Hello friends! If this is the first video you're seeing on my channel: Hi!
I'm Ginny Di. I do cosplay and music and other various geeky things.
And today I want to talk to you about a place called Evermore Park, which I just went to for
the first time last weekend.
If you look up Evermore Park on Google, you will see it described as a theme park.
If you go to the Evermore Park website, you will
see it described as an "experience park," a "world of play," "step through the portal,"
"become the hero," that kind of language. So needless to say, when my friends invited
me to go with them this past weekend I really didn't know what to expect.
Was it gonna be like a Renaissance Festival? Was it gonna be like a LARP? Was it gonna be
like Westworld without robots? I just didn't know.
So in this video my goal is just to tell you a little bit about my experience
there and just help you understand what exactly Evermore is and whether or not
you should go and if you do go, how to get the most out of your experience.
So first let's talk about the basics of Evermore. It is located in Pleasant Grove
Utah, which is just about 40 minutes south of Salt Lake City. From Denver
where I live, it was a little over a seven hour drive. Their hours are kind of
wacky — they are only open Friday, Saturday, and Monday. The Monday hours are 6:00 to
10:00 and the Friday and Saturday hours are 6:00 to 11:00. We went on a Saturday,
so we showed up right when it opened at 6:00 and we stayed all the way up until
it closed. Adult ticket prices, depending on the date and the experience, range
from twenty to thirty dollars, so pretty comparable to your local Renaissance
Festival or at least comparable to mine. The experience that we got to play was
called Mythos, which is their summer experience. It's sort of like a festival
of magic and fairies kind of plotline. In the fall they switch over to a darker
more horror-oriented plot line called Lore, and then in the winter they do
something called Aurora that's sort of like a Victorian Dickensian feel.
On the website they encourage you to wear costumes, and since my fiancé and I were
going with other cosplayers, of course we took that seriously. Whenever you go
somewhere in costume there's always the risk that you'll be the only one that
did that and you'll feel weird, but I would estimate that about 60% of the
people there were in some form of costume. So we showed up about 15 minutes
before the park opened and there were already lines of people outside
waiting to get in. While we were waiting in line, a man with a tiny horse came up
to us and explained to us the basics of how the quest system works in Evermore.
He told us that as first timers, step one was to pick up our level one adventure
card. When you first come to Evermore, you start out as a level one apprentice and
then as you complete quests throughout the season, you can level up through the
six available levels. The first quest required us to: meet with a member from
each of the four guilds and learn of their attributes, watch a production by
the roving acting troupe to learn of Evermore's history, and earn one piece of
gold from an Evermore character. We were also given a map of Evermore, which to be
honest we barely used because the park is basically a big circle, so it's very
easy to navigate. Plus the cast is super helpful and they are everywhere, so
every time we had a question about something, there was someone to answer it.
One weak point of this first quest is just that since most of the people coming into the
park were there for the first time, a lot of people were crowding around
specific characters getting the information they needed to complete this
first task. During the first hour-ish when we completed this first level, it
definitely did feel like everywhere we went there were a dozen people already
there doing exactly the same thing as us, which is a little unfortunate. But this
first quest functions as sort of a tutorial to learn how to navigate
Evermore and interact with the characters. Once we got past it, things
got a lot more interesting and a lot more unique to our party. Also I have to
say that this "watch a production by the roving acting troupe about Evermore's
history" task really sounded like it was going to be super boring, so we put it
off until the end, but actually the Evermore history act was just like a
really funny improv sketch. And of course the final task was to earn gold from an
Evermore character. Pretty much every character you spoke to, if you asked them
about it, would have a task that you could complete to earn one piece of gold
from them, which are these little spray-painted rocks. At first I was like
"wow, the gold could be cooler" and then I realized that there's really no way for
them to collect the gold back, and even if they were doing that, people would
probably steal it if it was like interesting coins. And these are easy to
fit in your pocket. So for example, we asked this kind of shady merchant if
there was anything we could do to earn gold from him, and he sent us with a
coded message to go talk to one of the pirates. We talked to the pirates, we got
information about a sort of a black-market shipment that the merchant was
receiving, we ferried that information back, and he paid us. And not all of them
are errands — the dwarves gave us each gold for telling them a joke. There are
certain things you have to use gold for in Evermore Park, but to be honest, there
aren't many. You can't buy concessions or merchandise with gold, you have to use
real money for those. The gold is only used for plot-relevant things. For
instance, when you decide to join a guild, you have to pay five gold into the guild
for your membership. At one point a character made a wager with us and we
bet four gold on it. It's more of a plot point than anything else.
Once we completed our first quest, we took it to the Kettle Café up front,
got it all approved, and officially became level two mentors. It did cost us
two dollars to get the next set of three quest cards, and unfortunately they're
not equipped to take cash, so that was a little inconvenient. But they're pretty
neat little cards, so I understand why they don't want to just hand them out to
everybody that goes in, especially when the cost of entry is pretty darn low.
