Returning for its second year is Newsham Scream Park in the suburbs of Liverpool. There’s no dedicated parking, but if you get there early enough you should be able to find a spot on the road that the venue is on. If you get there later, you may need to hunt around for a suitable spot. The venue itself is the very impressive looking Newsham Park Hospital.
On entry you go into a central courtyard area, which has a massive marquee, making the event almost fully covered. This central hub is nicely done, there’s a bar, a couple of food options, some merch, a main stage with regular entertainment on it, it also has a really nice set of photo ops in the centre. During our visit we didn’t see any street team or roamers, which did feel a bit disappointing for a busy Saturday evening just before Halloween.
There was a nice vibe throughout this central hub and it’s definitely somewhere you could enjoy a bit of a chill, some entertainment, food and drink in between the mazes.
Under the Bed
First up was Under the Bed, a fun concept that ties in to the childhood tales of a monster under the bed. This maze involved a lot of stairs and a lot of walking around the outside of a single room while the actors didn’t seem to do much from our vantage point at the rear of the group. The final creature was impressive, but the rest fell very flat.
The Mortuary
Sharing the same initial entrance for the usual safety spiel was The Mortuary. We were told to do hands on shoulders, which wasn’t necessary and everyone soon gave up on this. Some of our group were also given glowsticks, which to be frank were also unnecessary as the maze wasn’t that dark and you could easily see without them. Sadly no scares, and nothing really of note to mention.
The Priest Hood
Hooded maze, so expectations were low anyway. I’ve had to read the blurb on the website to work out what this maze was actually about as none of that description came through before or during the maze. Got some light touches in there, but none were particularly scary.
Humanimal
Last up was Humanimal, a mostly Heras fenced maze with a few bits of fabric around. Honestly less than 48 hours after going through it, I honestly couldn’t remember anything else about it other than it was short (it took less than 2 minutes to go through in a slow moving group), the theming was basic and we didn’t get any scares.
Summary
We enjoyed the hub and venue itself and we felt that with some roaming actors the atmosphere could be really ramped up. It had a decent vibe that would make you want to spend time there.
Sadly the mazes just didn’t work for us. They felt very basic and the scares were sadly non-existent. We managed to get round all four mazes in 20 minutes and since we’d paid almost £38 each, it was really poor value for money. Especially as the majority of that time would have been spent in queues and walking from one queue to another. Because the mazes themselves were so short and there was a healthy 60 seconds between groups, we can’t fault the batching.
