*OVER*

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.