JoshC.

To be honest, there won't be any real differences in how busy it is. Weather might play a factor, but the Saturdays in September will all be equally busy really. Saturdays will be the busiest day of the week, but it still won't be that busy.

Couple of potential theories: -It was found that whoever went into the ride area damaged the ride area fencing. This wouldn't have been immediately obvious, but after dealing with the people in the ride and then surveying the fencing, this would be discovered. That could take 30 minutes. I'd say that's most likely. -Further issues with people trying to enter the park / entering the ride area, which were causing further delays. -An unrelated technical issue occurred after the guest action, meaning the ride wouldn't be able to reopen.

1st September is still technically Summer Holidays, so that's a hit. It's closure is happening earlier and earlier. It's a shame. I can understand it from a cost-cutting perspective, as it is probably the best way to save money and have minimal impact on the guest experience. But closing rides is still a sad thing to do. Frankly it would be good for them to replace it with a different water ride which actually gets a decent ridership. Ideally something where the wetness riders experience can be tweaked based on time of year, so that it can be open over Fright Nights and provide relief on the busiest days of the year. I'm quite worried about Zodiac. It spent a good chunk of last season closed, and has been closed for a while now. I believe a couple of pods are currently off the structure. I do wonder whether the park are weighing their options with it. Samurai is a weird one. The app has listed it as a "delayed opening" for a couple of weeks, despite clearing having no intention to open. Hopefully just one of its usual hiccups, and not anything more serious.

Rode Tomb Blaster today. It remains bloody dreadful. -Every train had at least one car not in use. One train had two cars not in use. -The 'story' is beyond dull, with the voiceover being one of the worst-sounding, boring and grating things I've ever heard on a theme park -The guns are rubbish -Pacing of the ride feels so off. Partially because of the story they shoehorned in, but also just because the ride system feels like it's on its last legs -Audio is either too quiet or too loud. -Most of the screens in the on ride photo viewpoint were broken (not necessarily turned off, but physically broken). Honestly, of everything that the park are doing, adding and changing, sorting out Tomb Blaster should really have been number 1 priority.

The way SFA is running I don't think half the rides will make it till then even... Stealth's repeated downtime is very different. It had its issue at the start of the season, which was a big unexpected hiccup from winter maintenance. Since then, it's had two, pre-planned, periods of downtime. One of them was for a launch cable replacement, which happens yearly. The other I do not know, but since it was short, pre-planned and stayed on schedule, I don't think is a major concern. Rita has suffered longer, not-planned closures, with no known opening date advertised during those closures. That indicates that those issues are actual problems with the ride which needed fixing / parts replacing. I don't think the two are linked, and it's more coincidence that there's two rides of the same time that have experienced downtime in the same year.

I must be one of the few people who actually really likes Heide Park. Desert Race has get in the bin and be harvested for Stealth parts though.

Poor Desert Race and Heide Park, both so forgotten about they don't even get considered for a Merlin plague...

It's even weirder given they're currently a whole area down (which you would expect has knock on effects to queue times, so cutting hours would lead to people getting less rides), and that Chessington are getting the most investment out of the Merlin parks currently. You'd expect them to be the crown jewel all round right now. Unless the fact that a third of the park is basically a construction site has reduced visitor numbers drastically, I don't get it.

It's certainly a fair concern. Given that Towers have already outsourced their Ents department, it will be interesting to see how Scarefest goes down this year and what changes are noticeable. Though Scarefest and Fright Nights are obviously very different events, it will at least give us some indication as to what the situation could be. It will be interesting how much creative control the park will retain for the event. They might still be able to design attractions, and just give operational outlines. They might be able to outline briefs and then leave things with the third party. Regardless, I don't just see it being handed over with Thorpe have next-to-no input and not being able to share that knowledge or passion, nor do I expect we'll return to lower quality outdoor mazes (not to say that outdoor mazes should be completely disregarded). I have heard murmurings at the very least that the park are seeing next year's Fright Nights as a 'big' one, due to it being the 25th edition. It's possible that's why there's no new maze this year (and so, less money spent on the event), so that they can go all out a bit more next year. Obviously take it with a pitch of salt, but I think for now, we're okay.

Thorpe comes out on top for me. Speaking across the board, availability is decent and throughputs are good. Towers do well with throughputs, but their availability feels a lot worse. Legoland comes next for me. They cope well with what they have. Chessington isn't awful, but they have a lot of low throughput rides and they struggle to operate them well.

