coasterverse

I moved to Suffolk in October last year - Pleasurewood Hills is around about an hour and a half away from where I currently live, and I must say I have had absolutely zero intention of visiting since moving here - which, for a theme park enthusiast, should tell you something. The ride lineup (especially the coaster lineup) is absolutely dire for a park of that size. Sure, the park's not massive, but it could be so much more if the Looping Group actually decided to chuck decent money at it like they are doing to Drayton. The fact that the park boast that a Vekoma Boomerang is 'East Anglia's largest rollercoaster and the only Vekoma Boomerang in the UK' (as if a Vekoma Boomerang is anything to brag about...) is absolutely laughable. Even a small scale Gerstlauer Eurofighter like Rage at Adventure Island would increase the appeal to this park tenfold. It's small, compact, decently paced and pretty bloody smooth all things considered - so why not have something like that at Pleasurewood Hills too?! Feels like the Looping Group bought the park as a bit of passive income to keep the company kicking along without doing anything significant investment-wise.

The park (on the passholder group) have been mentioning that September is looking like the month that the supports start to go into place - which after watching Jack's construction update very much does look like a very likely situation. They have also teased that something may be posted at golden hour tomorrow (technically today as I write this), which for those of you who don't know (I won't insult your intelligence) is at sunset - which I believe is some time between half 7 and half 8 tomorrow night. This came as a direct result of somebody asking for updated teasers on the construction walls, to which the park responded something along the lines of "we were thinking something more digital 👀", so looking very likely that we'll get our very first video teaser for Project Exodus tomorrow night!! I absolutely cannot wait for the marketing of this coaster to start gearing up. My bets are still pretty firmly set on an Egyptian theme for this coaster, but only time will tell!

I dunno, I honestly quite enjoyed it - and must still be doing something right with the general public as it's got consistent 60+ minute queues (which is something that Derren Brown's Ghost Train wasn't getting for a long time!) But even so, out of all of the options the park could've gone for, I think dragging their heels with this style of attraction probably was a bit of a waste of money, yeah. But I suppose the options for them were: Renew the IP for another few years with Derren Brown - likely at great expense - and continue having a mediocre at best attraction run, and running it thoroughly into the ground over the next 3-4 years Spend the money they would've spent on an IP renewal on a brand new original retheme, generating a little bit more buzz with the general public without being tied down in a contract with an IP so the park are allowed to pull the plug on it whenever they feel like it Spend no money on it whatsoever and have a massive building be SBNO until the park are in a financial position to fully strip it all out or bulldoze the building and completely start fresh Out of the three options there, I think this version of Ghost Train is definitely the best for the park. The GP may complain about this version of Ghost Train, but I guarantee they'd complain louder if that building was left instead - and they certainly would complain if Derren Brown's Ghost Train fell into total disrepair (which was absolutely the direction it was heading in - I genuinely don't think it had another 3-4 years of life left in it). For what the park were given, I think it's a credit to the creative team. Is it revolutionary? No. But would I have rather it stood empty until the park are ready to do something with it? Absolutely not. Do I think the attraction is actually of fairly good quality considering the very little timeframe the creative team had? Absolutely. Let's all be honest here - Ghost Train isn't going to be around for very much longer. It's very obvious to me that this is just a temporary stopgap until the park are ready to do something bigger with the showbuilding. Either a trackless darkride or a darkride-cum-water ride are the options I'm hopeful for - and I honestly think, in the grand scheme of things, we'll see whatever they've got planned for the next generation of this building sooner rather than later. I reckon it'll last however long Black Mirror ends up lasting at the most.

Just to expand a bit on this, I'd imagine we're pretty certain to see false MDF walls and possibly even ceilings put in place too - the tent is basically just there to ensure it's all waterproof. Once inside the maze I'm sure it'll be perfectly fine and you'll likely quickly forget you're inside of a tent, which again pleads the question of how are they going to make the outside look like whatever they're going to put on the inside? Again, at the end of the day it really doesn't make much of a difference either way - it's purely just for immersion and first impression's sake. Excited to see how it turns out!

