I have long been an advocate of the recent rise of games without combat. There are so many interesting ways to create the push and pull, the challenge, the intense moments that are going to stick with us forever beyond fighting. My favorite game of all time, Death Stranding, is an entire open world action game that does everything in its power to convince you not to fight, and a game which has many surface level similarities to this one. Caravan SandWitch is the latest addition to this much needed subgenre, but unfortunately it fails to replace the idea of combat in this beautiful open world with any interesting gameplay at all.
You take control of Sauge, a young woman on the hunt for her missing sister Garrance, who many believe died years ago in a crash. She has received a message from the emergency box in her sister’s ship, which shouldn’t be possible. Unless… she’s somehow alive on the dying planet? Sauge opens up her Toaster message from her fathers begging her not to go, collects a ticket for the space train, and boards it to the planet below. Upon landing, she’s greeted by some old friends from years ago in this village that seems to be a post-apocalyptic version of the South of France, including some frog people called Reinetos, as well as some people who are quite angry with her. You’ll come into possession of a barely functioning van from an old lady named Rose to aid with your quest, and then the game opens up for you to explore.
Caravan SandWitch as a concept is immediately confusing, and it does not become any less confusing over the next 10 hours of playtime. The world is so strange that when you begin, you have no concept of what you’re meant to understand and what is meant to be explained later. What is Space City? Does everyone in the universe live there? Are the people trapped on this dying planet there by choice or because they can’t afford to leave? If so, why did Garrance leave? Why do the people who hate Sauge at the beginning hate her? The Robot race hates humans, but do they hate the frog people? What is the poison infecting the land? Why are there anthropomorphic frog people? What is their relationship to the humans? What is Toaster, is it a social network or is it the entire concept of the internet? How did the world end? All of these questions entered my mind in the first hour of the game, and all are answered either not at all or about five hours after I needed the information to understand the story.
I cannot describe the story of Caravan SandWitch as anything other than poorly written and structured. Before spotting the titular SandWitch in the desert, there isn’t really anything at all interesting about the world presented here. I’ll give a bit of leeway to the developers about the dialogue, as it is a French studio, and this script was written in French and then translated to English. Either it lost a lot of personality and spark in translation, or there was never any there to begin with. Dialogue is dull and lifeless, and every single character I met was forgettable just seconds after I finished talking to them. With the characters and narrative being the driving force of the game, this is a pretty serious shortcoming. There is, of course, the mystery of the titular Caravan SandWitch, a mysterious figure who appears sometimes in the desert and disappears just as quickly. It’s so obvious and apparent who this SandWitch is from the beginning that the mystery totally falls flat, and so the last vestige of narrative force is gone.
The gameplay is essentially a collectathon of different color microchips laying about the open world with different rarities. From most common to most rare, there are green, red, yellow, and purple chips that must be found to upgrade your van to explore more ruins by adding a grappling hook, scanning tool, pulley, and more. So, that’s mostly the game. Drive around in a car that is impossible to control properly in a gorgeous open world, break the signal jammers to restore the internet (or Toaster? I don’t know), and stop the car every 20 seconds to hop out, walk slowly to collect microchips, and then drive again. It is an unbelievably boring gameplay loop.
Another huge gripe I had is that when you’re in an area that is not yet connected to the Toaster internet because of a signal jammer, you cannot view your current quests. I understand blocking the map, but there were so many times that I was in one of these areas and didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, and so I had to get in my van and drive a few minutes to check my quest, turn around, and drive back. The game also consistently yanks you into a boring blue virtual simulation to practice using new tools… why not just guide me on how to use them in the real open world you already made? There also aren’t really puzzles in the ruins, it’s just something you return to once you have the right device. There’s no thinking involved. Caravan SandWitch is just one strange design decision after another, and all of them are bad.
There are of course side quests, and that’s going to be the primary way to get the needed chips to upgrade your van. However, most of the side quests are also “drive around the map and collect things and bring them to me.” Actually, that is all of them. And sometimes, an NPC will ask you to bring them 10 sandwiches and 10 wild flowers and 10 jars of jam, and you’re expected to just drive around until you find all that lying on the ground. Or perhaps when I was told to hunt down escaped tadpoles and feed them a specific mushroom to convince them to come home, and they’re just flopping around the map. Every side quest in this game is bad and aggravating, and the NPCs, whether frog or human, are just as frustrating.
Caravan SandWitch‘s primary strength is in its cell-shaded art and gorgeous animation. I would kill to have this art style, lighting, character designs, and animation used this way in a better video game. Reminiscent simultaneously of The Legend of Zelda and Journey, it’s some of my favorite visuals of the year. I took dozens of photos of the horizon because I wanted to share the unreal landscapes with my friends. The music is alright as well, but I didn’t find it notable or newsworthy. The characters all look great and distinct, though they do not have personality to match the physical designs. The worst of it is truly that the gameplay is so unengaging I felt as if I were about to fall asleep half the time. The story was one of the least interesting I’ve ever been presented with, mostly because the game does literally zero world-building before throwing you into detailed exposition. I felt as if I were playing the 9th game in a decades-long series like Zelda where I’m expected to know roughly how the world works before going in, and it prevented me from understanding anything that was happening or applying narrative weight to anything that happened.
Despite all this Caravan SandWitch so clearly has heart behind it. The developers obviously put everything they had into what I think was a poor design document from the start, and I think this idea of an open world to explore without combat can and has been done. I get the intent. It’s also a love letter to their home of Provence in France, which I think is very lovely, and I see the drive to celebrate their culture here. Other than the visuals, however, I can’t really praise anything about Caravan SandWitch. It doesn’t really even work as a game to play while listening to podcasts or watching TV because the driving mechanics are so bad and moving around the world just doesn’t feel good. I love how inclusive the character roster is for LGBTQ+ folks of all kinds, but every single one of them is just so freaking boring. I want to believe there is something for someone here, but I have found not an ounce of fun in Caravan SandWitch, and I’m not sure anyone else will either.
Nirav reviewed Caravan SandWitch with a review code.
