In today’s article, we’ll be rating from best to worst the attractions that made up the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Journey to Hell 2022 event.
Journey to Hell has been quite a weak event in our Halloween calender as year after year the event makes the tiniest little improvements that still don’t elevate the event to anything even remotely worth the entry price.
This year the event cost £39 which is the second most expensive Halloween event in the country and what guests receive is what you’d expect from an event half the price.
Journey to Hell has been relying on the wonderful rides at Pleasure Beach to carry the event with the scare mazes and other horror-related additions being short on quality, duration, set detail and acting quality.
This year the format of the event was different. Instead of a ‘journey-led’ experience from ride to maze, it’s now a free-roam experience for you to pick and choose what you’d like to do.
It’s a format that works better as it was never really a journey before anyways but in 2022 you can wander around hell at your leisure.
Let’s take a look at what’s on offer at this year’s event as we rate the individual experiences from best to worst.
Rising Ghost Train
Rating – 3/5
It’s as simple as adding actors to the world’s first ‘Ghost Train’ and it works perfectly. You’re on edge and whilst there weren’t as many actors inside as I’d have liked there were jumps and well-timed scares. Easily the standout attraction of the evening for us as the compliments end there.
Hell Tunnels
Rating – 2/5
Exploring the tunnels underneath the Pleasure Beach is a cool and unique experience and for that alone it hits our second-placed spot. As far as a scare attraction goes, it’s abysmal.
Wide open spaces with no actors in them, zero theming, back against the wall listening to dialogue and more sleep-inducing scenes render Hell Tunnels about as scary as a trip to Disneyland.
The Butchers room is detailed but it’s a shame this level of theming doesn’t spread out to the rest of the maze and at least this year we didn’t stroll through a Christmas wonderland that was ready for the Pleasure Beach Christmas event and was absolutely nothing to do with Journey to Hell.
They could make this experience very scary, they just choose not to.
Freak House
Rating – 2/5
Clowns talking to you inside a building themed with cotton wool and fake spiders. Freak House lasted all of 2 minutes and provided no scares. The Impossible building is always fun to explore but somehow this unthemed experience sucked all of the fun out of the maze.
I couldn’t quite believe how such a wonderful and naturally fun building had been toned down to the point of boredom.
The actors certainly tried and the masks were great but it was over before it even started.
The Lost
Rating 1/5
A maze complete with guardrails with a black cloth over the top and a few sets where you stop, listen to them deliver their dialogue and off you go.
This once again wasn’t a scare maze but more a theatrical experience and it just didn’t hit home. Standing around listening to someone talk is usually how you introduce a maze or scare experience, it’s not how you encounter every single scene unless you’re at a Dungeon attraction and even there there’s audience interaction and participation. Here there was absolutely nothing.
It was cool to see the inside of the Space Invader building though but It just made me want an indoor coaster in this space, even more, to stop this awful scare attraction from popping up again in another future Journey to Hell instalment.
Cursed River Caves, Hexpress, Sirens and Controllers
Rating 0/5
Simply thrown in to make the event look bigger than it is and to try and justify the £39 spend The Cursed River Caves was an experience in the dark with a lantern. The lantern is a nice touch but without a ferryman with you on your journey it’s a quite journey where inside we met two actors and they just stood there and did absolutely nothing. Poor.
Hexpress was a ride that staff members told us to avoid as it was just a train ride in the dark with nothing happening. Another staff member described the experience as F**king S**t which instantly made me like that person more, I always respect honesty and he wasn’t wrong, this particular train ride has been panned by just about everyone (yes, even the ‘everything is awesome’ brigade who love everything, always, every day).
Sirens was just Infusion in the dark but having one of the roughest rides on the list whilst removing the incredible ICON ride off the line-up was a strange decision. Sirens consisted of 3 people in costume staring at us as we made our way to the ride, that was it, that’s the experience.
Finally, Controllers was Big One in the dark which is great but sadly it was closed on the night we visited due to the weather. This can’t be helped and as a compensation, the park offered us any other attraction that we could do again to make up for it, out of a group of 8 of us absolutely no one wanted to do any of the attractions again, that speaks volumes.
Using the rides in the dark to try and get a more positive review for a poor event just doesn’t sit well with me. These are things you can do on the usual late-night riding events and unless you’re making the rides unique to Halloween (such as the incredible ghost train idea) then you’re just leaning on your historic rides to paper over the cracks of an event in desperate need of an external company to come in and save it.
Three years and no major improvements, only minor. Something needs to be done to justify the cost of entry because compared to even the cheapest event of the Halloween season that we’ve done, this was worse.
Watch our VLOG of the evening HERE
