The Grey Rooms · The Grey Rooms Productions

S4 - Behind the Door: The Tower

April 8, 2022·39 min·3 clips

Kyle explains how UK social housing tenants are forced to use separate entrances and denied amenities like pools and playgrounds.

Brooks opens with Kyle Wilcox. The conversation starts as a first meeting after Twitter contact, loose and friendly in the way collaborators tend to be. Kyle lays out his route. He is originally from New Zealand, has lived in London and the wider UK for seven or so years, and still sounds unsure whether staying is good or bad. The small talk does not stay small for long. Rising costs and hostile media currents sit just outside the horror chat, giving the tower a grim shadow before its machinery comes into focus. Then Brooks turns to the story. He wants to unpack what is happening inside The Tower, and the interview moves from greeting into craft talk. The game structure gets most of the attention. Brooks imagines a bigger version where the narrator pushes back, demands answers, and gets pulled into a subplot about the games. Kyle keeps it tighter. The point, as they work through it, is not to explain everything. It is to hit the right beats in a podcast-sized story. That restraint matters. Brooks says the first challenge is almost funny at first, just an egg hidden in an arcade machine, until the doors close and the losers burn. The reset is ugly but practical. Kyle says fire is the fastest way to clear the area for the next group, with no bodies and no mass grave. They even joke about why the machines survive, exactly the kind of sideways question this show gives room to breathe. Kyle also mentions a darker version where the bodies' fires fuel the building. The ending loosens up, with Brooks calling the season crazy, hard, fun, entertaining, and the best yet, while Kyle looks ahead to hearing how it wraps.

As heard by us

A compact horror debrief that follows a tower story's tests, resets, and grim machinery.

The episode frames The Tower as a tight horror story with a clean design spine. Brooks Bigley and Kyle Wilcox move through the beats in order: the tower setting, the first test, the locked doors, the burn-and-reset logic, and the ugly idea that the building keeps going on the…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Want the anatomy of a grim tower test, plus the logic behind the burn-reset?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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