Whatever Happened To ‘Evermore Park’? (A NoPro Field Trip)
The Utah immersive park held out the dream of a next-gen theme park. It still stands, but is it a dream deferred?
Evermore Park is one of the most beautifully designed fantasy spaces I’ve ever seen. Seriously, some of the buildings in Evermore give Disneyland a run for its money.
This is no surprise, given park owner Ken Bretschneider’s dedication to bringing his epic vision to life. Bretschneider spent $37 million creating Evermore and he did not skimp on production value.
“We brought on Disney Imagineers, people from Universal Studios, artists from the Hollywood effects industry and tons of people from the local market,”[1] Bretschneider told Utah’s Daily Herald back when the park first opened in 2018.
Today, Evermore exists as a testament to great physical design. Pathways wind around charming cottages, leading you farther into what feels like another world. Lantern light spills out of a lovely tavern’s windows, drawing you towards a lively, chattering crowd. Inside, there are plenty of benches for weary travelers — and quests for those brave enough to approach the Blackheart seated at the bar. Next door, a dwarves’ warren is filled to bursting with family photos and bric-a-brac. It feels lived in, sturdy, and beautifully built. Outside, wind whistles through a mausoleum’s eerie eaves, and mysterious purple mist curls around stone corners. These spaces are magical. Unlike parks where most designed spaces exist to support rides, Evermore has created spaces that exist to support stories.
Theoretically, at least. When I first heard about Evermore a few years ago, it sounded too good to be true. It was billed as an immersive, real-life Dungeons & Dragons game. People could step out of their everyday lives and into a quest to save the realm of Evermore. It wouldn’t be easy — guests would have to follow a story that could only be discovered by mixing with dwarves and fairies, pirates and wizards — but that was part of the appeal. This was a park for adventurers! Stories were meant to change with the season, which meant that guests could come back, again and again, to experience magic a little differently each time. To me, it sounded like heaven.
I’d wanted to go to Evermore since the park opened. This June, I joined a handful of immersive theatre nerds in a cross-country road trip that ended in Salt Lake City, Utah. We spent nine days hitting up immersive pop-ups, shows, and experiences between LA and SLC. Evermore was definitely on our list. I can’t fully explain how excited my group was when we pulled into Evermore’s parking lot. We tumbled out of the car in a mess of capes and crowns, heroes ready to save the realm. What we found, unfortunately, was a realm that needed a different kind of savior.
Evermore feels like it was designed for die-hard fantasy-chasers then abandoned halfway through construction before getting re-staffed by teens and marketed to tourists. Walking through Evermore’s gates is like stepping into a half-written fantasy novel — most of the park is beautifully finished and rich in detail, but the parts that aren’t finished are hard to ignore. Half-built plywood structures line the park’s outer edges. An inflatable dragon acts as a placeholder for something that was clearly meant to be much, much larger. Vendors sell hot dogs and pretzels. This is not the “experiential food” promised in early interviews.
Additionally, the park seems understaffed. The actors who were on during my visit were wonderful. They clearly cared about creating a magical space, and that passion shone through each improvised interaction. There were a handful of vendors and activity booths in Evermore’s town square. Shows included aerial silks and something educational with an owl named Łyżka, but ambient actors were few and far between. This made interacting with characters a challenge. If you wanted to talk with a Blackheart (who I think are magical bounty hunters? I didn’t get much out of the shady fellow I spoke with at the bar, so take that with a grain of salt) about a quest, you’d have to wait in a makeshift queue until it was your turn. This created bottlenecks throughout the park, short-changing what could have been the most exciting interactive elements of Evermore’s world.
Uneven design and execution made it obvious that Bretschneider’s dream had stalled out somewhere along the way. A staff member who wishes to remain nameless told me that “most of the staff was fired last year” and that “contractors aren’t getting paid, so they’re walking off the job.” Some very light digging confirms that the park is, in fact, in financial trouble.[2] As of June 2020, Bretschneider is facing at least five lawsuits alleging non-payment of contracts. This has obviously put a kink in the park’s construction plans. The same staff member I spoke with earlier says that “there are at least four buyers interested in Evermore,” though, so we’ll have to wait and see what’s in store for the park’s future.
My visit to Evermore was less like entering an epic fantasy world and more like spending an afternoon in a fairyland play-park with a few lovely characters and little-to-no coherent narrative. Quests were barely disguised scavenger hunts, and — while I appreciated the delineation between children’s and adult quests — very little of the experience felt aimed at adults. The exception, of course, was Vanders Keep. This hidden jewel is well worth the (admittedly reasonable) price of admission. My group ended our evening cozied up to the restaurant’s beautifully designed bar, chatting with the Keep’s resident mixologist, Aaron. He and his fellow barkeepers are full of stories and songs, if you catch them when things aren’t too busy.
My group ended our adventure a little before midnight. I left Evermore happy, but wistful. I hadn’t found the adventure I had hoped for, but I had gotten a chance to explore beautiful grounds and dream about what might come next. I remain hopeful that the fantasy world so beautifully laid out in concept art displayed throughout the park will be brought to life someday, but that day’s not here yet.
Evermore Park’s summer season, MYTHOS, concluded on August 7. Tickets were $15 for adults, $12 for children, with free admission for those under 5.
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[2] https://www.utahbusiness.com/evermore-park-faces-financial-ruin/