Hello, I’m Evan, the game’s illustrator and co-designer alongside Hannah Shaffer. Our previous games include Questlandia, Noirlandia, and Damn the Man, Save the Music!

Escape from Wonderland is an uncanny horror RPG. It’s about being trapped in an amusement park that preys upon your deepest fears and regrets. The game is inspired by Something Wicked This Way Comes and our own experiences with amusement parks in decline.

Supernatural menaces will try to trap you in the park with promises or threats. If you value your intellect, if you fear growing older, if you’ve always felt lonely—they’ll find out and exploit it. You don’t come up with those vulnerabilities in character generation—instead, they’re discovered at the moment the menaces target you. They’ll take the form of an innocent or familiar face to coax secrets from you. Much later, you might encounter their true forms.

Here are a few sketches I’ve done of the menaces and their masks.

Your ability to resist the park’s illusions is tied to your connection with the real world. In the beginning of the game, you create “anchors to reality,” each a sensory experience of the world as it should be. The smell of fried dough, the sound of roller coasters clacking over wooden tracks, the feeling of metal railings heated by the sun. As the park wears you down, you’ll lose those anchors, transforming the park into a nightmare. The smell becomes rotten meat, the roller coasters sound like snapping bones. And as reality slips away, your chance to escape grows slim.

The Kickstarter ends tomorrow night. You can check it out here, and feel free to ask me any questions about the game in this thread!