Ride Review – Myth

Myth is a dome theatre based dark ride attraction found at several OCT properties within China, including their Visionland brand of parks. The ride is designed and built in house by the chain owners, under the name Shenzhen OCT Vision who also produce the films and media to accompany such attractions. A queueline decorated with ancient drawings leads to this instructional video and batching room, in which we can see the hardware is essentially a Flying Theatre on steroids. Riders are mounted perpedicular to a large platform which has the ability to rotate in all directions inside a more fully encompassing 360° giant screen.

This greatly enhanced my excitement as, while the regular theatres rely on compelling and attractive visuals (sometimes smells), the accompanying movements are a little sedate – if you pause to think for a moment about the ‘ride’ part of the experience there really isn’t much going on when there perhaps should be.
In this instance, there are moments where you can be tilted right back into a face-up lying down position, perhaps even putting guests out of their comfort zone a little more and it just overall increases the dynamic of the whole package when you never quite know what your body is going to be subjected to next as the story unfolds.

The storyline focuses on Nuwa, a Goddess from Chinese mythology and obviously a popular one, as she now boasts a variety of different attractions that revolve around her character across the various theme park chains in China, from Fantawild to Wanda/Sunac. Nuwa is responsible for both creating humanity and mending the heavens when the sky fell apart, and where these tales are often portrayed as, or adapted into, a more action based sequence of scenes for other dark rides, Myth instead spends more time on the general wonder and spectacle of the events, with awe-inspiring results. The whole thing really is rather epic, as well as making a nice change from the usual fight scene frolicks – it’s rather hard to do it justice with just words, as with all dark rides it simply has to be experienced in person to be appreciated fully.

Overall this attraction is the highlight of Visionland Liuzhou for me (even with an empty Intamin Megalite to marathon just around the corner), it’s well worth the visit on its own, along with being, in my opinion, OCT’s finest in-house achievement to date. I’m really glad to see a bit of healthy competition brewing between the giants of the Chinese theme park industry and can’t wait to see where it leads.
With the world becoming steadily more saturated (even I can’t keep up) with Soarin’ inspired rides that gently hover over either local or far flung tourist destinations, Myth ups the standards by which they should all be measured, and in more ways than one.