If this whole Mr Clappy thing isn’t just one massive red herring, then a haunted toyshop type maze could work quite well with this flooring. Although like you say an exterior doesn’t make or break a maze, if they do opt for a toyshop type maze, it’s gonna look hella tacky if it looks like a tent from the outside. Lots of these small scare parks opt for this type of thing (because they simply can’t afford anything better) and it looks exactly as you’d expect… cheap and nasty. The Big Top worked as a tent because… well… it was supposed to be a circus. Who knows! Don’t have massively high hopes right now, but to be fair there’s zero theming in yet so I’m not gonna be a pessimist and I’m remaining hopeful that this could be good! I’d much rather this than nothing new to be fair, so props to Thorpe for taking a risk!

Defo seems to have just been strange wording about the ‘new experience’, but at least this gives us confirmation that all three mazes will be indoors! That’ll be Trailers, Survival Games and a brand new attraction. I’ve said it before, but I really hope this is the final year of Trailers - especially in its current incarnation. I wouldn’t be opposed to a re-theme inside and them still calling it Trailers (as a cinema attraction they should’ve been replacing these ‘scenes’ every year anyway imo), but it’s getting very old and tired now.

Also just seen this tweet: As well as quite a handful of others referring to the third maze as an 'experience'. I find it especially odd considering it says "Enjoy three scare mazes including one brand-new experience! 😍" - Do we think it's just strange wording, or could there be a slight twist on the new attraction for this year? I really hope it's unique in some fashion - the same copy pasted mazes year in, year out gets a bit tiresome.

I think unless the Dobble sponsorship was only a 12-month thing (which I'm pretty sure isn't overly common, it'll more likely be a 2/3 year thing at a minimum. Pretty sure the old Tetley sponsorship began around 2011, and was definitely still there in 2017 - perhaps even later I have no idea when the sponsorship was removed. But, this could've also been them extending the contract past the first year. Who knows! As much as it would be a nice blast from the past for the 'new land' to be themed to the Rangers, I think the park would find it hard to be marketable and therefore probably (in the eyes of management) not be worth the time, effort (and most importantly) money it would take to turn it into a reality. In terms of the family market, whilst I do (somewhat) agree that the park does lack an appeal for the family market - I think, again with current management, the park are very much established as being a theme park for thrillseekers currently. This also makes sense as I've always said that high thrill, high intensity rides are much more marketable and therefore likely to bring in a wider audience than family attractions. If the park were to add more family attractions to the park, I feel like this would be done quietly as a start-of-season bonus rather than the big selling point of the new season. I'm not sure if the park are looking to retire Angry Birds land next season or perhaps a couple of seasons down the line, but considering it most likely wouldn't be a cheap job to achieve, I would imagine the park would want to make a rather large song and dance out of it. With Project Exodus opening next year, unless they're able to tie it all together (which would be a pretty impossible job, considering they're both on opposite ends of the park to eachother) I think it would probably make more sense to be a 2025 job instead along with a new flat ride or two. As for the theme... that could be anyone's guess. I'd very much like an Amity extension again as all of the theming in there very much still does blend in with that of Amity - fingers crossed they don't try to shoehorn another IP in though.

Looks like (hopefully) Angry Birds Land is finally on its way out! I'm genuinely so surprised the IP has lasted this long - especially for a franchise that's essentially just a mobile game. Crazy decision creatively for the park to take this on considering Angry Birds is very much a family IP, but the park offer very little for families in the area other than the bumper cars and the 4D cinema!

We've not even had delivery of the bottom supports yet either I'm pretty sure, so there's definitely no rush for it right now

I've always wondered why Thorpe seem to be so against this. It's strange that Towers, Pleasure Beach, Paultons etc all seem to be offering it - but Thorpe seem to have absolutely zero interest in it. It's super unlike a Merlin attraction to turn down a potential moneymaking opportunity! Considering the park offer behind the scenes tours of their rollercoasters and attractions, they're clearly catering towards enthusiasts... so why not go the full hog and sell worthless chunks of metal to them too?! Unless the park have some sort of strange deal with the manufacturers or whoever they buy their rides from that they're not allowed to resell ride hardware, it just seems insane to me!

Definitely won't be an overhaul - an overhaul of certain scenes, sure. But a complete overhaul? No chance.

I'm pretty sure I read on the passholder Facebook group a while back that they were toying with the idea of an unlimited scare maze pass - someone threw a ballpark figure out there of £100 I'm pretty sure and the park came back and said it'd likely exceed that amount if they did decide to implement it. (Don't quote me on the figure - I definitely remember the conversation taking place, but don't quite remember the ballpark figure thrown out there by a member of the group) I get that it has to be expensive to avoid everyone buying it and therefore solving nothing, but surely they can get away with charging less than that. Even at £100 a pop, for that to be worth the money you'd need to do the mazes 20 times (and that's just to break even, you'd have to do it more than that to really get your money's worth!) - which would be a stretch considering just how busy peak Fright Nights can be.

