This weekend I headed down to Westminster, south of LA, eager to see what Sinister Pointe had cooked up for the season.

The company has a reputation for making some of the best haunted attractions out there, and work on some of the biggest haunts worldwide. Their 2018 attraction Scary Place earned high praise from those who saw it, and I kicked myself for not making the trek last year.

The idea for this year’s attraction, Mist, is a solid one: a free roaming scavenger hunt in a haunted town shrouded by the titular mist and inhabited by a malevolent hoard called THE SEE’ERS. Our task is to find 13 cursed objects in order to lift the spell that dooms the town. All of which is set up inside a vacant department store.

Upon arrival I got excited, as converting every old big box store into an immersive attraction is something I day dream about constantly. This kind of suburban reclamation is exactly what the immersive renaissance needs if it is going to grow a wider audience. (Can someone PLEASE do something with the old Burbank IKEA? I lost the last Chevy’s in LA because of that move.)

Everything right up through the game briefing was fine. The scavenger hunt maps that we were provided were particularly well drawn. Indeed, Sinister Pointe’s graphics department is consistently on, um, point. I had some concern about reading the map inside what we were told was going to be a dark, mist enshrouded space… but they had to have figured that out, right?

Gentle reader, on press preview night they had not.

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What followed sadly felt more like an afterthought in a fairly busy season for the company, which has design work out at other attractions. What could have been an eerie, nerve-wracking crawl through a cursed town ended up a hunt for hole punchers on the sparsely decorated second floor of a department store. The dim lighting meant that the participants — somewhere around 30 of us, give or take — kept having to pick up the electric candles scattered around to read the map they’d given us.

We’d find a hole puncher, but none of the objects might seem to be around it. So someone would punch away and then we’d step into the light to see what symbol had been left behind. Clearly not what the designers had intended, but also pretty much the only way we could identify some of the objects.

A scare actor — in an impeccable costume, really, SP has this part cornered — might pop out of a corner, but is just as likely to be seen from yards away in the thinner than anticipated mist. Roaming around the space led to empty dead ends and the backsides of flats. Even the spots that were decorated felt sparse, like we were being given the leftovers of the fear harvest.

Twenty minutes later (and some folks were noting that the website said thirty) we were back out of the town. Few had managed to find more than a handful of the objects, but I can tell you now it wasn’t because there were difficult puzzles or that THE SE’ERS were throwing down a real challenge. It was because it was dim, making it hard to read the map or see the objects. Full stop.

Look: there’s something to this idea, and Sinister Pointe does great work but this… this just isn’t something you want to see a good company put out into the world at any price. It’s probably not too late for the company to mix things up for this season, but if this is going to work — and it could — it’s going to need some work.

Mist continues through November 2. Tickets are $29.

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