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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

Oh further to the Stardust Racers incident when we collected our RAP card we were asked a series of questions and on the card itself it now lists Hyperia as unsuitable for non-ambulant (you can see it was previously listed as suitable).
 
Bowser said:
Park is heaving today for some reason too, Hyperia on 2 hours and most other things around 60 min, any reason?
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It’s really interesting to hear about the parks being busier on weekdays now.

I remember 10-15 years ago, including the time that I worked for Merlin, the difference between weekdays and weekends being the complete polar opposite. Virtually all coasters on weekdays would be walk-on even with only one train operation and when we did get queue on weekdays they rarely exceeded 20 minutes.

I don’t know if perhaps these days, more incentives are being offered to visit on weekdays (better prices for example), or maybe with the increase in hybrid working, people can be more flexible with their work hours. But certainly it seems like ‘dead’ weekdays are a thing of the past.
 
Enter Valhalla said:
It’s really interesting to hear about the parks being busier on weekdays now.

I remember 10-15 years ago, including the time that I worked for Merlin, the difference between weekdays and weekends being the complete polar opposite. Virtually all coasters on weekdays would be walk-on even with only one train operation and when we did get queue on weekdays they rarely exceeded 20 minutes.

I don’t know if perhaps these days, more incentives are being offered to visit on weekdays (better prices for example), or maybe with the increase in hybrid working, people can be more flexible with their work hours. But certainly it seems like ‘dead’ weekdays are a thing of the past.
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Conversely today is dead (based on the app) with everything walk on except Hyperia.

The only "quiet" day we've had at a UK theme park was when we went on a term time Monday to Alton Towers last year. Wasn't walk on for anything but like you say maximum was 20 minutes. I agree, they increasingly seem a thing of the past.

In theory you'd think it would make the parks more palatable in general if the attendance is being spread out but sadly that's not the case... as @rob666 says, curse of the MAP.
 
On the subject of Thorpe busy-ness. Visited today and blissfully calm, only a few coach loads and emptiest I’ve seen the car park.
Max 20mins for hyperia all day, mostly walkon for all the others, except stealth which was usually 30-40mins owing to one train.
Side note - baffling to see so many people still using fast track on rides with no queue where trains were dispatching half full - mad no?!
 
Edjc said:
On the subject of Thorpe busy-ness. Visited today and blissfully calm, only a few coach loads and emptiest I’ve seen the car park.
Max 20mins for hyperia all day, mostly walkon for all the others, except stealth which was usually 30-40mins owing to one train.
Side note - baffling to see so many people still using fast track on rides with no queue where trains were dispatching half full - mad no?!
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Yep, a good day! Plenty of school/college kids so it's all about being smart and waiting for 3pm to come. Once they all left everything was very quiet. They overestimated a lot of the queue times. Saw showing 10 minutes was a walk-on which I have hardly ever seen before. Colossus advertising 25 minutes and it was a walk-on. I felt because everything was open pretty much all day, you had a nice spread. With stealth on reduced capacity, I actually think that helped because it holds some of the queues.

On the rope drop, went straight to stealth (which I don't tend to do, I normally go to The Swarm first) and got straight on that. Props to the operations team doing what they can to keep it going efficiently on 1 train. It really is noticeable as when it's on 2 trains it is a proper queue muncher.
 
Well, this is a very long post. My apologies.

After my Scarefest review last week where I called it one of the strongest Scarefests I've been to (started doing mazes in 2020), unfortunately, based only off the opening day admittedly, I have to say that has to be the weakest non-Covid Fright Nights I've done. Despite the lineup not really changing, it had been a long time since we went without a new maze at Thorpe and we gained a maze last year so a good new scare zone and some changes to the existing mazes would have kept the event from feeling stale I feel. While some mazes have undergone some changes, they are certainly not all positive.

