Each year we ask the team here at No Proscenium to put forth their nominees for the best work they have experienced on their travels through the immersive cosmos, and then we take those and put them to the members of No Proscenium for a vote.

The rules, such as they are, are simple:

  • There had to be at least three nominees for a category to hit the ballot
  • No category could have more than five nominees
  • A nominee must have debuted, be a new production of an existing work that opened, or began a new tour between 1/1/2025 and 12/31/2025

Voting was open to all active NoPro members for one week, and the results are below.

And with that, this year's Immies go to...


United Kingdom

The Key of Dreams: Shadows Lengthen
Lemon Difficult

The team at Lemon Difficult continues to build on the success of previous efforts The Locksmith's Dream and the first chapter of what is now The Key of Dreams series. A Lovecraftian tinged mystery awaits travelers to the Welsh countryside, in this overnight escapade that is satisfying those who seek to lose themselves in an immersive dream for an extended stretch.

New York City

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom Of The Opera Masquerade
LW Entertainment Ltd.

After years of rumors, and with New York City desperate for a hit immersive anchor, a lot of pressure was put on the arrival of Masquerade. After all, it isn't obvious how one even could adapt THE Broadway musical into an immersive experience, let alone if fickle audiences of both Broadway and immersive would find something they could enjoy. Let alone enjoy together.

By every measure Masquerade appears to have nailed it, and even in a year with incredibly strong competition in the NYC category – 2025 was really a rising from the ashes for the NYC immersive scene – the show still led the pack, and best of all has gotten the kind of mainstream attention that often eludes the form.

Southern California

The Willows
JFI Productions

The seasonal LA favorite came back with an all new location and some new production twists for the 2025 season, marking an evolution of the show that has delighted audiences for the better part of a decade and which keeps people coming back year after year to spend a strange dinner with the Willows family. The show often feels like you stepped onto the set of an indie psychological horror film, where the anticipation of what comes next drives the dread.

Toronto

FLUX: A Cyberpunk Experience
Lockwood Immersive

FLUX transformed Toronto's See-Scape into “a crooked dive bar in the year 2125,” and filled it with characters, games, and contract jobs in a cyberpunk future. Players took on the roles of hackers looking to make some quick cash, and the team at Lockwood enabled this with help from Pocket Moon Games providing "dreamy digital experiments."

Chicago

TIE

House of the Exquisite Corpse V: Blood & Puppets
Rough House Puppet Arts

&

Lonely Hearts: The Big Dance
Birch House Immersive

House of the Exquisite Corpse and Lonely Hearts are both long running series from established players on the Chicago scene, and they couldn't be more different.

Rough House Puppet Arts's House... has been disturbing (in a good way) audiences during Spooky Season for years now with their macabre vignettes, while Lonely Hearts brings patrons back each Valentine's Day to get a glimpse into the lives of an entwined set of characters. Oddly enough, the thing the series have in common are puppets.

Mid-Atlantic

Monstrosity
Ryan Hart & Kat Schonheyder w/Sinking Ship Productions

Vampire live action role playing games are their own subset of the medium, but Monstrosity stands apart as an event that has a highly structured invitation, acceptance, and partnering system that sets the ground for what the organizers characterize as a "high risk" larp.

Other North America

John Wick Experience 
Egan Escape Productions, Lionsgate, AREA15 (Las Vegas)

Guests check in to the Las Vegas version of The Continental, but they have to fight their way out. Such is the way in the world of John Wick, and this collaboration that heralded the expansion of AREA15 has been delighting fans of the film series since it opened.

International


Sleep No More
Punchdrunk presented by Ms Jackson (Seoul, South Korea)

The third sit-down instance of the venerable Sleep No More has arrived in Seoul and is entertaining both residents of South Korea's capital and acting as a siren's call for those Sleep No More fans who lament its closing in Manhattan.

The new edition scales up from the New York City production, and melds elements of the previous versions along with new beats while, as reports have it, hewing a bit closer to NYC version than the Shanghai one does.

Tour


Viola’s Room
Punchdrunk

In a major departure from Punchdrunk's "masked show" formula, Viola's Room invites audiences, barefoot and wearing headphones, "to feel their way through a labyrinthine installation as an unseen narrator reveals a story of innocence lost and obsession unleashed."

Part of a new experimental era for the famed immersive theatre company, Viola's Room has no live actors, but that "unseen narrator" is voiced by none other than Helena Bonham Carter.

VR - Experiential

In the Current of Being
Cameron Kostopoulos

Kostopoulos' daring piece leverages VR and haptics to share "the harrowing story of Carolyn Mercer, a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy aimed at 'correcting' her gender identity."

The piece has been the talk of the film festival XR circuit since making its debut at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, taking gome Agog's Impact Award. Since then it has moved audiences around the globe.

VR - Game

Ghost Town
Fireproof Studios

The team at Fireproof pretty much perfected the video game escape genre with The Room series starting in 2012, just when real world escape games were starting to take off. So it came as little surprise when their VR version of the The Room, 2020's A Dark Matter, knocked it out of the park.

Ghost Town continues the string of hits, with an even more ambitious offering that is heavy on story and scale. This is the escape game form as a deep adventure, a capstone on a video game genre that has its roots in the classic SCUMM games and brings in the dynamics of physical escape games. Just unburdened by pesky things like physics and OSHA.

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

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