I can see how easy it is for the park to fall back on fan favourite mazes, what with Trailers, Platform 15 and Creek Freak all returning year after year and before those Asylum was certainly also a fan favourite that ended up returning for a good few years - all most likely due to their popularity. I wonder why the same didn't happen for Roots of Evil or Vulcan Peak... 🤔😂 But I would really like to see them just piggyback off of the success in other ways. The park have proven that they are fully capable of making consistently good quality mazes, I think they just need to bite the bullet and go against the grain and refresh the lineup each year. That was the joy of the shipping container-style attractions as they were small, compact, could be moved around and due to their size meant that gutting and replacing wouldn't be an expensive affair. When you have the park building mazes into purpose-built buildings such as the Trailers building, you become a bit stuck because gutting and rebuilding a new maze becomes a much more complicated affair. Although Survival Games is for all intents and purposes, a shipping container maze, the sheer scale of it again makes it difficult to completely gut and retheme as it'd be suuuuuper expensive to do. Obviously we don't know for certain that Survival Games will be returning as Survival Games, but looking at the way previous large Fright Nights investments have gone at the park - Thorpe tend to keep new investments for at least 3 years. I really hope 2023 is the final year of Trailers as we know it. I'd have much preferred if for this year they managed to totally gut the Trailers building and convert it to a Creek Freak maze if we had to keep a past maze for this year. Speaking of the new maze for this year... Egyptian-themed scare maze, anyone? 👀

When people speak fondly of Duel/The Haunted House, I know for certain it comes from a place of nostalgia and not because it was simply a better attraction. I took some time yesterday to watch POV's from both Duel and The Curse and I can say with absolute certainty that The Curse is by far the superior attraction. I don't think the storyline is too dark at all. I've ridden the attraction multiple times, and if it wasn't for reading the forums I'd never have grasped onto the idea that Emily killed her parents. It's not as if it's being told to you in black and white - if that was the case then yes I absolutely would agree with you that that's probably too dark for a ride in a predominantly family theme park - would work for Thorpe Park, but certainly not Alton Towers. It's only 'too dark' if you research into the lore of the attraction, which is something that most members of the general public will not. On a surface level, The Curse is simply just a horror cliché attraction - abandoned house with creepy possessed girl haunting it. It really doesn't get any more cliché than that. I'd also be willing to bet that there's been no significant increase in families being scared and kids running out of the attraction crying than when it was The Haunted House or Duel. Most of these kids going in have probably been persuaded by their parents or simply don't know what the attraction exactly involves - something that also would've been the case with both previous iterations of the attraction. Those that know what the attraction is and experience it for what it is at a surface level won't have such a visceral reaction to it. In terms of changes, I don't think there's much that needs to be done. Yes, the hide and seek scene needs to go. It doesn't work. It either needs a final jumpscare right at the very end of the scene to make it impactful, or needs to be totally overhauled and dismiss the 'hide and seek' idea altogether. The flying heads scene is also genuinely awful. No sound effects or anything to entice you to look up - on my first runthrough I thought it was just another hide and seek type scene, until right at the very end I decided to look up and saw that I had missed. Again, I think this scene either needs proper lighting and sound design to get people to look up (maybe even pieces of hanging string that you pass through which brushes against your head, causing you to look up? That's a classic trick used by old ghost trains) or totally gutting and installing another brand new scene. To be fair I think the latter would be the best option as the 'flying heads' scene has already been done in both The Haunted House and Duel. The hand projection mapping on the leadup to the finale is barely visible. I get what they were trying to do, but again it just doesn't work. Perhaps another full-scale prop inside that area instead? Maybe one that's on some sort of mechanical arm that causes it to pop up for a jumpscare. I think everything else works exactly as intended. This ride really is a credit to John Burton and his team of creatives. What they managed to get done in such a short timeframe is nothing short of majorly impressive.