Quite how Trailers is still my favourite maze in it's 5th season I don't know. We led the group and got a fair few good scares, but the problem Trailers has is with the rooms being so distinct, actors can't roam at all, and each room ideally needs a couple of actors in to provide good scares for the whole group. The most you'll find in a room that isn't the finale is 2.
The preshow has changed slightly for the better I think, the old preshow room is now just a themed briefing room and the cinema room you previously just walked straight through is now a preshow with "The Director". One of the new rooms is one of the weakest in the attraction, with the actor essentially just talking to us. The other has changed a bit more substantially than other "new rooms" in the past, with some gore that actually made me squirm a bit.

Stitches and Dead Beat are essentially unchanged. Stitches has most definitely run it's course for me. Dead Beat has SO many very cool effects that were used rarely in it's first season and even less so this year, which is disappointing.

Survival Games is the most substantially changed maze. Other have posted that this maze is now a single route and you no longer get split up. You can very much tell the attraction is not designed for this.
The first room is a cool twist on the cages idea. Every other room after, similar to Trailers, has maybe one actor in who has to scare a whole group. Sometimes they are effective, sometimes not so much. Another issue the maze has is there are several rooms that can't have actors in due to a lack of visibility. The pitch black rooms can't have actors in for obvious reasons, but you now go through both making for two completely dead spots. The maze section doesn't have many good hiding spots for actors either.
Survival Games was always an interesting maze to me, you'd have a majorly different experience every time ranging from one of my favourite mazes to walking around desperately trying to find some actors to scare you. The maze is now more consistent, unfortunately, based off two run throughs, it's just consistently not very good.

Near the Crows, nobody goes. Will this scare zone ever go? Nobody knows. Nothing feels as stale as Mawkin Meadow to me. They've tried to freshen it up a bit this year and there is one cool effect. I have always much preferred the Crows as creepy roamers that can show up at any moment, them in a scare zone just doesn't work for me anymore. Plus, the cast and direction is so far gone from the original. Remember when they'd all have that creepy twitching sort of shamble to them? Nowadays they just stare at you and maybe raise their hand. They can't even make any noise.

By the time we got to Purgatory Town it was pouring down and the actors were all under shelter or umbrellas, so I can't really judge that. It looks like it was meant to go to Chessington and somehow ended up in the wrong park, though.

Lucifer's Lair desperately needs a backup plan for when the fire show can't have any fire. "Turn up the heat!" shouts Lucifer as we all stand around, wet and freezing with absolutely no fire to be seen. The scare zone is fun. Didn't bother with Creature Campus.

I always really look forward to the first day of Fright Nights and it's usually one of my favourite park days of the year. I would go as far as to say almost all of the bad Fright Nights I have had in the past have almost exclusively been down to the behaviour of other guests. Unfortunately that's not the case this year. I'll go back and hopefully it improves, but I certainly don't feel compelled to visit again and again as I have in years gone by.

In an ideal world, none of the mazes from this year would return in 2026 and we'd get a completely fresh event. That's not really realistic, but I feel the reset button needs hitting next year. Ironically, I'm most happy for Trailers to stay, as they can keep that maze fresh by continually changing the rooms as they have been. Stitches and Survival Games have had their time, as has Mawkin Meadow.

On a positive note, the waffle on a stick I had from next to Tidal Wave was fantastic.
 
We visited this evening, arrived around 5pm and managed to get a few rides in before the weather caused this:

https://ibb.co/Y4x6C9FV

Depth Charge, Flying Fish, Banana Boat and Tidal Wave were also closed, though think some of those close early anyway.

Decided to leave at that point.

We have visited on first day of Fright Nights before and remember it being quite rowdy, but didn't seem that way today - can only assume the weather kept a lot of people away.
 
StajBeetle said:
Well, this is a very long post. My apologies.

After my Scarefest review last week where I called it one of the strongest Scarefests I've been to (started doing mazes in 2020), unfortunately, based only off the opening day admittedly, I have to say that has to be the weakest non-Covid Fright Nights I've done. Despite the lineup not really changing, it had been a long time since we went without a new maze at Thorpe and we gained a maze last year so a good new scare zone and some changes to the existing mazes would have kept the event from feeling stale I feel. While some mazes have undergone some changes, they are certainly not all positive.

