Lockwood Immersive Blog: October 2026

Trick or Treat! It’s Halloween Month! (At least, that’s how it feels looking at all the store displays.) We love Halloween here at Lockwood Immersive, and why wouldn’t we? It’s a time of year where everyone feels more comfortable dressing up, playing, and suspending their disbelief. In a word, it’s a more immersive time of year.

Not only do we have our usual report on our work and play, we’ve got an extra special treat for you: a puzzle of the month! Take a look and see if you can solve it - the answer is listed at the bottom of the blog.

Updates

First things first: we had to get ready for Halloween season ourselves, and that meant putting our lobby in order. 

Digging up some spooky props from past experiences, tastefully arranging some votive candles, and adding a massive spiderweb to our window helped set the mood, and a jack-o-lantern carved in the Lockwood logo was the pumpkin-cherry on top. You can see a bit more detail here if you’re so inclined.

There's only one thing better than a mysterious manor, and that's a spooky mysterious manor.

After that, we had other work to deal with. First, we set aside some time to make some continued updates to Shades of Grey. (Goes without saying - Shades spoilers ahead! Play it before reading this!)

This is an ongoing process for us as we gather more data about the experience, people’s favourite moments, and areas that could use improvement. In particular, there were some back-end elements that we were able to improve to make it easier for staff to Game Master. We’ve never shown our back-end on the blog before (our mothers raised us right, after all), but here’s a little peek at what your Game Master sees during the game:

Some elements redacted for your protection.

Updates include tools to add or remove time on the timer (for late teams, for example), an integrated camera system (this used to require having a second app open), and quickfire buttons for anything that might need manual override (like if a team swallows a cassette tape before they get a chance to play it). All of these little changes add up and make it easier for the Game Master to ensure you have a smooth and satisfying game, so hooray for tech iterations!

We can also share a couple of set touch-ups, mostly in the realm of making stuff feel a little more detailed. There’s a tendency when designing escape rooms to keep things minimal; you’ve probably been to an escape room that felt like a suite of IKEA furniture and no more props than are actually necessary.

There are at least a couple reasons for this. A minor one is that the less stuff there is in the room, the less needs to be maintained, or replaced if it gets broken or goes missing. But a more central one is that everything inside an escape room is also a piece of information. It’s very easy to add in material that can inadvertently distract or confuse your players and have them feeling more lost or frustrated than clever and successful. 

So, we’ve been adding set pieces a little bit at a time, focusing on elements that add a bit more texture and realism to the space, and avoiding distracting elements like additional text, numbers, or loose objects that can get mixed up and make a mess.

This desk drawer was totally empty, making it boring and unrealistic. Now it's got a tray with all kinds of greyscale office supplies glued in to add texture and dimension.

Since we always give ourselves plenty of stuff to do, we’ve also been working away at our next PAXU puzzlehunt! We’ll have more to share in November, but right now we can show off a bit of our testing dashboard!

If loving spreadsheet formulas is wrong, we don't want to be right.

These puzzles are being completed by many different testers over multiple different waves, all of whom are providing different rankings for fun and difficulty and commentary on how their experience went. Knowing this, Bryan got to work building a spreadsheet that allows us to see at a glance the breakdown of information for each wave as well as each individual puzzle. With this, all of our puzzle authors will be able to find the feedback relevant to their work, and see how their puzzles are improving over the course of each testing period.

It seems like this month’s blog has a real “behind the scenes” feel as we show you some of the systems that make our projects work. We hope you liked the glimpse of how the puzzle sausage is made!

Extracurriculars

It seems like we’re getting better at tuning into the trends of the immersive world! Last month, we talked about our exciting playthrough of Blood Moon Pact, and this month, it won a Golden Lock Award! (Congratulations to Twist n Turn studio on their achievement!)

This month, we took a visit to Revo Escape in Scarborough to play The Tomb…and a few days later, it won a Golden Lock as well! Maybe we can sniff them out like hunting dogs…or maybe we’re just lucky.

Should we get a neon sign for our lobby? We should.

It was easy to see why The Tomb was deserving of a Golden Lock! We’ve played lots of escape rooms across the GTA (and in different countries), and The Tomb offers a level of physical activity and exploration that’s very rarely present in immersive experiences. We crawled, climbed, and balanced our way through an elaborate, multi-level set that truly made us feel transported to the world of the game.

The puzzle design also took an interesting approach: The Tomb put a lot of emphasis on creative problem solving over traditional escape room-style puzzles. Lots of challenges had open-ended solutions with multiple valid methods, and were solved with an application of realistic logic as opposed to contrived padlocks or unexplained effects. It’s still very much an escape room experience, but its experiments with set, action, and format made it a total standout for us!

Hunks that spelunk.

We also made a stop at Black Creek, where new immersive events seem to be popping up all the time! Secret City has a new game at the village: When Shadows Lie, a sequel to their original spooky adventure Where Dark Things Dwell. Instead of having the players time travel to the historic village, When Shadows Lie takes place in the present day, and continues the story by having players meet the descendants of characters from the original game.

Is there anything more Halloween-y than wandering a cursed village by lantern light?

There are very few escape rooms that have direct sequels, so we appreciated all the nods to the first game, as well as beats in the story that tied in elements from Lost & Found. A sort of narrative universe is forming at the site, which is another really unique element in Toronto’s immersive landscape.

Puzzle Solution

Each pumpkin has four attributes - its colour, eyes, mouth, and stem. Those attributes are associated with the letters in its name, and you can use the overlapping letters in the pumpkins' names to work out the solution. For example, JUDD and JUDY's names are only one letter apart, and those pumpkins are identical in every way - except for their colour. From this, we can conclude that the pumpkin's colour determines its last letter (and since the mystery pumpkin is the same colour as JUDD, its last letter must be D.

Sara and Tara prove that the mouth shape determines first letter, and JUDD and CODY confirm that eye shape is the third. Therefore, the stem must be associated with the second letter. Now looking at our mystery pumpkin and comparing its attributes to his friends, we can determine that his name is GORD.

Recommendations

Jesse recommends TOEM 2:

Something you need to know about me: I love games with little puzzlebox-y, diorama-style levels. Games like Captain Toad and GNOG just scratch an itch for a tidy little space that begs to be explored. TOEM 2 expands on its predecessor with a series of little settlements, each only a few screens in scope, that have layers of quests and interactions packed into every corner, all organized through a genuinely satisfying photography mechanic. If you want a low-stakes list of lightly puzzleish quests and plenty of unlockable outfits, look no further.

Bryan recommends Deep Sea Adventure Boost:

My first board game recommendation comes from an impulse buy when I was wandering queen street with my friend the other week. Oink games is known to create very succinct experiences within incredibly small packages, and after playing this game in August when Jesse and I went to RECON I knew I had to add it to my collection. A quick(ish) 2-6 player game where you are plundering the ocean floor for treasure while balancing a shared oxygen tank between all players.

What should feel like a fun co-operative experience collecting gems becomes a terrifying battle of greed and risk - the more treasure a player gathers, the heavier you are and more oxygen you consume, which makes it more difficult to return to your submarine with your bounty. Of course whoever returns with the biggest loot pile wins. The “Boost” edition adds an extra game mechanic allowing players to take an even greater risk for greater rewards and there is something so satisfying ruining your friend’s schemes by depleting all your oxygen and drowning together. No? Just me?