*OVER*

Readers, a confession: I fear I was not a very fun child. Case in point, even when I was little I never much liked cotton candy. Sure, it looks pretty and it’s good enough on first bite. But there’s just so much of it, and every bite is exactly the same – the same unidimensional sweetness, the same airy-yet-claggy texture, with nothing to liven up the monotony of the march to the soggy cardboard at the end.

OVER is much more enjoyable than a stick of cotton candy, so this is an unfair simile with which to open this review. It’s got some characters who eventually grew on me, a nicely-granular look at the enervating logistics of a big family vacation, and entertaining period details. But I also found it way too long for what’s ultimately a simple story whose themes, characterizations, and gameplay don’t have much depth; at half the length, they wouldn’t wear out their welcome, but at over two hours, the candyfloss has time to turn to a gummy paste in the mouth.

Here’s the short version: a 19-person family goes on vacation to an unnamed theme park that is 100% Disneyworld, and over the course of five days, the two main characters – both queer women, one a 20-year old whose name the player supplies, the other a maybe-late-thirties aunt named Lou – come to grips with the ways they’ve allowed the demands of their big, homophobic family to push aside their need for autonomy and love, against a backdrop of low-key child-mediated mayhem and ubiquitous walkie-talkie use serving as a metaphor for garbled communication and the possibility of surprising connections. Everybody gets on each others’ nerves, everyone’s trying to convince themselves they’re having fun when there’s little authentic pleasure on offer, and just as Disneyland is a pleasant but generic façade over a grim capitalist reality, so too do the rituals of a loving family cloak disapproval, sharp elbows, and bigotry. Fortunately, both the 20-year-old and Lou happen across idealized love interests who offer an escape (though you can’t see how both of their stories resolve, since you have to choose just one to follow into the climactic sequence, which retroactively renders much of the slow buildup of the path not taken superfluous).

That’s not a bad story, but it’s not an especially complex or novel one to support a game that ran me well over two hours to get through. Characters are almost all slotted into a one-dimensional good vs. bad continuum, except for the children who are such non-entities they’re not even allowed names (this is a game with a lot to say about parenting and nothing to say about parenthood). There are a few small choices the player can make to affect the story, but they come infrequently and late – I mostly just remember them being of the form KISS LOVE INTEREST/DON’T KISS LOVE INTEREST. Instead, most of the gameplay consists of deciding which of the characters to follow for the next piece of narration, which always left me feeling like I was missing out on the full story (a feeling exacerbated by the game occasionally calling back to events that I hadn’t seen happen, or even been mentioned). And as for the plot, there’s not much that happens for the first three or so days of the five-day running time, besides the slow establishment of the character dynamics, low-key introductions to the love interests, and (in fairness) a kid puking on the awful grandma’s shoes – and things only pick up slightly in days four and five.

All that means that playing OVER can feel enervating, something the prose definitely contributes to – it’s wordy, and intentionally evades detail:

"The lines were long and dark, most line games were rendered inoperable, and tiredness made them all skirt around conversation. The kids talked about their plans for the coming days, which rides were high priority repeaters and which they barely felt the need to do once. The mom’s, Marian, and Lou talked about the weather, how poorly they had all packed, how nice it was to get away from home for a little while. Charlotte asked her mom about work, and they discussed some previously relayed story’s newest developments. Lou hadn’t heard that story, and didn’t feel like listening to a saga start to finish at the moment, so she asked Margot if she’d read any good books lately. It was a thing they had bonded over in the past, though their tastes weren’t similar, by any means, they both appreciated texts that were unusual, that you wouldn’t necessarily find on any of Oprah’s lists."

There’s a reason the author adopted this style, I suspect – with its busy-ness, its focus on logistics, and its monomaniacal fixation on form and allergy to substance, it clearly has some resonance with the Disneyworld experience it depicts. That same logic applies to OVER’s length, too – the brutality of long exposure to this place, and this family, is precisely what’s ground down Lou, and what the 20-year-old eventually comes to see as an existential threat. So subjecting the player to this very much furthers the work’s artistic aims. And it’s clear the author is writing from experience, and can include some wry or winsome detail when desired:

"A dramatic sobriety falls over her, so dramatic that it almost feels like she’s actually drunk, and she clenches her fists together tight enough to make crescent-moons in her palms with her fingernails, matching the sliver of moon in the sky."

It’s also the case that quantity can have a quality all its own, and by the end I did have some fondness for the sympathetic members of the cast. While Lou is a straightforward character not drawn with as much specificity as I’d have liked (I don’t need a ton of backstory, but there are a couple sentences towards the end that imply that she’s never actually been in a relationship, and if that’s true that should probably have been mentioned earlier), I still wish I’d been able to see how her story turned out, since after long exposure to her travails I couldn’t help but root for her. A fling with a hot, understanding bartender, which seemed to be where she was heading, won’t cure all ills but it certainly wouldn’t hurt, and it would have been a fun note to end on.

So there’s definitely enjoyment to be had in OVER, but it can’t overcome the fundamental mismatch of scope and richness: as the game itself argues, a week is way too long to spend in someplace as simple and cloying as Disneyworld, so better to make it a day trip or go to Rome instead.