*OVER*

This is a long Twine game about a family of 19 that visits a theme park that (to me) seems clearly Disney-influenced (due to things like a water-based ride that takes a picture of 8 people at a time for a souvenir, or a hall of american history).

The overall structure of this game reminds me of nothing more than the Wikipedia summary of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has been voted the best movie of all time. I haven't seen it, but it's described as a very long, slow movie about a single mother who has a dull daily routine (including daily prostitution). Her day is shown in slow stillness over and over for hours, but then flaws enter her routine, and in the end she becomes violent and breaks out.

This game is similar. The beginning part emphasizes the chaotic and frustrating nature of a Disney (or Universal Studios) trip with 19 people. There are constant little arguments and clamoring from children and adults wanting to take a break and get a drink or food, etc. Like Jeanne Dielman, this story is (intentionally) paced painfully slowly, with large pages filled with large paragraphs of very similar, repetitive material. To me, this seems intentional, so that when the strange flaws begin to creep in (which I first noticed in a scene involving a mole), it becomes more shocking and strange.

There are two main protagonists I saw more than any other, Lou and a name you chose yourself (I chose Evelyn from Incredibles 2). I had great trouble distinguishing between the two at first, as speakers and act-ors change frequently in the middle of paragraphs, and spoken text is often written without italics or quotations. Here is an early sample:

The combination of smells only intensifies inside the park. Added to it now is the smell of melting rubber-shoe-soles, engine exhaust, caramel, horse manure, artificial vanilla. grandma is dying for a cup of coffee, does anyone else want anything? Three hands go up, two adults and one child. The two adults want coffee also, the child wants an ice cream cone. This earns a rebuke from her father. Ice cream! It’s eight in the morning! But grandma is quick, this is vacation! Let’s have ice cream!

While the protagonist whose name we choose is interesting and has some experiences meeting up with other local college students, I followed Lou more. Lou is older, a gay woman in her 30s, and not out to her homophobic family. As she ventures through the park and navigates interactions with her family, she also encounters a mysterious voice on a walkie-talkie channel, as well as an attractive bartender. The ending of her story was long, complex and unexpected.

I think the overall concept of this game is well-thought out, and it's clear the author has great skill at writing. In this case, they obtained the effect they desired, but I found it dense and not fully enjoyable. The suffocating feel of the large paragraphs, the confusion of switching perspectives and speech, it effectively simulated the 'big stressful vacation', but one maxim I've had over the years is "a perfect simulation of a boring or annoying situation is boring or annoying". However, I'm torn, because this same frustration in the early sections is needed for the setup for the big changes in the end. So I don't have any advice for this author, other than to give my own personal subjective experience.

Playing the game did make me reminisce a lot. For the last five years or so, me and my son have been part of a big family vacation to the mountains in Utah, where we wander around as a group of 17. Many parts of this game felt familiar, like navigating different political climates (some of my family are ardent Trump supporters, while others are lifelong Democrats) and the chaos of big groups and tracking down missing kids. Others were less familiar; we don't drink or have blow-out arguments, and we pick completely chill vacations without structure where we mostly swim. We do have closeted gay family, but the 'support' side is large and there is no open hate. None of this affects the verisimilitude of the game, and is likely not relevant to the author or other readers, but it's interesting to see how other people perceive the same life events as us. I have also, conversely been on non-family trips that had this exact suffocating feeling, desire to flee from everything, and buying a flight early. So a lot of this story rang true to me.

Another factor tied in to the whole 'frustrating setup, satisfying payoff' is that there isn't much freedom early on, and we only get freedom in choice as the protagonists themselves do. I was particularly frustrated early on where I had the choice to expose a family member's cruelty or not. I chose not to, but the game said something like, 'Yeah right! No, you do the other choice.'. Similarly, at the very end, for Lou's path, I had to choose between two major options. I chose the more cowardly option, and the game ended very abruptly, leaving me wondering if this was a 'fake' or 'bad' option and that I'd need to replay to see the other.

