Phantom Peak opened in London back in August 2022, which means I’ve been planning to visit this attraction for approximately 14 months. Finally, with the launch of Hallowed Peak: The Lunar Festival for this year’s Halloween season, I’ve made the trip out to the far western town of Phantom Peak, and I’m here to tell you all about it!
Located in a retail park in Canada Water, Phantom Peak touts itself as the ‘World’s First Fully-Immersive Open World Adventure.’ It also, in its official listings on Google, titles itself as an ‘Immersive Theme Park’. This, of course, opens the can of worms that is ‘what is a theme park?’, and can you truly be a theme park without rides? Puy Du Fou would, of course, argue that you can, so I’m going to choose not to argue that point right now. But the use of ‘theme park’ certainly sets a level of expectation. This is not an attraction that calls itself a ‘themed experience’, after all, a cocktail in a room with some leaves on the wall and a stuffed gorilla in the corner is a themed experience. Instead, to go with Wikipedia here:
An amusement park is a park that features various attractions, such as rides and games, as well as other events for entertainment purposes. A theme park is a type of amusement park that bases its structures and attractions around a central theme, often featuring multiple areas with different themes.
So. We’re thinking open-world, immersive, various structures and attractions, all with a central theme. Sounds pretty darn good to me!
On arriving at Phantom Peak, we were greeted by an enormous queue snaking all along the adjacent road. We arrived a few minutes after our session started and didn’t manage to reach the first central space in the experience until moments before the opening ceremony began (half an hour after the session starts). I’ll be honest here, from first impressions as we were in this space, I really thought I was going to hate my time here. The room was packed to a point where I was deeply, deeply uncomfortable to be there. I cheered along with the opening ceremony, trying my best to get immersed in the story, but all I could think about was how little space I had and how there was no escape. Thankfully, after the opening ceremony, the other spaces within the experience opened, and guests began to spread out throughout the attraction. As part of the opening ceremony, guests were instructed to visit a website and sign up for our trails, so I eagerly signed up for our mission, declaring that we were prepared to crawl and handle tight spaces and were fans of mystery. And with that, we were off!
Mission obtained, the next challenge would be to try and orient ourselves in the town of Phantom Peak. Sure, there was a map, but it was stylized enough that before we’d got the lay of the land ourselves, it didn’t seem to help much. As such, we spent a good 20 minutes searching for our first location before having to stop and ask a character for help. After this, though, we had a pretty good sense of where everything was. So, it’s probably worth just taking a good look around to start with anyway! After all, the scale of this attraction is something to behold. I’d seen the outdoor town in the promotional images but had never truly appreciated just how much there is to Phantom Peak. There are so many rooms to explore and so many characters to meet! It’s a gorgeously realised immersive attraction, with fun details, bright colours, and delightfully quirky design – especially if, like any reasonable person, you love a platypus. The Lunar Festival also features an impressively thorough autumnal overlay, with plenty of golden leaves, pumpkins, and skeletons everywhere.
Over the next few hours, we found ourselves trailing all over Phantom Peak, having to talk to characters, watch videos, play games, and dig through documents to progress through the trail. Throughout our trail, I was consistently impressed by the quality of the interactions at each stop. Each piece of equipment we needed to use felt really well crafted, solid, and believable. The videos were fun and achieved that rarest of things: they weren’t cringey. The actors were nothing short of excellent. Even the paper paraphernalia was well designed, looking sufficiently authentic whilst easily providing the necessary information.
I’ve seen comparisons drawn between Phantom Peak and an escape room, and, for our trail, at least, I didn’t really find this to be the case. There was only one step where we had to use any sort of deduction, with most answers simply being fed to us when completing the instructed task. As was expected from the large crowds on arrival, completing the tasks was occasionally quite challenging, with large groups of people all trying to access each of the actors and/or equipment. The hardest of all was our final stop, talking to Mayor Pocket. Mayor Pocket is the main character in all of the theatrics and seems to feature in many of the trails, as well as leading proceedings throughout the day. It took three separate attempts to be able to speak to her. On the first occasion, the actress playing the character clearly had somewhere to be, or needed the toilet, or something because she was frantically speed-walking, yet still kept being stopped by other guests. The next time, she was completely mobbed, and we couldn’t get near her. Finally, I managed to catch her on an off-chance when she was done helping another guest with a problem and was able to complete our trail. Similarly, we found ourselves waiting a while to use many of the pieces of equipment throughout. This wasn’t a major issue, but it certainly made the exploration feel a little less free. Nonetheless, I thought the trails did an excellent job of spreading guests throughout the attraction. Whilst there, I only ever noticed one pair who were clearly making their way through the same trail as us. There were always people spread out everywhere, which certainly helped to manage the large crowd. Whilst in the experience, we only completed the one trail, which, at a slow pace, took us around two hours. We stopped for a few other activities during this time, including a browse of the gift shop, and a stop in the ‘Miramaze’ – more on that later – as we weren’t in any rush to complete our activity. I only realised, after reading some reviews on the way home, that many people aim to complete all of the trails. One person I saw complained as they were only able to finish four! Clearly, we’re playing the game wrong! However, as enjoyable as we found the game, we didn’t find ourselves super hungry for another round, so instead, opted to enjoy the other activities available at Phantom Peak with our remaining time.
