interactive elements rather than rushing through.
Otherworld
📍 5819 Chantry Dr, Columbus, OH 43232
Website: https://www.otherworld.com/main/home-ohio
