Lockwood Immersive Blog: March 2026

It’s been a wet and windy March so far in Toronto! We hope you’ve been staying warm and dry as we all march headfirst into a blustery spring.

Updates

We’ve dedicated 100% of our time this month* to building our upcoming escape room! Programming, sketching, building, shopping, lighting, recording - you name it. And testing: lots and lots of testing.

More than anything, we wish we could tell you more about the room - the theme, the mechanics, the set, and the puzzles. But we simply must wait until everything is perfectly ready. Here’s another sneak peek of our lobby to satisfy your appetite for now: we’ve got some lovely pictures on the wall - but could there be more to them than meets the eye?

What if the lobby itself was a puzzle…?

*Okay: pretty close to, but not exactly, 100% of our time has been spent setting up the room. Along with some planning for the future (and oh, are there plans!), we also took a bit of time for one of our favourite activities: paying a visit to the students at Sheridan College.

We once again conducted our workshop on Immersive Prototyping with the students in the college’s Experiential Design course. The students broke into teams and assigned locations across campus to create short immersive prototypes based on classic fairytales. We saw an incredible mix of ideas - like working with the Fairy Godmother to make a police sketch of Cinderella, or answering trivia questions to avoid Rapunzel’s demise in a sort of reverse-hangman experience.

Rapunzel was represented by a stuffed tiger in this scenario, because deadlines.

An escape room twist on tracking down Cinderella's glass slipper!

It’s always refreshing and inspiring to work with the students, who are so ready to dive headfirst into raw creativity and get playful and silly. With any luck we’ll be able to return soon.

Extracurriculars

If we haven’t spelled it out yet, we’ve been very, very busy this month! There are lots of local escape rooms on our to-visit list, and very little time to get through them. So this month, we decided to find something simple and small we could play from the comfort of our homes.

Enter Escape from the Two Base Stations. This game, developed during the pandemic, is designed for two players to play remotely over a video call. Some sections include restrictions like communicating only through audio, or silently through video, to solve a variety of puzzles.

Jesse’s a big fan of SCRAP (see his entry in the January blog post) and this was a set he picked up at the Real Escape Game during his time in Japan. It was a fun way to remember the trip, try some new puzzles, and spark discussion about the way different constraints can lead to fun and creative problem solving.

I wouldn't want to get trapped a polar research station, but if I did…I'd choose South!

Here's to another successful escape!

Recommendations

This month, Jesse recommends Thinky Dailies: Looking to level up your logic? I’ve really been enjoying this new daily puzzle series from the curators/bloggers/community builders over at Thinky Games. Two things that set them apart from a daily Sudoku or crossword: a light story with cute illustrations moves the story forward day by day, and instead of the same type of puzzle each day, there’s a good-sized pool that injects a sense of novelty into the experience. Will tomorrow be an Akari puzzle, or an Aquarium, or a Nurikabe? There’s only one way to find out!

Bryan recommends Last One Laughing UK: I mean who can’t use a laugh this month? The answer is all the contestants on this show. 10 comedians featuring (at least in season 2) David Mitchell, Diane Morgan, Alan Carr, Romesh Ranganathan and more try to out-funny each other in a contained room while trying not to laugh or smile which would eliminate them from the game. It’s the most amount of fun you can have while watching professional mirth-makers try to not enjoy themselves.