HalloWeekends Opening Night 2017

[malem]

I visited Cedar Point yesterday for Opening Night of HalloWeekends. Crowds were relatively light, noticeably more-so than during Mean Streak's funeral last year. With lots of KIC'ers and other familiar faces at the park, it was a great night to be there.

At rope drop for Early Entry, I met up with @acole5292, @chugh43 and @pianoman for rides on Valravn, Millennium Force and Maverick before the park opened. At 6:00pm, the first order of business was riding Cedar Creek Mystic Mine Ride, catching the second-ever public train. We all loved the new logo.

Fans of Kings Island will get a kick out of #WhatsInTheShed. I won't spoil it here, but be on the lookout for plenty of nods to Mystic Timbers. While it's not very elaborate (we're talking about Mine Ride, after all), it was better than I thought it would be!

We then got a few more rides (Magnum, front seat on TTD, Blue Streak) and a dining plan meal before meeting up with @XGatorHead 8904, "Mama", and @rotag . Everyone wanted to do a Haunt maze, so we went to G.A. Boeckling's Erie Estate. With the line wrapped around the building (no switchbacks), we waited 50 minutes at 8:10pm. This is one of the park's better mazes, and capacity is relatively low, so it's usually one of the longer waits.

The maze itself seemed well-staffed; they made a few of us jump. We gave acole5292 a bit of a hard time for sitting out the maze at last year's meetup, prompting the host to yell "Adam's coming" into the maze as we entered. Fortunately for Adam, none of the actors trying to scare Adam managed to find him in the group.

Gator and his group split off after the maze to go eat, and the four of us met up with Jarred Bour-Jones so that acole5292 could convince his friend Larry to do mazes. Instead, Adam and Larry pulled an @ohiocolts, ditching the rest of us to ride stuff while we did mazes.

After being spoiled by the superior Blackout maze at KI, our one disappointment of the night was the new Deprivation maze. This is located in the building in Steel Vengence's midfield, where Eden Musse was formerly located. To keep capacity up, it's divided into thirds, of which each group navigates only one. The result is a short maze with very few scares other than being in total darkness. To its credit, it's darker inside than Blackout, and some very cool views of Steel Vengeance are available from the queue.

We skipped the other new maze, Fearground Freakshow, opting to do a few night rides instead. We made plans to meet up with @aandjgoods there at the end of the night to walk through and get LROTNOM. This was a very good decision, as there was no line for either the maze or Maverick by 11:45pm.

At some point we caught part of the Skeleton Crew show, enjoying the Rola Bolla act from this year's Origins show at KI.

Eternity Infirmary was getting tired in recent seasons, so I was glad to see that maze get refreshed. Fearground Freakshow is very similar in theme to the former Carnevil scare zone in Camp Snoopy. After the let down at Deprivation, I was pleasantly surprised with this one. I especially appreciated how some scenes take advantage of the building's high ceiling. It fits the circus theme very well.

All-in-all, it was a very enjoyable start to HalloWeekends. We unfortunately didn't end up seeing Midnight Syndicate (which was very good in 2014), but we had a great time hanging out and got a lot done. Now, on to Kings Island's Haunt kickoff next weekend!

[JubJester]

Sounds like you had a fun time. Heading up in October with some friends, so I'll make sure to hit Erie Estate first.

I was very disappointed they scratched Eden Musse off their list, never got to experience it, and really wanted to. Was it a good replacement in your opinion? 

[Creed Bratton]

Sounds like you had a fun time. Heading up in October with some friends, so I'll make sure to hit Erie Estate first.
I was very disappointed they scratched Eden Musse off their list, never got to experience it, and really wanted to. Was it a good replacement in your opinion? 

No, it wasn't a good replacement. Too short of a maze and not worth a wait.


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[pianoman]

This was my first time visiting Cedar Point during HalloWeekends. I had a great time! Overall, I still like KI's Haunt a little better. My favorite mazes were Eerie Estate and Zombie High School. Their outdoor scare zones are much better than KI's.


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[XGatorHead 8904]

My group went all three days this past weekend and we decided to skip out on Deprivation based on what chugh43 told us about it.  That was the only haunt we didn't do at all.  Walking through the dark does nothing for me; I walk through my house in the dark all the time so Blackout and Deprivation don't get to me, but I know it does affect many others so they're good for those people.  We did several multiple times, the most visited was Sam's northern brethren at Slaughterhouse three times, followed by Eerie Estate, Fearground Freakshow, Manical Mechanical Screamworks and Zombie High School twice each, and Blood on the Bayou, CornStalkers, Cut Throat Cove, Harvest Fear, Hexed and Tombstone Terror-tory once each.

During the day they have Hexed open in a kid-friendly mode.  Since we had a 10 year old in our group that isn't too fond of haunts, we did this with her and it was very well done.  They give the kids a flashlight and they have to solve riddles in each room by looking for a specific item or completing a puzzle.  The associates in there have witch hats and capes on, but no makeup so as not to scare the kids; the environment itself is spooky enough.

[jcgoble3]

For anyone that was there this past weekend, check your bank and credit card statements. Some people were double-charged:

http://www.wkyc.com/features/some-guests-double-charged-for-cedar-point-purchases/476918761