Room Escape Artist

I never metamorphosis I didn’t like 🦋

Location: Toronto, Canada

Date Played: July 12, 2026

Team Size: 1-4; we recommend 2-3

Duration: Up to 3 hours

Price: $35.99 CAD per player

Ticketing: Public, but you’ll play on a private team

Accessibility Consideration: All players must spend multiple hours walking around uneven terrain and climbing stairs in a public park.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly offered an afternoon of enigmatic exploration in Toronto’s High Park that was equal parts wholesome, thoughtful, and clever.

For me, as a newcomer to Toronto, it provided a fantastic excuse to visit one of the city’s most cherished outdoor spaces. For locals, The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly is guaranteed to introduce you to various hidden features around the park.

Where many escape rooms have fantastical “save the world” theming, The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly centered around a refreshingly low-stakes premise: helping to track down a particularly elusive butterfly species in the park. The Brightwing Butterfly didn’t purport to have magical powers. It wasn’t needed to save the world from disaster. It was just really pretty and really rare.

Above all else, The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly stood out for its puzzles. This was an entry-level puzzle hunt that was full of creativity and polish. Most puzzles were quick yet satisfying, with a couple more substantial solves in the mix. Yet even the simpler puzzles were never one-and-done, always adding some small twist, variation, or extra layer to evoke that essential feeling of “but there’s more!” The puzzles were meaningfully site-specific, engaging with a mix of existing and added features throughout High Park. The whole experience was facilitated through the ClueKeeper app, which cleanly guided navigation, confirmed answers, and provided tiered hints.

Although The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly was accessible by puzzle hunt standards, it will likely skew on the harder side for players who’ve only played escape rooms or are newer to puzzles. Rest assured, no prior experience is necessary to enjoy and complete this event. If anything, it’s a fantastic representation of the joy and refinement of puzzle hunt mechanics. Just don’t be afraid to take hints if you get stuck.

The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly was an absolute delight that I would strongly recommend to experienced and novice puzzlers alike. While The Great Gotham Challenge offers similarly site-specific puzzle quests in New York City, it’s wonderful to see this adventure format expanding to new locations.

Lockwood Immersive just announced new public dates for September 2026 on their website, and The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly is also available for private groups of a certain size.

Who is this for?

• Puzzle lovers
• Nature lovers
• Best for players with at least some experience

Why play?

• Stellar puzzle design
• A curated outdoor adventure
• A thoughtful intro to puzzle hunts

Story

A legendary creature known as the Brightwing Butterfly was rumored to live somewhere in High Park. We were recruited to assist in the investigation (aka solve puzzles) to track down its whereabouts.

Setting

The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly takes place fully outdoors in Toronto’s High Park. Each puzzle guides players to a different location around the park, with at most 10 minutes walking between locations.

Gameplay

Lockwood Immersive’s The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly was an outdoor puzzle quest with a moderate level of difficulty for a public puzzle hunt, or a high level of difficulty relative to a standard escape room.

The gameplay was driven by the ClueKeeper app, along with printed materials and various real-world elements. Each puzzle guided us to a different location around the park. There were a range of puzzle types, similar to what you’d find in a light puzzle hunt. The majority of puzzles were site-specific in some way or another.

Analysis

➕ The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly was thoughtful and caring throughout every element of its design. We immediately established a high level of trust in the designers as we could tell that all possible details— both in the gameplay and the overall experience — had been considered.

➕ The puzzles were phenomenal, featuring a variety of mechanics and environmental ahas. While no puzzle was individually mind-blowing, they each added clever twists and extra layers to classic puzzle types. Lockwood Immersive calibrated the difficulty and style to be enjoyable for puzzle enthusiasts while still largely accessible to newer players, especially with the assistance of built-in hints in ClueKeeper.

➕/➖  My favorite puzzle of the game was also potentially the most difficult or tedious, depending on a team’s spatial thinking and ability to organize information. This puzzle stood out for elegantly taking advantage of a mesmerizing existing feature in High Park. Solving the puzzle was an embodied experience, utilizing the emergent choreography of this feature. However, this was a flow-breaking bottleneck for many teams in my session, exhausting them for the lighter content that followed. While I wouldn’t want Lockwood Immersive to remove this puzzle, and there were already multiple forms of helpful intermediate confirmation in place, there was an opportunity to smooth out some edges by increasing the size of the puzzle graphic or offering an easier version of the puzzle for newer solvers who might otherwise be inclined to skip the puzzle altogether.

➕ The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly was inspired by The Great Gotham Challenge in NYC, specifically their Central Park Sprint. While Lockwood Immersive put their own personal spin on the outdoor puzzle quest format, I also appreciated one particularly immersive nod to GGC’s original work.

➕ When confronted with a lightly subversive social situation, we were given strong confirmation to ensure that we were in the right place, allowing both actor and players to lean fully into the bit.

➕/➖ A physical installation was charmingly intricate, far more than it needed to be. However, for players who haven’t previously used ClueKeeper, or specifically Zappar, it may be confusing to be asked for camera permissions, but then use the built-in media player for other purposes.

➕ The final puzzle gently introduced the idea of a metapuzzle, providing a sense of finality without raising the difficulty.

➕ The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly had particularly polished graphic design, in the materials presented during the event itself as well as all the surrounding marketing materials. There was a strong visual identity that was consistent with Lockwood Immersive’s overall brand, yet also specific to this particular event.

🦋 All players earned a beautiful souvenir that I’m excited to add to my collection.

➖ I’m not entirely convinced that The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly needed to be framed as a competition, or at least, the lightly competitive framing and presence of a leaderboard only really benefit the top team (and I say that having topped the all-time leaderboard, as of our session.) On one hand, it was helpful to have a sense of friendly urgency so that teams complete the game by the designated cutoff time, and don’t get too distracted by a leisurely snack break or side quest. However, this was “cozy puzzling” at its finest, with plenty of measures in place to support teams of all experience levels, and the slight pressure of a “top team” and leaderboard may discourage some teams from taking hints or feeling relaxed throughout the process.

Tips For Visiting

• Bring a fully charged phone, battery pack, water bottle, and any snacks you might need for 2-3 hours actively exploring a park.
• The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly offers occasional public sessions, and is available ongoing for private sessions of 12 players or more. Their next public run is in September 2026.

Book your session with Lockwood Immersive’s The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.