Each of these quest cards is worth one level; they don't need to be completed in
any sort of order. In the remaining four-ish hours we had in the park, we were
able to complete all three of these quest cards, leaving us as level four
paladins. When we went back to the Kettle Café, they let us know that they didn't
actually have any more quest cards printed and available yet. This is just
one of a few indicators that the park is still pretty new — it's under a year old –
and they're still finding their feet on some stuff. However, it didn't impact our
enjoyment at all because there was so much more going on in the park than just
the quests. In fact, by the time we'd completed these three quests, I think we
were much more interested in engaging with the characters and trying to solve
some of the story mysteries than we were in leveling up at all. Speaking of the
characters, the actors who are employed by Evermore are 100% the highlight of
the park. Having worked at a Renaissance Festival, I'm very familiar with how
mediocre, underpaid hobby actors perform in improv roles... and that was not what
was happening here. Every single actor we met had an absolutely impeccable accent
and a huge variety of them — there were Irish people and Scottish people and
British people, people with cockney accents, none of them, I assume, real,
considering this was Pleasant Grove, Utah. And all of the actors just completely
inhabit their roles. At one point we ran into this guy Faldo who was wearing
this top hat that had these candles on top of it that were just melting down
over the edges of the top hat, and he had these crazy piercing blue contacts and
talking to this guy was seriously unsettling. The vibe I got was like
"stumbled into a fairy ring and came out 100 years later not quite the same."
Our conversation with him laid the groundwork for this whole storyline of
the fairy king being sick with some sort of failed blood magic attempt thing and
And I think it's important to point out that although a lot of what the characters
were saying to us was clearly things that they were supposed to say to guide
us down certain plot lines, none of the interactions felt scripted, and if you
pushed the actors past the basic things that they were supposed to say to you,
they didn't falter at all. They were completely ready to have a 30-minute
conversation with you in character. There was a race for mayor of Evermore that
was happening while we were there, which we could cast a vote for, and one of the
people who was running was a guy named Suds who worked at the tavern. When we
went to the tavern and talked to him about the mayoral race, we literally had
a 20-, 25-minute conversation with him about mayoral policy. He was able to give
us really specific information about what kind of mayor he would be and why.
And it really didn't sound like he was pulling it out of his butt! There's also
a merchant who was kind of like "born again" and had like decided that being a
black market dealer was bad, and that he should be a better person. He told us a
little bit when we first met him about his change of heart, and then a few hours
later when we came back by for something else, he was like sitting on a bench with
a few guests having an in-depth conversation about morality. Like, they
were just straight-up discussing the trolley problem there, in character.
I think the coolest part about it is that you can take whatever you want to take
away from this experience. Like if you want to be a quest person and you just
want to level up, you can dedicate all of your energies towards completing quests
and leveling up through those main tiers. And if you exhaust that like we kind of
did in this first visit, you can join a guild and then you can level up within
each guild. If you'd rather just have an experience more like kind of a Ren Faire
visit, you can throw axes and do archery, there's a reptile show that you can go
see, and during Mythos they have this thing called the Dwarf Games where every
hour there's sort of like a big carnival game that happens on the main lawn in
the middle. And if you're more interested in the roleplay and the story, you can
treat it almost more like an escape room experience where you're trying to track
down the answer to a mystery. There were at least three ongoing plot lines that
we touched on while we were there. There was the sick fairy king where no one
knew what he was sick with or how it could be fixed, someone named Violet had
had her farm burned down a few weeks back, so there was a mystery over who had
done that, and then of course there was the race for
mayor, which included a lot of different characters where you could look into
those characters and see if you thought they were good people or bad people, and
deserved to be mayor. And then on top of that there were tiny little threads
connecting every character to each other. Like the merchant that had a connection
to the pirate that was smuggling goods for him, but there were also characters
who were in love with each other and having us deliver little gifts to show
their favor. There were rivalries between guilds and
alliances between guilds. The more that we talked to the characters, the more I felt
like there was sort of a bottomless pit of plot that we could explore if we
chose to do so and if we had the time. Now, maybe we experienced most of
everything, maybe there wasn't much more depth than what we explored. But the fact
that I feel like there could have been is testament to just the illusion of
completeness that Evermore delivers. You very much feel like you are stepping
into an ongoing story where you could never experience all of it. The further
we got into the night and the longer we were there, the more often it happened
where we would overhear part of another attendee's conversation with a character
and we would just have no idea what they were talking about. Like, they were trying
to complete some quest we hadn't even heard of, or they were asking questions
about a character we hadn't even met. We were pretty tired by the time the park
closed because we'd been on our feet for five hours, but I definitely feel like if
we had gone Friday and then also Saturday, we still wouldn't have run out
of things to do. Of course, as a cosplayer, I would be remiss if I didn't compliment
the costumes and even just the ambience and decor of the place. When we showed up
we were a little confused because it's kind of in the middle of like... office
buildings and shopping centers and stuff. But the park itself is pretty big and
once you're inside it, there's definitely a sense of immersion even though you can
occasionally see building tops over the trees. All of the buildings in Evermore
were specifically built for the park and all of them are these beautiful
stonework, thatched roof, historical, medieval-looking buildings. The interior
decor is amazing, just tons of detail. There's ambient music which I read was
written for Evermore, so it's a full original soundtrack. Once it gets dark,
the park is lit in these really beautiful, very magical-feeling ways. And
then dotted all over the park are these gorgeous, intricate, massive statues. And
they were custom sculpted for Evermore! There's a little graveyard that feels
very solemn, there's like a pretty little bridge, there's water features.
