Yeah, that’s what everyone’s been waiting for, right? More Evermore posts. Longtime readers will be pleased to know that Threadbare posts are resuming tomorrow, it just so happens that my schedule freed up enough for real blog posts again just in time for a Friday post.
Fans of nitpicking will be pleased to know that Evermore is beginning to manifest some flaws, however. Three in particular. First, Evermore is sluggish. I mentioned last time that I’d just barely managed to get to the end of the hunter leg of their Halloween plot. I turned up today, showed Killian my hunter card (new actor on this one, I hope it’s because vital characters have different actors on different nights and not because they’re seeing actor turnover within the space of a single plot arc), and asked what to do next. She had nothing to give me. The plot dead ends there. I was okay with this during the soft open, but halfway through the entire arc the actual ending still isn’t available? The idea here seems to be that the plot advances week by week or maybe even day by day, and you have to come to Evermore very regularly to get each moment. But there’s not actually a whole lot more to do if you go multiple times, and people who visit early on during an arc and aren’t able to return until it’s over just never get to see how that arc finishes.
Evermore is also confused. The actors do not appear to be properly briefed on what the current plot is at all. I was receiving quest hooks for finding black stones to bring to Thurgood the alchemist (who I’m now confident actually is the dual-personality alchemist I met on preview night, but when I met him on other nights, he was played by a different actor – I don’t fault Evermore for this, retaining the same actor every night, six days a week, for every single role would very possibly run the actors into the ground). The problem is, that plot hook is no longer a thing. The Nettletons already have a supply of those black rocks, which they’re grinding up into little bottles of powder and distributing to anyone who asks about it to bring it to the witch Wyn Weaver (pronounced “when weaver,” I only know how to spell it because “Wyn Weaver’s cookies” show up on the food stand menus – they’re pretty good, too, but the hot chocolate is the real selling point when it comes to Evermore food).
Not only that, but apparently the Mother Nature/Mother Earth dichotomy is not a result of a divide between pre- and post-corruption, but instead everyone is just referring to her exclusively as Mother Nature, and reacted with bemused surprise at the notion that she was ever called Mother Earth. One of the off-duty actors even reacted with surprise that Mother Nature’s name was known to park guests at all, having apparently been told that it was being kept secret. This is what makes Evermore contrary. Not only do the actors not seem to be properly briefed on the current stage of the plot, they seem to be being given information that’s flat-out false. I met Mother Nature, identified by that name, during the soft open. That actor who was told she’s a secret wasn’t behind the current stage of the plot, they had been given information that was never true. I suspect there was an attempt to back up and hide Mother Nature’s identity (possibly why she switched to Mother Earth), which they later decided was infeasible so they walked it back. Certainly that would square with Mother Earth being reluctant to admit that she had previously been known as Mother Nature when I talked to her under that name during my first visit after the full opening, and then actors being unaware that she had ever had that name.
I did still buy tickets for Halloween, which will hopefully not be too horribly crowded. My last visit was on a Wednesday, and the more manageable crowds have reaffirmed my “don’t go on weekends” stance. Unfortunately, Wednesday and Saturday are the only evenings I have available, and next Wednesday is Samhain, which means I just have to hope that Evermore isn’t too crowded for the holiday.
There’s still a plot to wrap up here, even if it did advance hardly at all. Many side quests now give out little “gold” (actually pyrite, I’m pretty sure) nuggets, and if you hand enough of that gold into the acolytes, they’ll tell you that gold is magic and had something to do with the opening of the portals, and Wiccam and his assistant William can both tell you more. Wiccam’s not here, so William it is, but psyche, just kidding, William doesn’t know jack. Maybe Wiccam doesn’t either and the acolytes just weren’t informed that the next leg of the plot doesn’t exist yet. Hopefully my efforts to actually get to the end of the Evermore plot this Halloween won’t be thwarted by either heavy crowds or by the plot not actually existing.
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