I ended up being stood up twice for this event so I braved a trip down to Wicked Experiences Zombie Nightmare event this time set in the Mercury Mall in Romford on my own. Thankfully I was joined by eight other random strangers for this hour long-ish event. Wicked Experiences run similar events across the country based in different shopping centres in evenings after the shops and general public have left.
I’m a seasoned expert when it comes to saving what remains of humanity after a zombie apocalypse, having done so in disused shopping centres and factories, through the mean streets and buildings of Wembley and even in a porta-cabin in Stratford. In fact, I’m getting a bit tired of finding the cure to a zombie plague and really wish those madcap scientists would stop messing around with their experiments and find something more productive to do with their time.
After a short wait, in between a still open Asda and McDonalds, our intrepid group of woefully under qualified civilians were introduced to our superb, at times harsh and at times darkly hilarious military escort. He gave us our mission briefing and we were speedily on our way through the bowels of this shopping centre.
Zombie Nightmare provides a mixture of creepy and occasionally scary promenade style immersive theatre with three or four escape room type scenes. There are no guns in this version of science gone wrong, even the military have run out of ammo. As such we had to rely on stealth and cunning to survive the zombies.
The setting for this event is a bit of an unusual one as areas of the mall were still open, so there were limited sections of the more publicly available areas open to our journey, so most of our time was spent in the numerous and confusing ‘backstage’ areas of the mall. We were led by our military escort through a variety of passageways to the bigger set piece escape room elements to find the cure and signal an evacuation.
Most of the scares were creepier rather than impactful, though there were a few occasions when we had to peg it from a fast zombie who noticed us. After we’d successfully completed our mission we then had to make it to the extraction point, which led to two fun set pieces.
The first was designed to ramp up the tension as we slowly and silently traversed a circuitous route in the dark of a disused nightclub. This would have been great if one member of our group hadn’t consistently kept loudly proclaiming where the zombie was, despite it being completely obvious to the rest of us. Our military escort made a great effort in silencing them, but it was only his long suffering wife that could manage to properly shut him up.
After the tension, it was time for the adrenaline filled finale. One highlight was when our lift, heading to the bottom floor was stopped on a floor unintentionally. Somehow some dear old lady leaving the Bingo had intercepted our lift and was temporarily part of our group. I have no idea what she thought of this encounter. The brief, but fun finale ended with all the civilians reaching the extraction point with the cure. Sadly, our military escort wasn’t so lucky and ended up being overwhelmed by the Zombie horde to ensure our safety and the survival of the human race. I salute you for your sacrifice brave soldier, sweet cheeks.
Final thoughts
I had a fun evening at Wicked Experiences Zombie Nightmare event. If I was to offer any criticism, I would have liked to see more actors and have a few more running for your life type scenes. That said what interactions I had with the actors were always good. The escape room elements are light and we were helpfully advised in character throughout them. Our military escort throughout the evening was absolutely bang on, remaining in character and offering a good mixture of humour and drill sergeant angry put downs, he made the event for me. Anyway I now have a cure for the zombie plague. You can thank me later… for a price.
Wicked Experiences Zombie Nightmare is a year round attraction available on select dates at a variety of locations around the UK check them out for more details
