- May 24, 2018
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Wish I did more last night but I got rained out. I’m not to worried tho as ill be back. The houses I did do, I saw improvements from opening.
As the biggest Triplets fan, I appreciate your genuine honesty and likeness for the house, and I do fully agree it's a lil disappointing that it ends just as it gets to the best point.REVIEW: Haunt Season is back, and Halloween Horror Nights 33 features a great line-up - mixing up the fun aspects of horror with good old fashioned scary. #hhn33
REVIEW: Halloween Horror Nights 33 at Universal Orlando
(Pt. 2)
Zones
This is where it gets interesting, for it's pretty clear the zones this year were affected in one way or another. They lacked the overall cohesion which made them shine in the past two years, and then you have Duality of Fear which clearly lacked everything to the point where you have to question if it's really a zone.
That said, thankfully something which hasn't changed are the casts themselves, as they're making due with what they have and still made the zones enjoyable. I didn't know if I would enjoy a theme like Torture Faire, but the casts made that zone fun! Demon Queens was a surprisingly nice vibe with Surreal strolling around and the monsters and queens getting people, Swamp of the Undead looked fantastic and those misters actually felt kinda' nice at points.
I figure I can also talk about Sinister and Surreal in here since they're the most present in the zones. I gotta' say both of them grew on me throughout the trip. I love that both of them are mic'd up so they got to show off their personalities while engaging with folks, and I don't know if it's just me, but it seemed like Surreal's autotune was tweaked a bit so she doesn't sound so shrill like she sounded early on, so for me her voice was a lot more pleasant.
So while the zones overall aren't on the level of the past several years, the casts still made them enjoyable.
Nightmare Fuel: Nocturnal Circus
Having seen every iteration of Nightmare Fuel, I did enjoy this one quite a bit! Very happy to see a whole new story which I think was needed at this point, and the new costumes are really great, too! The dancing, fire and specialty acts are always nice, and I really dug a lot of the music choices. While the show might not reach the highs of last year's show, it's still quite enjoyable. (Plus, last years had that Endgame effect where it was a finale several years in the making, so that would be impossible to match/top the following year.)
Food
When it came to the specialty food this year, my Dad and I really enjoyed the stuff we had. For a good snack, there was the Red Door hand pie, the Heart "Beet" Tostada, and the Wooden Board Eclaire. For something more substantial, the Eggs in the Further definitely hit the spot. We probably would've hit up more, but we were generally full from our dinners at places like Vivo, The Wok Experience at Royal Pacific etc., so we were only down for one snack a night. And the night we could've snacked a lot was Thursday, but it had a long period of rain, so we chose to take shelter in Minion Cafe which was a good, tasty choice.
Ops
Ops were totally fine on my end, all the lines seemed to move pretty smoothly in both standby and express, and ops only needed to step in when needed. Great example is waiting in line for Major Sweets on Friday, and two teens thought it would be A-O.K. to rough house and push each other into a nearby trash can. The TM monitoring the line immediately stepped right in and showed the two that if they're gonna' be trash, it gets taken right out. And what made that situation all the better was there was a group of teens in front of me who proceeded to applaud the TM for doing that. Also, I can happily say the walks this year are the best they've ever been. With no more massive hike to and from E.T., and the two new tents being its little courtyard where you can chain both together, it helped a ton!
Memorable Moment
As usual for any year at HHN, there's a bunch of them and this year is no exception. But there is one moment which I really wanna' bring attention to as it's really nice. One of my friends I got to hang out with has worked at the event as a tour guide and is in a wheelchair, so I got to talk with plenty of staff members they know and got some wonderful insights. Something that made both my friend and staff members very happy were how the casts were tackling a rather big complaint from last year, that complaint being that casts weren't really going after folks in wheelchairs etc.
This year is a total 180 on that as the casts in zones and houses were absolutely going after them, much to the delight and surprise of those in the wheelchairs and those pushing them! I was witness to a lot of that, and I got to talking with the nice folks about that and they were super happy about it! They relayed last year was pretty bad, so this year is a massive improvement on getting engaged by the casts. Hilariously, that can either be fantastic or terrible in a house like Insidious because I saw some all-timer scares hitting wheelchairs. (Thankfully the lady I saw in the wheelchair LOVED that, I think her friend pushing the wheelchair liked it as well...once she calmed down. XD ) Either way, massive hat's off to the casts for making sure everyone's involved!
Final Thoughts
While this year might not reach the overall highs of 32 which is still my favorite year, a very strong house line-up, great casts, a fun show a good food still make this a very enjoyable year for me. My Dad and friends really enjoyed this year as well, so a good time was had by all of us!