Hackney-based immersive specialists Swamp Motel provided one of the rare lockdown online highlights with their interactive conspiracy thiller The Iskander Triology.

Clem Garrity and Ollie Jones have since created a jump scare live escape room in Whitechapel, but their latest show is less of an adrenaline rush, and more a quietly unsettling dystopian chiller.

Driven by AI, the hour-long experience not only lacks the tension of previous work, but doesn't quite deliver the agency to find your own path through the story.

The set-up though is intriguing. Former TFL offices on Petty France are dressed to look like a futuristic medical corporation, where we are a group of 'Guidestar' volunteers invited to talk to coma patients via a distinctly retro-futurist 'echosump'.

We are told in an introductory briefing that this new technology can communicate with their subconscious and help them awaken. 'Stefan' instructs us to draw out their secrets by offering them empathetic details about ourselves - while never mentioning they are in a coma.

Ham & High: The retro-futurist echosump which allows volunteers to talk to 'sleepers'The retro-futurist echosump which allows volunteers to talk to 'sleepers' (Image: Alexander Nicolaou)

We are queasily aware there's a sinister undercurrent to this information mining as we are ushered into individual booths, and pressured to type up our sleeper's secrets on tickets, which Stefan collects.

Communicating via a mic, our patient starts describing nightmarish visions, of stigmata, and being tracked and chased. But what will we divulge to fulfil the brief, and how compliant are we with even the most disturbing instructions?

At the end you are given a print-out of how you did, and you are supposed to feel implicated in Saint Jude's menacing corporate scheme. But there were times when my questions and urgings were met with radio silence from my sleeper - until I came up with something else. Perhaps the AI wasn't sophisticated eough to make you feel you had choices which could affect the outcome, or the twist wasn't twisty enough; either way it lessened the impact with the result that this is more diverting than disturbing.

Saint Jude runs at 100, Petty France until April 23. https://saintjude.ai/tickets/