DELUSION — Local services in Pomona

The good:

What a venue! Holy crap the ballrooms and basements housed this show with an impressive scale!

The sense of urgency while not being too scary. There were moments where you had to hide, freeze, or scuttle past a baddie, and with a little suspension of disbelief they were exciting fun!

smooth operation

The actors in general did a good job, including managing handoffs to other actors

A couple genuinely cool moments! I can think of three "creatures", used loosely, that were impressive for very different reasons.

The bad:

Value: $100 for a half hour or so (a time short enough to feel misleading given their "give it two hours"

The lounge experience: kind of embarrassingly bad. Zero immersion (less than zero; there was a giant poster for the show on the wall), no character interactions. $16 cocktails and lame non-alcoholic options ("we can give you a soda+cran", $4). I don't really know why you would stay there besides sunk cost fallacy.

Narrative: Really this goes in the "medium" category. Moment to moment it was always clear what we were running from or where we were trying to get to, and the actors were doing their best God bless them. But why were we trying to get to hell? Who were we in the story? A little disorienting to have the primary motivation through line so opaque but something I've seen lately from many haunted houses. I was definitely expecting more of a tight cohesive story, with more work gone into the writing than the haunted House aspect in terms of balance. You got the gist though of having to escape a cult, I just wouldn't expect much more than that and because of that thinness, to call it a play is generous.

Character interaction: I understand you can't go overboard with improv and reacting to guests, and it's not meant to be fully interactive, but this skewed far enough the other way that it really did feel like just walking through a haunted house with a guide, even though I really tried to suspend disbelief. I expected something more personalized. Again, I know we don't want this to be Evermore, and I recognize the need for balance but I think it was just a little off.

Details/quality: it was maybe my mistake for expecting more. It's probably unfair for me to compare prop work to a Universal Horror Nights haunted house but having just come from those a couple weeks before, the comparison is unavoidable. This was mostly in the dark and had the quality of build that you would find in a very good amateur haunted house.

Finale: I hate to give a spoiler for the ending in a review, but I feel like it's necessary to tell you that when you're on the boat, you should keep your eyes on your actor, even if you see something you shouldn't. We missed a big set piece!

Overall, I was just expecting higher quality for the price. I think I came in with some unfair expectations, my two touch points for comparison being Halloween horror nights at universal for haunted houses and CAGES (2019) for immersive interactive theater.

On its own, this was a fun haunted house with some unique selling points, and again going through the amazing venue was really really cool and the physical scale of the space felt special. But it lacked the polish I've come to expect in premium experiences and is not something I would rush back to do again. It is definitely a production with ambition and is not a scam (except maybe for the expectation they set about the runtime), so if you won't miss the money and you want a spooky time you could do worse. And I think for the venue alone, haunted house diehards should definitely visit because I don't know where else...

Over-hyped and Over-priced! A friend of ours invited us to join him for this. He had gone last year and raved about it. I couldn't believe how much it cost, but so long it provided the value, I was okay with it. Unfortunately, it did not! Was it fun? Yeah, definitely. Was it worth over $100? Hell no! The website talked about it being around an hour in length and recommended you give yourself an additional hour before/after because there would be a big something that was an extension of the actual "show" for you to enjoy. But the only thing there was here for before/after the show was a bar. Just a normal over-priced drinks bar. I wish we hadn't gotten there early because they were running 30ish minutes late so we ended up just sitting on a sofa surfing our phones for an hour or so waiting for our turn. The interactive performance is pretty great. The actors are all excellent. The story, at least this year, was okay, but not great - I mean it was very abstract and didn't make a lick of sense. But it was fun to sort of "be a kid again" and just go with it and run away from supposed bad guys or hide from an evil entity under the bed. And the effects and stuff were super amazing. BUT there were a lot of missed opportunities in my opinion to make it a bit scarier or more of a thriller - there were many times looking back where I was thinking, "if they had just done this or that small thing, it could have created a great surprise scare or made this scene way more spooky." And I wish the story actually involved us more and was a narrative we could follow and maybe even introduced mysteries that we might be able to be involved with solving as it went on. Instead it was more like the each character just told us their story and most of them seemed to be fairly random and disconnected. I gave it 3 stars because I did have a lot of fun for 30 minutes - it could have been better imo, but it was a lot of fun. But I could have bought a ticket to Universal Studios for the same price (NOT the night time horror thing, just the daytime amusement park) and had a full day of amazing entertainment. Or I could have gotten a ticket to see Hadestown at the Pantages for that price and experienced one of the best musicals ever which is 2-3 hours of brilliant entertainment. Delusion was 30 minutes of fun at WAY too...

This is long overdue! I meant to post this year's update a lot earlier, but you know, life...

I got a group of friends together again at the beginning of October for, what, our 10th year??

And OH, MY GOD, this was one of our absolute favorite years!

As usual, there are your typical haters this year and frankly, I have no freaking clue why. Ignore the negative reviews, please...I have no idea what they are talking about! Maybe they went to the wrong place??? Made a wrong turn in Chino Hills among the cow hollows??

We had to be split among two groups this year because our group of 16 was the largest group I've put together yet and the group sizes were good at 8 each to really experience it best.

As usual, the mansion and actors were dressed amazingly. If they'd allow it, I'd love to stay the night! Just super cool, super spooky, just wonderful!

Story line was excellent and THE ACTING was definitely THE BEST of all the years, I'd say.

Just a couple spoiler alert tidbits because I don't want to give more away...the breaking through the wall to attack the brother, the truck and cargo truck transport were fantastic.

The one hour length was AWESOME and like another reviewer mentioned, I wanted it to keep going...I don't know what marks a successful production more than the audience leaving wanting more.

Speaking of audience...every single person in our group absolutely loved it.

In fact, two of us are returning TOMORROW NIGHT (their last performance day) because we want more and I believe this is the first year 12+ year olds are allowed so I am bringing my 13-year old daughter and she is going to FREAKING LOVE IT. She is super pumped. We plan to arrive an hour early so we can interact with the actors outside which we didn't have time for last month.

Thank you, Jon, and everyone at Delusion for yet another absolutely...