The Easter Egg culture for Merlin has become a lot. Realistically, sticking in an Easter Egg takes very little effort. Taking Toxicator as an example, it wouldn't have taken any real energy and time away from the creative team to throw in references to 1997, seeing that "Ripsaw" spelt backwards was "Waspir", and that could be used to spell something that sounded vaguely acidic in "Waspirium", a poster with "Can you cut it?", etc. It's a fun little nod. Designers putting their name on an attraction is also a trend which has been around a long time too. But there's now an innate expectation for Easter Eggs which has come from influencers and enthusiasts seeking them out and really pushing them. It erred too far. My favourite example of how far it went was how Survival Games at Thorpe Park features a prop of a severed penis (behind a fence, in a box, not in an obvious place, I believe), with a tag labelled "JS" on it, which stood for Jack Silkstone, an 'Easter Egg' to how Jack was involved in the marketing for it. Again, not something that takes up time, money or energy to create really, but extremely convoluted, and by bringing it to people's attention and encouraging them to look out for it, actively takes away from the experience. And that's the issue now. People fixate more on Easter Eggs and finding these nods and feeling clever than actually taking in the bigger picture. Going back to Toxicator, whilst all the references make sense and that, does Toxicator really fit and work with Forbidden Valley? Well, it's certainly changed the area more and continued to turn of it into X Sector 2.0.

Not a baker, but I did notice similar when I (rather unusually) had some at Towers a couple of months ago. I also noticed they weren't the same size, with us being given many more than 5 actual doughnuts to compensate for the fact many were small. I'd hazard a guess that they've changed the recipe to include less flour, using a different kind of flour or substituting flour with something else (and still using some flour). Flour would be where the gluten comes from that binds the dough together, and in turn gives the doughnut its structural integrity to not fall apart. The falling apart - and irregular sizing - would suggest less gluten at the very least.

Ultimately the park are keeping the line up the same and adding a free scare zone (and a lack of free stuff was something people complained about last year). So that's good. I can't lie, I'm a bit concerned about how they'll effectively staff all that, but we'll see. I wonder whether we'll see much in the way of changes to the existing mazes. At the very least, the posters that appeared outside Trailers don't match up with the description of the new scare zone.

I think it's worth pointing out that Survival Games ended up costing more than Trailers. And Creek Freak Massacre was, at the time, the park's single highest investment for a maze and lasted 3 seasons. So high cost doesn't mean it has to be around for a long time, although I understand the point and broadly don't disagree. I've seen people on social media talking about how Trailers in particular is "old". It's a very interesting discussion point. It's had 4 seasons now, and last year was the first year we saw substantial changes to it (though arguably, those changes weren't really substantial, just a redress), and is the oldest in the line up. But in the past, the park had mazes last for several seasons... Asylum - 9 seasons Saw Alive - 9 seasons Se7en - 6 seasons Hellgate - 6 seasons And there's even more recent examples of mazes lasting a few years... Platform 15 - 6 seasons Blair Witch - 6 seasons (with a brief gap) The Curse - 5 seasons Containment - 5 seasons Obviously the glaring difference right now is the fact the mazes are upcharge. But then, plenty of places keep mazes for a long time. Towers is a fine example. Lots of international parks (some of which have better Halloween events than Thorpe) do. And scream parks, some of which have mazes set up in situ all year round, have kept mazes for a long time (Tulleys has 5 mazes which are at least a decade old, have just retired one which was 15 years old, and have a couple which have been rethemed but are otherwise the same). My point is, keeping attractions the same for a long time isn't uncommon at other places either. Thorpe certainly gets held to a high expectation with Fright Nights. And recently that's at least partially their own doing thanks to the high maze costs, and their own marketing hype. But at the same time, I don't think a maze potentially having a run of 5 seasons is that long or necessarily a bad thing. It will be interesting to see what happens this year. The park have introduced a new maze every year since 2010 (if you include Saw Alive). Okay, there's a couple of loose definitions of new in that list but still. It's the expectation that there will be a new maze every year. In the same way in the past there was an expectation of a new ride every year. But with changing budgets and a complete behind the scenes overhaul, plus this being the last year that Thorpe run Ents themselves, who knows what this means. But if they don't introduce a new maze, I'll be very interested to see how they market the event and where they place their focuses.

Parm Pap is referencing the current repaint of Trailers' entrance, which was looking rather tired... https://x.com/ThorpeParkMania/status/1947946070564368440?t=sTe6cAWh7v_3yI8gFwd9Mg&s=19