You’ve been on the road for a long time, and you finally find a place offering sanctum for you. And you’re in luck – it’s dinner time! But it turns out the resident of Sanctum are cannibals, and you are being served for dinner. Escape the humans, but be aware, Walkers have also breached the area. Based off the Season 4 and 5 Terminus storyline from The Walking Dead.

For the first time, Thorpe Park used the space behind The Swarm to house a Fright Nights attraction. This wasn’t as straightforward as some might expect, as it closed off a route for engineers and required tweaks to the park’s emergency services plans, but it was great to see the park expand where Fright Nights took place.

Sanctum took place entirely outdoors and, unlike the park’s other outdoors mazes, didn’t have any natural landscaping to work with. Whilst the park used this blank landscape effectively, theming the maze to a makeshift safe haven from the apocalypse, it did have the downside of feeling a little cheap. However, the park couldn’t have done much more with the theme, story and location they gave themselves.

Sanctum wasn’t a long attraction to walk through, and many of the scenes played out between actors telling the story. This meant that parts of the maze felt a lot more like a scare zone than a maze. This wasn’t a bad thing, as it all worked for what was going on, but it wasn’t necessarily what people were expecting.

Perhaps the biggest issues Sanctum suffered from was flooding. A lot of the queue line and maze space used gravel / mud / uneven ground, which was prone to flooding and getting very dirty. This wasn’t pleasant, and took a long time to drain away. This was a major reason for the maze not returning in that location; the flooring was improved when Survival Games took that location 5 years later.

Sanctum was an experimental maze both from Thorpe Park and AMC (the creators of The Walking Dead). Whilst it wasn’t as successful as either would have hoped, it served its purpose nicely in the 2017 line up, and led up to the superior Do or Die the following year.