In Praise of Found Space

This past fall, we shocked fans of Strange Bird Immersive: we opened a new experience, but it wasn’t Lucidity, the escape room we’ve been building for the last five years. (That’s still in the works. Promise.)

Instead, we opened THE ENDings.

What’s THE ENDings?

It’s so innovative, everyone struggles to describe it. One reviewer: “The Endings is a delightfully surreal choose-your-own-adventure interactive audio experience that weaves together an unnerving setting, humorous interaction, and themes of mortality, ethics, and agency” (No Proscenium). About as succinct as it gets.

THE ENDings is mysterious, provoking, and seriously funny. It’s immersive theater, it’s living video game, it’s existential crisis. You journey alone, but there are others on their own journeys. It’s structure is choose-your-own adventure: an impish narrator speaks to you in a headset, a phone app presents you with choices to make in your story, and a flashlight serves as your sole guide in the ruin of an abandoned office suite. Off you go.

There’s nothing quite like it. It’s been compared to Sleep No More (one reviewer even said it’s an improvement upon the form), to The Stanley Parable and other video games, to Phantom Peak for its depth of content and replayibility, to Severance for its surreal send up of corporate culture.

But the biggest influence is actually Logic Locks’s The Amsterdam Catacombs.

In Praise of Travel

Summer of 2023, Cameron and I had the good fortune to play Catacombs, just the two of us (romantic AF, I know!). To arrive for an escape room at a real cathedral is a whole other level of immersion.

Everything felt heightened before they even greeted us. All praise is due to the designers and cast who elevate the space into a cinematic experience. But the real genius of Catacombs lies in securing the space in the first place.

There’s no build team in the world that can turn a warehouse into an authentic church basement. You just can’t afford it. It’d be mad, and even still, I am not certain money can buy authenticity. History. DUST.

When we came back from that trip, full of heavyweights like The Dome and The Burnt City, it was ultimately Catacombs that inspired us to take action. We starting poking around Houston, looking for found spaces.

Then in May 2024, playing Stay in the Dark—another experience made possible only through its extraordinary found space, a six-story abandoned chemical factory—spurred us further to make the plans we had in motion a reality.

What’s a found space?

A found space is any location that comes with its own atmosphere. A quality found space insists upon itself. It has texture. It limits the stories you can tell. You’re not going to build walls with a found space. You can add décor, but you’ll be adding set dressing that enhances what is there already, rather than remaking the space or building it up from scratch.

With a quality found space, you walk in, and it already feels immersive. You can imagine the money and time savings that follow from such a find. Found spaces also sometimes come with interesting lease arrangements (which can be in your favor or not or a mix of both, continue reading for more on that).

Searching for found spaces is a practice more familiar to immersive theatre artists than escape room creators, as immersive theatre has “temporary pop-up on a budget” more in its DNA than escape rooms. But escape room creators: it’s time to consider…can we also benefit from temporary pop-up on a budget models—and the authenticity that comes from found space?

You get zero of the spaces you don’t ask for

We ended up losing a deal for a historic found space in Houston and directed our energy instead to our current landlord. We asked, “Got any empty spaces for a temporary arts activation?” We asked for a deal for Halloween or Christmas. To our surprise, they asked us, why not run the show for longer?

After touring a couple of vacated suites, we asked about the one we didn’t tour. “Suite 249? Oh…we don’t show people THAT space….”

“SHOW US.”

It looked like a tornado blew through, or like someone broke in, searching desperately for something, or like everyone had two minutes to grab what they could and make a run for it. The landlord told us the story of why it looks the way it does, but we don’t believe it. There are more layers to it than that. We have the physical evidence. All 4,600 sqft, full of evidence.

We explored the suite and its literal hoard of stuff, taking as much guidance as we could from what was already there. We created a spreadsheet of different structures that could work in the space. We axed a few models that didn’t have the profit potential to justify taking time off Lucidity build. We axed a few other models that didn’t excite us as artists. I wasn’t sure. I hesitated. It felt like too crazy a pivot. Until we remembered the “Dark Stanley” idea we’d been kicking around for a few years as a possible Halloween project some day. Suddenly we found ourselves eye to eye with that day.

The concept fit the soul of the space. It fit our economic goals. It excited our artistic curiosity. And it made us eager to try something we hadn’t seen done before: take the choose-your-own-adventure structure, but make it immersive.

Five weeks to opening

The concept lent itself well to Halloween, and we figured spooky things can stick around longer than holiday things, so we had a better chance of extending should it prove to be in demand. To maximize our October dates meant we had five weeks from “space secured” to previews on October 4.

And we hadn’t even started story-boarding.

But we had chosen a structure built to our two greatest strengths: writing and software. The build slog that has bogged down Lucidity just wasn’t a part of this show. What build there was, we could use hot glue, and it would be fine—a revelation when you’re coming from the escape room world. The player engagement in THE ENDings doesn’t require puzzles or high-tech custom mechanisms. It rides instead on the back of good writing and the discovery of secrets in the set. And that’s something you can do quickly if you’re really, really committed to doing it quickly. (Lest it sound all sun and roses, it was a hell of a five weeks—cast still talk about the zombie I was at first preview).

THE ENDings guarantees every player two one-on-ones with actors, another structural choice that made our short timeline possible. Instead of the typical 36 hours that it takes to prepare an actor for The Man From Beyond, THE ENDings requires only two one-hour rehearsals for the actor to be show-ready.

This was Nick Moran‘s lesson in operations made manifest. Nick dared to ask at Recon, “Can you design a structure that makes operations—your life—easier?” The thought definitely did not occur to us when we designed The Man From Beyond. Now running THE ENDings requires almost no maintenance, when MFB still demands operational attention.

Of course, we couldn’t have done any of it without the found space of Suite 249.

Yes, we bought plenty of unique items…

…and built some original environments…

But we never could have done it if we had started with an empty office suite, no texture, no atmosphere, no soul. Each of the eleven core stories took direct inspiration from objects that just happened to be there.

The result? On October 4, 2024, we debuted an immersive experience in 4,600 sqft for a total cost of $6,000 in materials.

THAT’S INSANE.

We turned a profit in our first month.

The deal

You may not always be able to get a long-term lease with found spaces. They’re often historic or already set up for event bookings or earmarked for the future. But that can be to your advantage: what would you build on a temporary basis?

We secured a temporary lease with our landlord, three months move-out notice if they want it or we choose to close, paying them a percentage of our monthly tickets sales, plus the electricity bill. It’s akin to a meanwhile lease in the UK—”you can have this for now, but it’s slated for something else later.” This deal, as you can imagine, set us up to take an artistic risk. And it paid off.

THE ENDings extended into 2025, inviting guests to play the starring role in a dark comedy full of surprises, unlike any immersive out there. But it’s not here for much longer.

On July 26, THE ENDings will meet its end, and Suite 249 will be transformed into another soulless and sleek co-working space. But for the next twelve weeks, it’s home to an existential adventure that leaves players grappling with questions of fate and chance, choice and desire, and who exactly is in charge of the story.

Will you see Suite 249 in this its most shining moment? Life is full of choices to be made, you know…

I’m sad to see THE ENDings close, but I’m also looking forward to the next found space experience we create. May this article inspire you the way Catacombs did us: there are more ways to make this art happen than with a five-year lease and a six-figure budget. Join us in exploring the creative frontier of faster and cheaper yet magically more authentic immersive experiences.

It all begins with the right space.