Lockwood Immersive Blog: January 2026

Hello, world! Welcome to the Lockwood Immersive blog!

What is this? As we’ve grown over the past year and a half of our existence, we’ve increasingly wanted to share more personal notes, recommendations, and behind-the-scenes tidbits to our audience. Some of the things we wanted to talk about didn’t feel like the right fit for our social media platforms, where we want to keep the focus on our current and upcoming experiences.

So, we’ll endeavour to update this space every month with things like:

• Closer looks at the work we’ve done over the course of the month

• Notes on our own extracurriculars - we attend lots of experiences and play many puzzle games

• Recommendations for other creators and projects we want to boost

• Maybe even a puzzle or two just for the blog!

We hope you enjoy our first-ever post!

Updates

It’s the start of the New Year! For many, January can be a slow, cold, and dreary month, but we have a long list of things to work on and no time to waste! In particular, we’re working day and night on an escape room experience at our new Etobicoke site - the plan is to have it open by the spring. We’ll stay tight-lipped for a little while longer, but expect updates about it very soon.

This new office also comes with a lot of work! We’ve been painting our first floor, which will eventually become our lobby, and sourcing furniture and decor. We want this space to feel like a timeless, old-world manor or museum, so we’ve started hunting for strange and interesting knickknacks on secondhand sites and yard sales. Take a look at the nice deep green we're adding to the walls!

This month is also a little unusual for us as co-director Jesse is traveling in Asia for the entirety of the month. He’s still working remotely, revising the design of the escape room and creating material for a new small project: a murder mystery party requested by a private client. The murder mystery features elements of both Greek mythology and burlesque, so we’ve been researching references, designing evidence lists, and casting our performers.

We can’t share too much about private works like these, but we’ll hope to include some photos from the event when it runs in February!

Extracurriculars

We’ve been very busy with our extracurriculars this month! As mentioned before, Jesse is currently traveling through Asia - and while there’s a lot of items on his itinerary, he always tries to make time for unique activities and experiences. Here are some of his highlights:

In this month’s blog, I want to shout out two experiences I attended in Tokyo! Japan overall has a unique and very interesting approach to puzzle design (as detailed in this great writeup by Matthew Stein over at Room Escape Artist!) and I was super eager to see it for myself.

Firstly, I played A Challenge from the Crafting Genius at SCRAP Asakusa. I’ve played some SCRAP games that have been produced in North America before, and I’ve always loved their commitment to central mechanics and concepts that turn the escape game experience on its head. Crafting Genius was no different: the entire game revolved around solving puzzles by (you guessed it) crafting the solutions out of materials like wood, string, and tape.

It was easily the most tactile escape room experience I’ve ever had, despite the fact that we spent the entire hour sitting around a table, which (spoiler alert!) we had to build ourselves! One great thing about the physical-first design was that my group included some inexperienced solvers, who were still able to make lots of contributions in sorting, organizing, balancing, taping - you name it. It’s a game I won’t soon forget!

The second experience I want to mention is not puzzle-based, but instead is TeamLab’s PLANETS exhibition in Toyosu. This walk-through exhibit is visually stunning and incredibly interactive, featuring chambers that play with light, scale, and technology in clever and dazzling combinations. Most people who have heard of this experience know that parts of it involve walking through water - though I still wasn’t prepared for the sensory impact of those sections - but I had no idea how many more interactions there were after that! My group spent a little over two hours at PLANETS, and could have stayed further if our stomachs hadn’t started rumbling.

Meanwhile, Bryan has been taking part in some rather exciting events of his own back in Toronto:

I had a very cool opportunity to participate (virtually) in the largest puzzle-hunt event of the year: The MIT Mystery Hunt! It was a 3 day puzzle marathon that took place on the MIT campus in Boston where teams of any size — although most scaled into the hundreds thanks to virtual players like myself — competed to solve an endless gauntlet of some of the most dastardly puzzles designed by person, or in this year’s theming, Puzzmon! With over 200 puzzles and tasks to complete, our team V.AL.V.E had our work cut out for us. 

