Review: Phantom Peak's Hallowed Peak (2025)

London's best open-world immersive experience returns with its fourth annual Halloween season, bringing with it another excellent batch of story trails for guests to sink their fangs into.

Photo: Alistar Veryard

Despite still being September, in the town of Phantom Peak, spooky season is here. Returning for its fourth year, Phantom Peak's annual Halloween celebration brings with it eleven new trails for guests to work through, an updated cocktail trail, and the latest developments in its ongoing story. Billed as more spooky than scary, this latest instalment of the ongoing, family-friendly immersive open-world experience has become a mainstay in London's immersive calendar in recent years, standing tall as a shining example of why London is regarded as the best city in the world for immersive experiences.

Regular visitors to the mining town will be familiar with the show's tried-and-tested formula, which has been continually tweaked and refined with each passing season. Four times a year, there's a town-wide retheme, accompanied by a fresh batch of story trails. Throughout these trails, guests explore the 30,000 sq ft town, interact with Phantom Peak's 15+ residents, engage with the numerous pieces of off-kilter tech, and solve puzzles over the show's 4-hour duration. While the focus of each storyline differs wildly from trail to trail, they're all packed full of humour and lead you down a rabbit hole far more bizarre, irreverent and offbeat than the starting point ever suggested.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

For those keen to collect all of this season's individual trail cards, which are given to guests upon completion of each storyline, it'll take at least 3 visits. That's without giving yourself time to sink your fangs into the various other distractions on offer around town, which include a trio of carnival games, fully functional in-world arcade machines, communal competitions, the ever-popular sport of Platyhooks, and, of course, themed food and drink options, which this season include Halloway's Coffin Deluxe burger (complete with charcoal brioche bun!) and cocktails such as Harvest Plasma and Copper Vein.

Picking up the ongoing storyline from Phantom Peak's summer season, this year's Hallowed Peak finds the town in lockdown after former Mayor, Dr Joy S. Furbish, who was long presumed dead, was confirmed to be alive and hiding somewhere in the area. True to form, Phantom Peak's creative team subverted Furbish's long-teased return last season by having the sausage-fingered fugitive appear in puppet form, thanks to a process developed by JONACO (the town's all-encompassing corporate presence) called puppetizing, which turns people from flesh to felt.

With the town's tourist population all deputised as honorary JIA agents during the Opening Ceremony, this season of Phantom Peak sees Furbish topping the JIA's Most Wanted List, alongside the festive demigod Father Platmas, Philip from JONACO Marketing and, inexplicably, the real-life founder of Phantom Peak's fan Discord server (the specifics of their crimes are unknown, but no doubt severe).

Photo: Alistair Veryard

With each season of Phantom Peak delivering 10+ hours of new content (the 11 main trails on offer each take close to an hour to complete), this review is only scratching the surface of everything on offer, but from the half a dozen trails we've finished so far, it's fair to say that they're as varied as ever, and the high benchmark set by previous seasons' offerings has once again been cleared.

As ever, Phantom Peak's storylines continue to engage with and lampoon popular culture. Whether they're taking shots at MrBeast's ever-growing empire or crypto pyramid schemes, these send-ups offer an extra layer of enjoyment to the character-driven storylines that fuel the Phantom Peak experience. Long-time visitors to Phantom Peak will also find numerous references to previous seasons throughout, which only deepen the show's rich lore further.

Year-round, many of Phantom Peak's trails have spooky, supernatural elements, and the townsfolk are no strangers to battling with demons and ghosts. For Hallowed Peak, it's dialled up to an extreme, with mummies, ghouls, wolfmen, and Dracula all featuring to various degrees.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

'The Axiomatic Zone', which wonderfully parodies The Twilight Zone, is one of this season's standout trails. In it, fictional actor Beardy Ham finds themself helpless against a Rod Serling-esque host (played pitch-perfectly by Luke Booys, via pre-recorded Jonavision videos), who's previously abducted dozens of melodramatic, jobbing actors and has now set their sights on one of the town's most theatrical residents.

Trails like this, which fully embrace spoofing pre-existing properties, have proven to be some of the show's most popular in past seasons, and Phantom Peak's writing team (made up of Nick Moran, Danny Romeo and Tibet Boyer) have never shied away from leaning into the elements that have previously resonated the most with audiences, taking their feedback on board. Woven into the DNA of Phantom Peak is a real commitment to ensuring the guest experience is as good as it can possibly be, and they're in the unique position of being able to deploy tweaks and larger changes at a far quicker pace than many other immersive shows can, thanks to the show's seasonal structure.

Photos: Alistair Veryard

Elsewhere in town, after returning to Phantom Peak last season following a 2-year absence, bar owner-turned-lawyer Giffard (Stella Saltibus) continues to struggle with keeping their fugitive father, Furbish, out of trouble. Despite the JIA actively searching for Furbish, in 'Flight Of The Furbish', they've been running their mouth at the bar, telling everyone their true identity and revealing that Giffard is their child. Guests looking to play both sides and undermine the JIA puppet hunt will find themselves tasked with securing and destroying the only physical copy of the incriminating CCTV footage and finding a way for Furbish to escape town without being captured.

The ongoing power struggle between Jonas and Furbish has driven much of Phantom Peak's ongoing storyline over the last three years, and to now have a physical representation of Furbish within the town's walls is a sure-fire sign that in the not-too-distant future, this chapter of Phantom Peak's story will reach its conclusion with The Great Undoing.

Photos: Alistair Veryard

Throughout Phantom Peak's history, its autumn and summer seasons have always had the luxury of running for several months before being cycled out. In stark contrast, Hallowed Peak often feels like an apparition – vanishing almost as soon as it appears. There are just six short weeks left to dive into their annual Halloween offering and discover everything it has to offer before Father Platmas ushers in Wintermas to see out the calendar year.

While the show's constant seasonal turnover makes it true for every season of Phantom Peak, to see this much care and love go into crafting an experience that's only available for a relatively short time before being removed and replaced is nothing short of miraculous. It's an experience that has continuously outdone itself with each passing season, and with this year's edition of Hallowed Peak, Phantom Peak is the best it's ever been. Until the next season opens anyway...

★★★★★

Interview: Phantom Peak's Nick Moran, Danny Romeo, and Jonathan Taylor

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Phantom Peak's Hallowed Peak runs until 9th November 2025 in Canada Water. To find out more and to book tickets, visit phantompeak.com

For more reviews of immersive experiences like Phantom Peak's Hallowed Peak, check out our recent Reviews.