I've Been To the Weirdest Attraction In Las Vegas, And It's A Grocery Store

As CinemaBlend’s resident theme park expert, my work and my play often cross paths. I was lucky enough to recently preview Universal Orlando’s Epic Universe as part of my day job. So what does a fan of themed entertainment do on vacation? Go looking for more themed entertainment, of course. When visiting Las Vegas, that means going to Omega Mart.

Omega Mart is the creation of Meow Wolf, an immersive art and entertainment company with multiple locations throughout the U.S. I had never had the chance to visit one of their venues before, so I made sure that while visiting Las Vegas, which has added some incredible themed entertainment in recent years, including escape rooms based on IT and the Blair Witch, I went shopping at Omega Mart.

Themed Entertainment Is Expanding In Interesting Ways

Once upon a time, the only place to get a piece of interactive and immersive entertainment that made you feel like you were part of another world was in theme parks. That's certainly no longer the case.

In recent years, we've seen major theme park players like Universal open the Great Movie Escape and Disney World try a huge swing in immersive entertainment with the incredible, if ultimately faulty, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. But the big names aren't the only game in town. In Las Vegas, a town with no shortage of things to do, one of the strangest, but most creative, is Meow Wolf's Omega Mart

Omega Mart Is A Grocery Store… At First

Located inside Area15, an immersive entertainment complex, which also houses the new and equally impressive, John Wick Experience, Omega Mart looks, as you enter, like any generic grocery store you’ve ever visited. It has rows and rows of packaged goods, all with logos that look, at first glance, like ones you’ve seen before. Upon closure examination, however, things don’t look quite so normal.

The items for sale, which are actually for sale if you want them, have very strange names. Things look like one thing, but then turn out to be another. What looks to be a standard drug store blood pressure monitor is designed to examine your metaphysical health. There are some interactive elements and some items that raise some interesting questions, but eventually, if you continue to explore, you find there’s a great deal more going on.

Multiple paths will lead you to what’s literally happening behind the scenes. Maybe you’ll enter the janitor’s closet and discover that it goes deeper than you expect. Perhaps you’ll open a door in the cold case, thinking you’ll grab a drink, but instead you find a frozen tunnel leading to who knows where.

Something Sinister Is Lurking Behind Omega Mart

When you find the layer behind the store, you’ll realize just how much deeper this story goes. Through the use of a Boop Card, purchased for a nominal fee in the store, you can interact with various computer terminals, reading emails and watching video files. Even without that, you could spend hours reading every book and journal you find. They reveal a much deeper story.

The details are picked up a piece at a time in a non-linear fashion as you happen upon various elements. You’ll be introduced to Dramcorp, the company that owns Omega Mart, as well as the family that runs it. You saw their faces in the store, but back here, you get to know who they are, and it’s not all good news.

I won't go into all the details; they're fun to discover for yourself, and I won't even pretend to understand the whole story in a single trip. But I love it when themed entertainment pushes boundaries, and Omega Mart is certainly that.

Omega Mart is a remarkable piece of themed entertainment presented in a form that we rarely see. If you’re not interested in chasing the story and putting it all together, you can simply wander through the incredible location. Discovering its various weird and wild rooms, interactive experiences, and visually stunning decor is a joy all its own.

Omega Mart isn't a theme park, but fans of that sort of entertainment will find a lot to appreciate. If you find yourself in Las Vegas, visit Area15 and find Omega Mart. It's absolutely worth your time, and you can spend the better part of a day there if you really want to see and do it all.