Lockwood Immersive Blog: June 2026

Summer is officially here! While we love the summer heat and the warm sunshine, we’re equally grateful for our air-conditioned office. Everything in moderation, right? Let’s check in and see how well-balanced our June really was.

Updates

In June we finally opened Shades of Grey! We’re absolutely thrilled that the first permanent Lockwood game is open for business, and it’s been wonderful seeing everyone come in and give the game a whirl. Of course, like any creatives, we still have the urge to touch up and add extra polish here and there, but overall we’re quite proud of the experience we’ve made!

Lots of friends have come to play Shades of Grey, including our pals at Secret City!

Likewise, we’re still tweaking our lobby - is it weird to say we’re also very proud of that space? Creating a tonal and aesthetic experience from the moment you walk in is an important goal for us, so we also take time every week to track down old books, find or make strange antiquities, and continue to boost the weird and whimsy of the space.

A rug really ties the room together, you know?

So, obviously, a lot of our time went to launching, running, and tweaking Shades. But now that production is mostly over, we’ve been able to take a breath and look ahead to the future. The rest of the summer sees us completing some private contracts - we ran pop-up games for a client at the end of this month - and bringing some work to the CNE in August! (More on that soon.)

Beyond that, we’re interested in bringing The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly back for another run - we’d have liked to do it at the start of summer, but Shades took up our focus - and then consider whether we want to start building a second room, create another pop-up experience, or something else entirely!

We have a new sign! The only question now is where to take it next.

Extracurriculars

Boy, was it a jam-packed June: we have not one, but two extracurriculars to share! (Our yearbook is starting to look pretty good…)

Firstly, mid-June was time for Toronto Games Week, an interdisciplinary celebration of games and culture. The best thing about TGW is its umbrella structure; creators and event hosts of all kinds are welcome and provided resources, meaning that at TGW you could go to a speedrunning tournament, then a scavenger hunt, a workshop, an academic talk with a game designer - all in the same day.

From the TGW closing party: everyone gets to draw sprites and contribute to live game creation!

It’s a well-organized, committed event from an all-star team - really our only problem is that we wish more people knew about it! These kinds of grassroots events are an amazing place to meet likeminded people and build community. There were so many folks we chatted games with, and so many unique games we got to play!

In a nutshell, we think TGW is great, and we had an especially rad time this year. You can see Jesse’s full video diary of his experience on Instagram.

But wait! There’s more!

As we sat at our desks after a long day, we bemoaned the fact that we hadn’t actually been to an escape room in months. Then, fluttering down from the ceiling came a strange note: Escape Games Canada was about to open their first game in years!

We saddled up our horses and rode straightaway to check out The Heist of Black Bart, which did not disappoint. Jesse is a little bit charmed by vintage-y, steampunk-y things, so getting to do a locomotive scenario was very exciting - the whole thing was really a little reminiscent of Imaginarium’s The Steampunk Express, in fact.

Your next friend hangout should be on an Old West train. Trust us.

Playing another game was a great break and really inspiring. We picked over our pros and cons of the design for at least a day after playing, and talked about what kinds of elements we’d like to see in our upcoming projects.

Oh, and we also set the record for the fastest completion time. Though the room had only been open for a couple of weeks, meaning that time was bound to get obliterated eventually…but let’s pretend otherwise for now.

If this is gone the next time you go to Escape Games Canada, please don't tell us.

Recommendations

Jesse recommends Mina the Hollower:

I spent a lot of time in June with Yacht Club’s new offering, a Zelda-meets-Fromsoft adventure about a mousey engineer in charge of repairing generator towers across the breadth of a monster-infested island. Tightly designed with a sprawling map, secrets hidden everywhere, and some really fun boss fights, it’s the perfect game to sink your teeth into over the summer.

And if you’re someone who dreads the demanding and punishing nature of a Soulslike, it’s packed with built in mods and accessibility features which make it approachable by anyone - which I think is a great touch.

Bryan recommends YARG:

Not to be confused with an expression by an agreeable pirate, YARG stands for “Yet Another Rhythm Game”. It’s a fairly computationally non-intensive-to-run open source rhythm game that harkens back to days of old when you and your gang would huddle in a basement to jam in Rockband for hours. I found myself easily hooking up my dusty PS3 peripherals to it and the game working perfectly.

I was feeling nostalgic for the guitar hero gameplay and YARG delivered in spades. It has a base 60-ish songs that are fun and likely you’ve never heard of before (since the game is not affiliated with any big music labels), which was honestly a selling point of the games of old where you would know around 10 of the total songs and be exposed to a heap you’ve never thought of liking before.

If you still have some of the gear lying around, YARG is the cool new game on the block. It’s a wonderful Guitar Hero supplement that allows you to import custom music charts (which if you dive into the community you’ll find MANY) with as little friction as possible. Note: the game is strictly ANTI-PIRACY. Don’t go freely stealing music from old games without risk even if you think you are tech savvy. Savvy?