2023: A retrospective

What a year 2023 has been! After our beginnings last year, we have run another six events this year including our first ‘special’ event, The Locksmith’s Dream Ball. We’ve had amazing responses from all of our guests, and some excellent feedback. We’ve made changes to our running structure, and we’ve grown from ‘a team’ to ‘a family.’

When starting on a project like this, it is hard to know where it will go and how it will develop. Ivan often says, naively his biggest initial concern around whether it would be successful was ‘will it be good?’ After having had over 200 guests visit, everyone has told us it’s unique and really special. Now the challenge is getting word out, so that as many people as possible can experience it, so that we can keep on making unique and interesting experiences.

Although set in the world of the Secret Histories, we always set out to make it accessible to those with no knowledge of the world and rewarding to those who have. The audiences that we have had bear that out, and over this year in particular we have had more guests who have no prior knowledge of the lore who have had a great time, and while the number of fans of the original IP are fewer in number than they were at the start, they still come and love the details they find.

Critical Responses

To have had such overwhelmingly positive responses, from so many guests is very gratifying. This year we’ve also had some high profile guests including well-known fan of immersive theatre, Neil Patrick Harris, writer and Immersive theatre enthusiast Anna James, and Jonas Kyratzes the writer of Talos Principle and Talos Principle 2.

We’ve received rave reviews from guests, as well The Stage, Wondercade, No Proscenium, The Escaperoomer, Armchair Escapist and others.

As for 2024, we are looking pretty busy! We have our new experience opening and the rooms for the first performances are nearly sold out, with only 1 room left available for each. This is an amazing start and we are super excited. We are also planning on running more Locksmith’s Dream events.

2024 Locksmith’s Dream bookings

As you know, we don’t own the beautiful venue which is the setting for LD, and we are a tiny company. This means that booking the venue is a risk for us as we make a loss if we can’t sell the dates. To this end, we have introduced a new deposit system for booking. We ask for £100 deposit for the experience (2 people) and your preferred dates and weekend/weekday options. Once we have interest in a particular time, we can contact everyone who has booked, provide first booking options and then release the remaining tickets for general sale. This reduces the financial risk for us, and allows us to tailor our dates to your desires. If we can’t find a date that works for you, the deposit is completely refundable.

The Future

We also have a few secret things bubbling away which we’re pretty excited about, but more on that later in the year.

For now, have a brilliant New Year and as always,

Dream Responsibly

Laura & Ivan