Now I’m hardly an expert in the area of scare attractions, as I’m perhaps controversially not into the scare side of things at all (a slight phobia of costumed characters mixed with a general distaste for forced participation means that scare attractions are not my thing in the slightest), but if none of you scare aficionados mind, I thought I might weigh in on the discussion about the maze lineup having “had its day” or whatever, as I do have some thoughts from having read these posts.
From my perspective observing from the sidelines rather than experiencing first hand, one thing I would say about scare mazes is that they appear to be quite “one and done” experiences by very nature. Now I know that they will vary slightly every time, because they rely almost solely on people and people are variable compared to mechanical effects, but scare attractions appear to rely very much on the element of surprise, and once you’ve done an attraction once, I’d imagine that that dissipates quite considerably. After experiencing a maze a few times, I can imagine that most will begin to get a feel for the maze layout and be able to predict where the scares are going to happen with almost 100% accuracy; for instance, you might walk into a maze and think “Ooh, I know that an actor is going to jump out from behind that bookcase there, and then I know that an actor will run at me with a chainsaw from behind there and I know that another one will come from there etc etc”. And even with the slight variability each time that relying on humans provides, I can imagine that the gratification decreases quite substantially upon re-experiencing a maze simply because that sense of the unknown from your initial experience is virtually gone.
For that reason, I reckon they must lack the rerideability of a regular theme park attraction, so scare events probably need to take one of two paths. They either need to target themselves less towards repeat visitation than a regular theme park or change the maze lineup pretty often, as if you have people revisiting the same mazes over and over, guest feedback will surely go down and people will gradually find your event stale and boring.
In terms of the roaming entertainment discussion; I personally agree with
@jon81uk in that I don’t think the scary roaming entertainment should be overly prevalent. There may be people like me who really don’t like scare stuff and just want a regular Alton Towers visit during the month of October.
I apologise if my perspective from someone who isn’t a scare fan at all isn’t appreciated, but I just wanted to express my own thoughts on the issue.