A 2014 addition that none of us picked up on until last week. The Universe of Energy dino dark ride underneath EuroSat has had narration added (in German). According to EP-Board, this was added in April, but only to cars 1-7 which explains why we heard it on our first ride but not the second. Hopefully they will roll this new feature out to all the cars over closed season!
The other change since July that I spotted is the improvements that have been made to Blue Fire's pre-launch dark ride section. The banging, crashing and shouting noises have been turned up significantly, and there are new white strobe lights as well as other lighting changes that make the whole thing feel a lot more intense. When I first rode in 2011, the dark ride section was a bit boring, with scientists tapping away at computers as if everything was fine. The tone of the whole scene has now acutely shifted since July, so that events seem to start going wrong even before the 'Oh no, there is a problem!' animatronic appears. It's a big improvement, and makes this part of the ride a lot more exciting.
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My thoughts on Horror Nights were mixed. Overall, the mazes were poor. Two mazes I thought were brilliant last year (The Crypt and Dead Inside) were terrible this year. Not a single scare on either of them - the former had dropped its imaginative wanderings through a spider's cave in favour of bland box rooms with actors in. Dead Inside last year was a tightly-controlled, masterfully designed piece of entertainment. This year for whatever reason it was all over the place, and felt a bit of a shambles.
Labor and Nightgrabber Forest were both good, especially the latter with its imaginative scenes of organic tentacles grabbing at you through forest walls. Last year's The Villa was great, so it was a shame that its werewolf-themed replacement this year was rubbish. On the plus side, there was no maze like last year (Snow White) that could be described as absolutely appalling. All of them at least had some standards of professionalism.
Blitz was fun with silly hard rock music blasting out mid-ride. Horror Nights' salvation though has to be the jaw-dropping ice show - maybe the best show I've ever seen in a theme park. It was totally adult and completely, utterly bonkers. Unfortunately, it's impossible to describe accurately how ridiculous it was to anybody who wasn't there. But - at various points - it included cocaine snorting, Nazi jokes, a simulated S&M sex, an orgy scene, hetero and homosexual flirting as well as the f-word, the s-word and the n-word. Is there anything I missed? The usual EP disregard for Health & Safety was even more flagrant than usual, with dozens of fireworks and sparks and angle-grinders and flame-throwers going off inside the packed ice show tent.
I don't really feel I can pass an opinion on Spook Me! as I don't speak any French of German, but I was underwhelmed. I reckon that I would have found it pretty boring even if I understood it. But this ignorant British monoglot was disappointed in EP's laziness. They clearly spent a fortune putting this musical together. There was a French translation on the screens at the side of the stage. So why not an English translation? The park were supposed to be moving towards being permanently trilingual. I know the percentage of visitors who speak neither German or French must be very low (1-2% perhaps?) but the park employ dozens of native English speakers already - they could have included an English translation with the absolute minimum of effort and expenditure. I am baffled as to why they did not do this.
