The Crooked House is a Gentle Ride added with RCT1's Corkscrew Follies DLC and is available in all future installments.


(Noah's Ark in Blackpool Pleasure Beach)

“Building containing warped rooms and angled corridors to disorient people walking through it.” - In-game description.

Table of Contents

Technical Information

Stats

  • Base Excitement Rating: 2.15
  • Base Intensity Rating: 0.62
  • Base Nausea Rating: 0.34

Stat Contribution Values

  • Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 15
  • Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 8
  • Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 0
  • Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 22

Building Information

  • Size: 3x3
  • Base Cost: $260.00
  • Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $1.00
  • Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 50ft/15m/+10

Other Information

  • Guest Capacity: 5 or 16 (depending on variant)
  • Sheltered?:

Building a Crooked House

The Crooked House is a 3x3 flat ride, and at a cost of only $260.00, it is the cheapest flat ride in the game. Additionally, it has a running cost of only $28.80 per hour, which is the lowest of any ride in the game. This means that it's extremely easy to integrate into your park, and its extremely tiny price to build and maintain means that it inherently serves a purpose when being built.

It has the second-highest support limit of all flat rides in the game at 10 units of height off the ground. For all practical purposes, height will never be a problem for the Crooked House, and this makes it a good ride for stacking it on top of other rides.

In terms of path clearance, the Crooked House requires a path to be built 6 units off the ground before it can clear a Crooked House. This sits in exactly the half-way point of path clearance among Gentle flat rides. There are 4 of them that beat this (Bumper Cars, Flying Saucers, Merry-Go-Round, and Space Rings), and 4 of them that are beaten by the Crooked House (Circus, Ferris Wheel, Haunter House, Spiral Slide).

The Crooked House does not any options available to customize, but it does come in four different styles. The original ride was added in the first game's Corkscrew Follies DLC, and it has three reskins that were all added in the second game's Time Twister DLC. Unlike most ride reskins, the different types of Crooked House rides actually do have a functional difference.


1. Normal Crooked House
2. Fun House
3. Hall of Mirrors
4. Haunted Jail House

That's not quite the case for the normal Crooked House, Fun House, and Hall of Mirrors. All of those are truly exactly the same. They all have a maximum capacity of 5 guests, and have the exact same stats.

The Haunted Jail House however has a capacity of 16 guests and a 75% Excitement Bonus. Despite its name and appearance, it is indeed a Crooked House and not a Haunted House.

No matter which one you build, they all cost the exact same amount of money to build and maintain, and they all have the exact same path clearance. In the case of the Hall of Mirrors and Haunted Jail House, this will cause the path and guests walking on it to clip through the top of the ride if the path is built at exactly the level it needs to be to be built above it.

It also means that the Haunted Jail House is strictly better than all of the other variants.

The Crooked House is one of the very few rides in the game that cannot break down. Unlike the Lift, Mechanics will not inspect the ride anyway when the inspection interval has been met. In RCT1 and RCT2, its Reliability will still go down even though this has no effect since the ride can't break down anyway In OpenRCT2, its Reliability will always stay at 100%. If you load an original RCT2 save in OpenRCT2, any Crooked Houses in the park with a Reliability of less than 100% will jump up to 100% as soon as the game rolls over to the next in-game day. This once again, has absolutely no effect.

Below you can see a Crooked House that hasn't been inspected for two full hours despite the fact that it has an inspection interval of 10 minutes, and has no last recorded breakdown in that time.

Stats

The Crooked House has very decent stats for a Gentle Ride. It has a base Excitement of 2.15, and a low Intensity and Nausea of 0.62 and 0.34 respectively. The Haunted Jail House gets a 75% Excitement bonus which brings its Excitement up to 3.40, but its Intensity and Nausea stay unaffected.

Similar to a few other rides, the Crooked House has absolutely no stat modifiers assigned to it. With no way to change its operating function, this means that every Crooked House or Haunted Jail House you build will always have the exact same stats no matter where you build it or what's nearby it.

The Crooked House and Haunted House are both tied for having the lowest Soft Guest Cap contribution value of all rides at only 22.

Throughput and Profit.

Despite the Crooked House's low guest capacity of only 5 guests, its throughput is quite high for a Gentle Ride, being able to process 600 guests per hour, though it will occasionally dip into the mid-to-high 500s too. Because time in RollerCoaster Tycoon works a little bit weird, waiting one full in-game year yields that 665 guests instead of 600 guests had rode it.

If the ride was a Haunted Jail House instead, its throughput shoots up to about 1800 guests per hour before the number gradually goes down to 1400 guests per hour despite there being no change in throughput. In one in-game year, it processed about 1800 guests per hour. The "Total customers" statistic is always more accurate than the "Customers" statistic since the former updates in real time while the latter attempts to approximate based on patterns and time intervals.

However, in spite of the ride's decent throughput, the Crooked House has one major Achilles Heel that plummets the ride's strength very significantly. It's ticket price. Because of its extremely low rating multipliers, the Crooked House has the lowest maximum ticket price of any ride in the game, tied with the Space Rings.

In the vanilla games, this doesn't ratter matter due to a quirk in way rides less than 13 months old have their prices calculated. In OpenRCT2 though, you can't even charge one full dollar for a brand new Crooked House. At 5-13 months old, the ride can only make a little over $350.00 per year if it runs at full capacity all the time, which is one of the lowest profits per year of any Gentle flat ride. The Haunted Jail House fairs quite a bit better, as even though its ticket price is not much higher, its throughput is nearly three times the amount. If that Crooked House that earned $350.00 per year was a Haunted Jail House instead, it would earn about $1,400.00 per year instead.

Verdict

The Crooked House is one of the weakest Gentle Rides in the game in terms of profit due to its low guest capacity and ticket price. Due to its tiny BonusValue, it won't attract very many guests to the park either. However, its rain protection, inability to break down, and extremely small price gives it some utility in any park. In parks where guests don't pay for the rides, its downsides don't really matter anymore.

The Haunted Jail House on the other hand is quite a nice Gentle Ride.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]