Quite how Trailers is still my favourite maze in it's 5th season I don't know. We led the group and got a fair few good scares, but the problem Trailers has is with the rooms being so distinct, actors can't roam at all, and each room ideally needs a couple of actors in to provide good scares for the whole group. The most you'll find in a room that isn't the finale is 2.
The preshow has changed slightly for the better I think, the old preshow room is now just a themed briefing room and the cinema room you previously just walked straight through is now a preshow with "The Director". One of the new rooms is one of the weakest in the attraction, with the actor essentially just talking to us. The other has changed a bit more substantially than other "new rooms" in the past, with some gore that actually made me squirm a bit.

Stitches and Dead Beat are essentially unchanged. Stitches has most definitely run it's course for me. Dead Beat has SO many very cool effects that were used rarely in it's first season and even less so this year, which is disappointing.

Survival Games is the most substantially changed maze. Other have posted that this maze is now a single route and you no longer get split up. You can very much tell the attraction is not designed for this.
The first room is a cool twist on the cages idea. Every other room after, similar to Trailers, has maybe one actor in who has to scare a whole group. Sometimes they are effective, sometimes not so much. Another issue the maze has is there are several rooms that can't have actors in due to a lack of visibility. The pitch black rooms can't have actors in for obvious reasons, but you now go through both making for two completely dead spots. The maze section doesn't have many good hiding spots for actors either.
Survival Games was always an interesting maze to me, you'd have a majorly different experience every time ranging from one of my favourite mazes to walking around desperately trying to find some actors to scare you. The maze is now more consistent, unfortunately, based off two run throughs, it's just consistently not very good.

Near the Crows, nobody goes. Will this scare zone ever go? Nobody knows. Nothing feels as stale as Mawkin Meadow to me. They've tried to freshen it up a bit this year and there is one cool effect. I have always much preferred the Crows as creepy roamers that can show up at any moment, them in a scare zone just doesn't work for me anymore. Plus, the cast and direction is so far gone from the original. Remember when they'd all have that creepy twitching sort of shamble to them? Nowadays they just stare at you and maybe raise their hand. They can't even make any noise.

By the time we got to Purgatory Town it was pouring down and the actors were all under shelter or umbrellas, so I can't really judge that. It looks like it was meant to go to Chessington and somehow ended up in the wrong park, though.

Lucifer's Lair desperately needs a backup plan for when the fire show can't have any fire. "Turn up the heat!" shouts Lucifer as we all stand around, wet and freezing with absolutely no fire to be seen. The scare zone is fun. Didn't bother with Creature Campus.

I always really look forward to the first day of Fright Nights and it's usually one of my favourite park days of the year. I would go as far as to say almost all of the bad Fright Nights I have had in the past have almost exclusively been down to the behaviour of other guests. Unfortunately that's not the case this year. I'll go back and hopefully it improves, but I certainly don't feel compelled to visit again and again as I have in years gone by.

In an ideal world, none of the mazes from this year would return in 2026 and we'd get a completely fresh event. That's not really realistic, but I feel the reset button needs hitting next year. Ironically, I'm most happy for Trailers to stay, as they can keep that maze fresh by continually changing the rooms as they have been. Stitches and Survival Games have had their time, as has Mawkin Meadow.

On a positive note, the waffle on a stick I had from next to Tidal Wave was fantastic.
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I am going to have to disagree with Stitches and Deadbeat are awesome Scare Mazes they are really well done some of the best themed mazes I have done.
 
Hid said:
I am going to have to disagree with Stitches and Deadbeat are awesome Scare Mazes they are really well done some of the best themed mazes I have done.
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They are both very well themed, but I've never found Stitches particularly scary to be honest, mostly just creepy. It's also the longest running maze at the park that has remained completely unchanged, while Trailers and Survival Games, which already was different every run through, have had pretty substantial changes. I think it's definitely run it's course.

I like Dead Beat, the problem is, as I say, there are a LOT of incredibly cool features and effects that barely get used.
For example, there's a REALLY cool effect in the VIP area where an actor gets raised up into the sky that I've seen once ever. We didn't get the actor crawling over your head this time either.
Dead Beat also lacks a good finale in my opinion.
 
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