So, outside of the trails, what is there to do? Well, our first break from the set trail was the ‘Miramaze’. We nipped in for a quick bit of fun, expecting this – from the name – to be a silly little mirror maze. Reader, I quickly discovered why the website had asked if I’d be happy to crawl. This was no mirror maze. Instead, it was a series of tight corridors leading to a messy jungle of bungee cords, which we had to manoeuvre ourselves through, whilst the ceiling got lower and lower. At the end of it all waited a ball pit, whose depth I completely misjudged and ended up flopping into the sea of bright plastic balls. All in all, it’s a lot of fun and far more unique and challenging than a mirror maze! There is also a small selection of free-to-play carnival games, including a custom version of Down the Clown, a favourite of mine! If you’re looking for more games, there are also a handful of arcade machine featuring custom versions of classic arcade games, including ‘Union Buster’, a version of Space Invader where you literally throw the book at union members. Finally, you’ll find a gift shop filled with cute merch – plus good quality cowboy hats for just £10 – and plenty of photo opportunities scattered around. Aside from that, your options are pretty much just enjoying food and drink. We didn’t really find Phantom Peak offered much as an unguided exploratory experience. It was all but impossible to spend more than a few minutes on any of these activities without unfairly hogging them, and outside of those, the endless rooms within the experience pretty much uniquely housed clues and information related to individual trails, with not much to interact with should the information not be relevant to you. That’s certainly fine, but when we finished up our trail without enough time to do another, but with time to spend we found ourselves wishing there was just a little more for a casual wanderer to do. We probably should have just started a new trail and moved fast!
Heading back to food and drink, should you wish to spend your time simply enjoying the town’s atmosphere with a drink and a bite to eat, Phantom Peak offers two bars, a hot chocolate outlet and one quick service restaurant. The bars are reasonably priced (£6.50 a pint, in a themed London attraction?! I’m happy with that!) and offer a great selection of drinks, although I didn’t find any of the cocktails taking my fancy. I did however, try the signature ‘Platypus Brain shot’ – incase you hadn’t figured it out by now, Phantom Peak townsfolk love the platypus – even though it looked absolutely disgusting, and had a list of ingredients I would never dream of including together. Baileys, in a shot with peach schnapps and blue curaco?! Madness. But… it kinda worked? I’m still not sure what the ‘brain’ was made of (pls be vegetarian), but it provided a sufficient barrier between the Baileys and everything else that the creamy drink was able to be drunk separately from everything else. So it was… nice? You’ve always got to try the signature item, right? Food-wise, well, you can probably guess what’s on the menu. Burgers, hot dogs, mac and cheese. Done. Happily, any of the burgers can be ordered as vegetarian, so I opted for ‘The Saviour Burger’ as vegetarian, and we shared a portion of fries between us, alongside a ‘golden nugget’ cheesecake. For two burgers, one portion of fries and one cheesecake slice (no drinks), our bill came to £32, so it’s not super cheap, but hey, it’s an attraction. My biggest gripe was the presentation. Both burgers were placed on a tray together, touching, even though my partner had opted for a meat burger. This just shouldn’t be the way things are done, in my opinion. I’m relaxed enough about these things that it was fine, but dietary requirements need a little more consideration, really. My burger was also overflowing with mustard, which genuinely made it quite difficult to eat. It was just too darn tangy! Other than that, though, the patty and bun were both very good quality, and the fries were perfection. I could easily have murdered another tray of those incredible fries! One weird thing to note: the only hot drink available at Phantom Peak is hot chocolate. At the bar, a couple next to me were asking if there was any coffee to be had anywhere within the attraction and were informed that they would have to settle for chocolate. A strange choice? But the chocolate did look really good.
The event ended with a final closing ceremony, tying together the story elements throughout the missions. Maybe it was because we stood at the back, or maybe because we’d only completed one mission, but this didn’t quite land with me. I wish there had been more of the characters from throughout the day involved, as the show featured just Mayor Pocket and videos on a screen. I was certainly expecting a more dramatic conclusion to the day. But perhaps I just wanted to see more from these characters because they were so fantastic. Like any character-based experience, it’s the strength of the actors that can make or break an experience, and the actors here are excellent. Across the board, every person we interacted with was a delight, and the actor playing ‘Spectre’ particularly made me crack up every time we visited his shop.
Thus, after four enjoyable hours, it was time to depart the fair town of Phantom Peak. I had an excellent afternoon. Relaxing in a sunny fictional town, interacting with hilarious characters, and getting tangled in a web of bungee cord makes for a fantastic day. I do just think it all could have been a little better had there been fewer people in there with us. Of course, that’s always going to be the way at these things. A theme park is always better if you don’t have to queue after all. But the crowds also create atmosphere – not to mention revenue – so where do we draw the line?
So, did the attraction live up to its description? Well, it certainly has a wonderful, cohesive theme with small story details – and platypuses – throughout! Real care has gone into making this an immersive experience, which it almost entirely is, with the one exception of the hulking retail park surrounding the outdoor area. But, there’s not much that can be done about that! I think a nighttime visit would almost definitely fix this issue, too. As an ‘open-world’ attraction however, I definitely wish there was a little more to do when freely exploring, as right now, it feels as though a level of hand-holding is required to be able to interact with the elements throughout. Perhaps I didn’t find things? Perhaps I just didn’t get deep enough into the attraction on my sold-out first visit? Maybe I needed to talk to more townsfolk? I’m not quite sure. But I do think I’d like to re-visit and explore more to find out, not to mention fully commit to doing as many trails as possible!
Speak again soon,
Claire
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coasterclaire.co.uk 