“What does the winning team get?” you might be asking yourself. Glory, notoriety and a shiny gold coin. Since the 1980s when Mystery Hunt began a coin was hidden on campus and the scavenger puzzlehunt was created to find it. That history hasn’t been lost in 2026 and is still the final win condition over the 3 days. The second massive reward is the honor to write the puzzle-hunt for the following year. Cardinality won the hunt in 2025 and developed our event, where The Providence Bureau of Invest-Egg-Ations has the privilege to write next year's event and boy do they have their work cut out for them.

This was my first time ever participating in the MITMH and it was DENSE. In-hunt we were tasked with finding and helping a cryptid society open and close portals throughout the PUZZMON world, a very deliberate copyright-free pokemon theme (I’ll admit I was so focussed on playing puzzles I skipped a large chunk of lightly animated narrative).Our team’s sole focus was just on COMPLETING THE HUNT IN TIME as many teams even fail to do so. So how did we do this? Well the main puzzlehunt site had a few avenues to navigate. A main puzzle page, where lists of puzzles existed to advance to the next world, an online 16-BIT VIDEOGAME where users can wander and uncover more puzzles to unlock on the main site, and research tasks which were usually live objectives that puzzlers had to send back to HQ to get graded on to receive research points that would unlock, you guessed it, more puzzles.

On the second day of the hunt, a large group of the Toronto players from V.AL.V.E met up in person to jam. I met a bunch of folk for the first time at this meetup and It was so much fun spending a full day bouncing between laptops and AHA! moments. When you got a little brain heavy from an extreme hex grid where you had to re-construct cryptic crossword clues, you could do a task with some friends nearby and build a Puzzmon out of blankets and cereal boxes. One moment I’ll never forget was when the entire team realized the answer to one of the puzzles used only mature 18+ phrases, so we just started shouting out the dirtiest words at each other laughing all the way. Something that truly turns strangers into friends.

On the third day I was locked in on Discord with my team. When we unlocked more puzzles on the main site our server was populated with more and more individual channels. I had so much adrenaline jumping from chat to chat trying to impart niche video game knowledge or helping fill out large logic grids. I was gobsmacked when we unlocked an entire chunk of puzzles whose text was redacted with nonsense symbols. We had to find the puzzles in this chunk with the most visual information to solve first which, after solving, would unredact letters for the rest of the set. So many unique game mechanics filled this hunt that it almost felt like 7 separate events smashed into one. (“ ****,???,***** ” was my favourite puzzle that I saw in this group)

Even with my experience playing puzzle games, I was worried I wouldn’t have been good enough to help scratch the surface of MITMH and I personally ended up only interacting with 10% of the hunt. My self-doubt be damned, As a team we finished JUST as the closing ceremonies ended! It was such a fun time and kudos to V.AL.V.E for being so warm and supportive. I’m afraid I can only recommend this event for any deep puzzle person. If you are unfamiliar with puzzle-hunts this would be a tough event to jump into, however I would highly recommend getting your feet wet with general puzzle-hunt formats starting with the always accessible Puzzled Pint monthly meet-up, then step it up a little with Colby’s Curious Cookout. If you want even MORE insight in the MITMH 2026, Here’s a link to the closing ceremonies. It even has charts!

Recommendations

Lastly, here’s a corner where Jesse and Bryan can recommend games, movies, music, or anything else they think deserves a look!

This month, Jesse recommends Is This Seat Taken?: I have some misgivings around “cozy” as a genre - let’s call this a “chill” deduction game that’s low-stakes, with cute graphics and a simple storyline. The deduction mechanics are easy to understand, and while they’re expanded on a little I do think there was more room to go wild with them, since the first levels play more or less like the last levels. Still, this game makes for a great before-bed wind down, or, in my case, the perfect game to slowly work through over multiple flights throughout Asia.

Bryan recommends Physical: Asia: Okay so yes this the third in the Netflix Physical 100 series. And I’m already going to assume you have seen the first two incredible series. This is the format pushed to the extreme. It features eight countries stacked with six of their most athletic behemoths battling it out in extreme physical competitions not unlike your favourite tournament arc from your favourite anime. It’s such a raw competitive gauntlet that makes the viewer feel like a roman emperor watching gladiators in a colosseum. It’s hype on top of hype. Did I mention this season has boxing legend Manny Pacquiao?

That's all for January's blog post. We'll see you again in February!