A lazy Sunday took us to Stourbridge to experience the new for this year, Stourbridge Scare Maze. The event is located in a former office building in the town centre. Plenty of nearby free parking in the evening and apart from the queue to get in on the street in front of the entrance it’s all indoors.
Once you get to the front of the socially distanced queue, you get the usual safety and COVID briefing, we also had our temperature checked and there was plenty of hand sanitizer at the start and the end.
Standing outside we were pretty impressed with the set around the entrance, and this continued with the theming throughout the rest of the maze. It wasn’t all as consistently good, but there were some decent pieces of design inside and it was clear which sections had the investment. The rest was fairly standard Heras fencing and wooden pallets, still dressed effectively, but perhaps could have done better with the lighting.
Each section of the maze had its own theme, but there was no overall narrative. The transitions between the different themes jarred slightly. We completely get how they were trying to fit all the usual scare maze tropes in, but in an event that lasts 20 – 30 minutes, it felt a bit crowded.
On to the scares and sadly this was one of the biggest let downs. Nothing really hit particularly well despite the clear motivation of the actors that we encountered, we felt that more variation in the scares and perhaps some additional training could really help improve the impact of the few actors we happened across. It could perhaps have done with a few more, but we’d prefer to see improvements with those they have first. As such we had a mostly fun walk around and enjoyed the parts of impressive theming, but not much more.
The other aspects that we felt didn’t work as well was the safety aspects of the event, and especially due to COVID. The actors did manage to keep a safe distance during our run, but sadly most didn’t appear to be wearing a mask. Even though we were wearing masks throughout. Also, the nature of the maze, which would have been fine pre-COVID felt a bit more awkward nowadays, firstly the overuse and to be honest unnecessary, flaps and other bits of material hanging from the ceiling, and secondly, there were some very dark, almost pitch-black sections. Again, in a normal year, this would be fine, but we really don’t want to be fumbling around in the dark touching so many things. Last up wasn’t COVID specific, but there were some very large steps up and down in one impressive section. Thankfully it’s well lit, but could maybe be missed by some.
All in all, we did feel that there was a lot of potential in the event, especially from the quality of some of the sets and design. Improvements to COVID safety should be very easy and quick to implement and if there was some additional training for the actors so that they could be better utilised then we’d be very keen to see what Stourbridge Scare Maze can produce in the future.