To be honest I found The Crows to be the strongest addition to the Fright Nights lineup in a while. I genuinely found it significantly scarier than Trailers & Platform 15 when I visited a couple years ago (I didn't go last year so can't comment on Survival Games, but from what I've read online that wasn't overly scary... just disorientating). Creek Freak was pretty intense though, I'll give them that. This is the thing the park need to get right - the value for money in the mazes. It's almost as if the actors that are put in scare zones know that it's a more difficult job to effectively get scares right in an open space, so are going out of their way to make the scares as impactful as possible. In the mazes the actors know they can hide and jump out of corners which gives them free scares, but I personally just find them all super predictable and it doesn't make me jump in the slightest. This is something I had a massive issue with in Trailers - those scenes are ridiculously small. You enter the room and can see every inch of every scene from the doorway, so you can always pre-emptively anticipate scares. I've said it since 2021 and the park need to half the number of 'screens' in Trailers to open up more space for less predictable, more impactful scares. Then it has the potential of being one of the better mazes on park - at the moment it's mid at best.

Honestly, feeling the quality of the posters when I went on opening day, it genuinely felt like they were almost printed on a plastic-type material rather than the paper ones that the Derren Brown posters were printed on so I'm pretty surprised these have ended up in such a state. I think the park wanted an authentic experience with the posters, hence why they opted not to cover in a plastic frame - but clearly this is why we can't have nice things and it's always the minority that ruin it for everyone else. On another note - it was the VIP behind the scenes tour of Ghost Train last night! Genuinely upset I couldn't attend, but that £80 passholder discount (£100 for non-passholders!!) was definitely outside of my reach this month. I'm hearing that they're planning on releasing some normal behind the scenes Ghost Train tours in September which shouldn't be as expensive, so I'm holding out for that. I think for the extra money you took the tour with some of the people who actually designed the attraction, plus some 'free' merch and a doughnut time doughnut. The only thing that I'm a little gutted I missed out on was being there with the people who designed the attraction, but I can take or leave the 'free' merch to be honest (especially when it's clearly just factored into the price instead 😂). Did anybody from here do it last night? Not sure if taking pictures was allowed, but I'm still yet to see anything from it on social media - but will defo keep looking. On another note, I found this video the other day of a behind the scenes of Derren Brown's Ghost Train which gives a super cool insight into the attraction that's never really been seen before: Not really sure what I expected exactly, but look how much room there is!! I really hope when the inevitable day comes that this attraction is no more that they just completely gut the innards and install some sort of trackless darkride in here instead. I bloody love the exterior of the attraction and the showbuilding itself is mental.

I can’t help but feel like it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth that this is STILL an upcharge (during both Fright Nights AND Carnival mind you, so double the potential revenue each season!) three years down the line. Surely it’s paid off by now that they could justify removing the upcharge - even if it’s just for Carnival considering it’s a majorly toned-down experience to its Fright Nights counterpart?

The finale actor definitely an improvement, hopefully the nun was just down to a lack of actors yesterday. Keeping my fingers crossed for new nun costumes for next season, because they are god awful currently!

I don’t think that’s strictly true, Carnival is probably one of their busiest events with the general public considering it falls slap bang when the kids break up for the summer holidays 😂

I don’t know if it is really ‘obvious’ though to anybody that’s not an enthusiast. There’s still the other two tarot cards as well that currently seem to bare no real meaning right now. Whatever it is though, Tutu’s Revenge being hinted at again is pretty cool! I just would find it extremely odd if all of the posters in Trailers meant something other than the one for Tutu’s Revenge, but only time will tell!

Bloody horrendous. It’s been this way (getting worse actually) for years now, it needs fixing as a matter of urgency. For a park that’s about to unveil a multi-million pound brand new rollercoaster, it really says a lot first-impressions wise that they can’t even be bothered to fix their entrance sign.

And our first Exodus teaser is here I’m pretty sure! This is either a teaser for Exodus, or for an Exodus-themed scare maze for this years Fright Nights. The park did this at Carnival last year too to tease Survival Games (one of the tarot cards had the Yvel eye on it). It’s also another hint towards the old ‘Tutus Revenge’ poster in Trailers that I speculated months ago will have something to do with Project Exodus. I’m still sold on the Egyptian theme being the theme of the coaster, possibly named Tutu’s Revenge (but whether or not that’s too obvious is yet to be seen!)

As far as I'm aware the supports delivered yesterday were (for some reason or another) the tops of the supports. I suppose there's probably a good few trucks enroute already so I wouldn't look too deep into the order, I think it just so happened that one truck arrived first 😂 The plan is definitely still gold to white!

Things are about to pick up pace very, very quickly 😏