I commend the author's intense efforts and strong writing skill. For me, I felt a strong dislike for the world in the first half, but that was a reflection of the author's ability, and not the lack thereof.

When a huge family takes a trip to a theme park, what could possibly go wrong? (Answer: Everything) In this story, we follow the tale of a large family on a multi-day theme park adventure, enjoying themselves while slowly letting fatigue and stress accumulate with each day.

A lot of work clearly went into this one, and I would have liked to give it a higher rating. The wordcount appears huge, from my own playthrough impressions. However, the pacing can get slow, and sometimes, it feels like the writing is just meandering around with only a thing or two happening even after trudging through an extra-large serving of text. The writing is competent at a technical level, but it comes with too many words for the story it is trying to tell.

There are multiple protagonists in the game, one of whom you can name, but the game doesn't seem too clear which POV we're at at different parts of the adventure. Some romantic encounters and options are also present, but nothing really stuck with me here.

There is some interesting art. The font and display is a headscratcher to me. My guess is that it's trying to evoke the feel of an arcade machine (which you'll also encounter in the story) but I'm not too sure. It was certainly readable to me for the most part, but some folks might have difficulty with it.

Still, there are some interesting stories and events here if you are able to handle the pacing and the huge load of text. For what it's worth, I'll still reiterate that lot of work must have went into this game.

Honestly, I've always preferred to fly to Orlando on my own for a solo theme park adventure with nobody to fight with.

A few weeks ago I visited a (comparatively) small theme park with a party of around twenty from my local trans youth group and—being a queer twentysomething with short dark hair and sunglasses—had a suitably surreal old time, complete with souvenir flattened penny (albeit in pence rather than cents). This provided an interesting backdrop of memory to this game. Theme parks are weird: the ultimate escape, we're told, yet they only seem to provoke more drama than ever.

So this is a choice-based horror game with a similar feel to the film The Zone of Interest. I admit I found it a little confusing to follow who I was following and whose decisions I was making—a changing name in the header and a dramatis personae in the footer could have gone a long way—but then that's not exactly detrimental to the overwhelming experience of a theme park. It's not like I remember everybody in my family in real life! (I wondered if there was a version of this where you would actually choose a character to play as, and you'd gradually experience the whole story through small crossover moments and repeated playthroughs. But that seems like a lot, and it's already a lot.)

I liked the occasional splash of art which isolates a little fragment of experience and I liked the sarcastic misery of the link prompts. I liked playing a radio show for no-one. I liked little moments like visiting the diner and finding relief in it being largely unthemed, a little fragment of the normal world whose familiarity is unexpectedly pleasing. Because this is what theme parks are like really, they are alien worlds where you must explore and discover the way things are done here... Some have more experience than others (as I found on my trip, where I stuck with a friend who had been many times before and knew which rides to head to first before the queues got too long) while some are wide-eyed lost little lambs like me and then there are children like I was who are inevitably upset with varying levels of clue what's happening. I hope I never reach the first category; it seems more boring that way, so I'd rather play vicariously. The monster is always implied in the background—what exactly are we escaping from?—because this somewhere is a place where context is necessarily abandoned at the opening gates (there is no story in riding a rollercoaster, only pure experience, though I certainly felt different afterwards), where age matters less than height, where the world may as well have ended and this is the museum that commemorates it all and you get a free voucher for the gift shop on your way in. Instead, *OVER* makes its focus observational: peoplewatching is the stated intent at the outset, and it's chock full of details that are simultaneously loving and filled with quiet despair.

Make the most of it, because these days will be remembered forever. I think this game really does succeed at feeling like a memorial to (one particular corner of) the human race. It's a liminal space, all the cracks in between one memory and the next for hours on end when all you really want to do is lie down. It's the experience of dissociation sitting out there in the sun on thousands of acres of land. It's arrested development. These are our lives, I guess, in purgatory: a little break before we return to our fates. It's over now.

Oh, wait, no, that was the end of day one.