There is quite a bit of construction happening in the park still. Evermore has said that
they have completed phase one of construction, but that there's more that
needs to be done, and you can definitely see that when you're in the park. There
are a few buildings you walk by where you're like "that is in process!" But
honestly, if you can just manage to look past one or two buildings that are still
under construction, there's more than enough places to go and enough places to be.
All that seeing the construction really did for me was just make me
excited to come back when the construction was completed. I would
estimate that maybe 15 to 20 percent of the park was under construction, and it's
all marked on the map, so it's not like you're not gonna know what's in progress.
And the park is big, so there's still plenty of places to go and things to do.
All of the prosthetics and like the monster kind of props are all made
in-house for Evermore — so when you meet a goblin and they have like a crazy face
and like a hooked nose and stuff, all those prosthetics are made specifically
for Evermore. And if you go upstairs in this one
building to where the historian sits next to a giant sleeping dragon, they
made that dragon for this park. A few other things I want to note about the
park: They do offer food abd concessions. They were shockingly reasonably priced.
At a place like that I would expect to pay like five or six dollars for a
lemonade, because that's just what you do when you have a captive audience, but I
think their lemonade was like two or three dollars there. We ate dinner before
we came there and to be honest, I think that would be a good idea, because they
did end up being sold out of quite a few things by the end of the night. I would
rely on the concessions as snacks rather than as meals. They do have a full menu
and price list on their website, so you can certainly prepare before you go there.
So should you go to Evermore? In my opinion yes, absolutely. If you can make
it out to Utah, you should definitely give it a try. It is so ridiculously
affordable that unless travel is like very difficult or expensive for you, you
have practically nothing to lose. Having been there, if I were to run
Evermore, I would charge people $45 to get in the door. And as an attendee, I would pay that.
Instead, we paid $22 a head, which is like only a few dollars more than a
movie ticket. Overall, and take this with a grain of salt because I haven't done
any LARP yet, but from what I have seen of LARP — which is live-action roleplay —
this is basically LARP Lite. It's designed to be immersive, and you
can choose how much of yourself and how much of a character you bring to the
experience. If you go, I would recommend that you attend both Friday and Saturday.
I would recommend bringing a costume and being a character. For us, we just took on
the names of our D&D characters and wore some sort of generic medieval-ish garb.
I really feel like taking your entire D&D group there in costume as their
characters would be like the ultimate experience!
Evermore really blew me away because a lot of the things it's doing, it's doing
to the quality level of a place like Universal or Disney, but it obviously
doesn't have that kind of money behind it. Instead, you can just tell that it's
being created and staffed by people who just really care about what they're
doing. I admit that I have my concerns about how sustainable this kind of park
is. When we were there, there were maybe 300 people throughout the whole night,
and they have a pretty big cast — like I'd estimate maybe 50 on the cast and crew.
I don't want to be a pessimist and I want to believe that places like Evermore can
be successful and can survive, but I also recognize having been there that a lot
of money and a lot of energy has to go into maintaining a park like that. So I
guess what I'm trying to say is: You should go to it, not just because you
should experience it, but also because we should support things like this. This is
a fraction of the cost of a trip to Disney World or a trip to Wizarding
World of Harry Potter. And yeah, it's a different experience than parks like
that, but they're doing something so cool and so unique and so interactive, I just
would so much rather my money go into their pockets then into the vast
coffers of Disney. Hopefully this was informative! I will put links to more
information about Evermore in the description. This isn't a sponsored video
or anything, they didn't pay me to come out and check out the park or
anything, I just went and I had a great time and I got a lot of questions about
it on Twitter and I wanted to share it with you. Make sure to subscribe if
you enjoy content like this! I am going to be doing my first LARP this fall. I am
going to Beinspora, which is a wizard school LARP. I hope I'm pronouncing that
right, I've only seen it written! I will link to that in the description too, in
case you want to buy a ticket to that and come be a wizard school student with
me. And I'll have videos about that up on my YouTube as it gets closer.
Josh: Ginny! Are you ready? Ginny: Yes!
No crown... it'll be in my way!
Oh!
Josh: You got this!
Nope!
Not my forte. I'm more of a bardic type.
type