Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide) would often daydream of visiting a tea shop in the woods and sitting on a bench by the water. After struggling with burnout following his previous two games, he wanted his next game to be a cozy game; a genre often renowned for its relaxation effects, hoping that this would help soothe his mind and recover from stress. Wreden, Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld (composer of Minecraft) and Karla Zimonja (co-creator of Gone Home and Tacoma) have joined forces to form Ivy Road, with the studio’s first game being Wanderstop, a cozy game built on the premise of Wreden’s daydream and recovery from burnout.
We play as Alta, an undefeated warrior who has devoted her life to becoming the best… until one day she isn’t. After suffering her first defeat in three years, Alta pushes herself harder and harder to do better with rigorous training, yet still facing defeat after defeat with no obvious reason as to why. Eventually, she decides to seek out Master Winters on the edge of the world in hopes that she can offer guidance on why Alta keeps losing fights despite her determination for perfection. On her journey, powering through the forest relentlessly, Alta finds herself growing tired, but pushes herself still. Until eventually, she cannot even lift her own sword and is forced to abandon it in the forest to continue her journey. Ultimately, she passes out.
Alta wakes up in a tea shop in the middle of the forest, owned by the optimistic Boro who suggests that Alta simply needs to rest. He proposes that she help him around the tea shop, serving customers and keeping the land tidy, until she has found her strength to pick up her sword again. But as Wreden found while developing Wanderstop, you cannot just make a couple of cups of tea in a forest and miraculously recover. Wanderstop is about recovering from burnout and having to put your life on hold due to the long term illness resulting from it.
As Alta struggles to adjust to this hellish landscape where she must put the tea in after the water and no one puts their cups in the dishwasher, she must also come to terms with her past lifestyle and unhealthy determination to learn how she got into her current state to begin with in order to heal and move on.
I do not like farming or management sims, so I was really keen to try out a game where the developer was trying this genre out for the first time too and also found these games to subvert their expectations. While most players of this genre enjoy it for the relaxation, I find its repetitive nature to do the complete opposite and these games often end up frustrating me. In fact, Alta’s hilariously blunt attitude towards farming sim tropes and its caricature NPCs really resonated with me and the majority of my enjoyment of Wanderstop came from following Alta as a character who I heavily related to. Her tone of voice is great and I was always presented with a dialogue option which I wished I could have said to customers back when I worked in a cafe myself.
Wanderstop’s gameplay loop consists of customers arriving at the tea shop with all manner of needs and problems. Sometimes they will have a specific order for us and sometimes they’re not sure what kind of tea they want but they do know what effects they want from it. Tea flavors are created from a mix of fruit which we can grow on the land surrounding the tea shop by planting ‘large hybrid’ plants consisting of different colored seeds planted in a specific order. Our handy gardening manual has a list of all the fruit available to us and its effects, but it’s up to us to work out what seed arrangement is required for each plant through trial and error.
The gameplay very much feels as though it’s designed so that the player is feeling as rested as Alta. There is no currency to generate, no time limits, there’s not even a penalty for getting the tea order wrong. The customer will simply either decline the drink and we’ll make them another, or sometimes they’ll accept what we’ve given them. My favorite NPC, Gerald, at one point asks us to make a tea including his son’s favorite jam. I forgot about the jam. But Gerald, always seeing the bright side, instead praised me for having such a unique take on following instructions. So if there’s no penalization for failure, where does the drive to continue playing Wanderstop come from?
Wanderstop is tremendously well-written. It’s hilarious, very much following on from The Stanley Parable in that case, albeit a different style of humor. A lot of it comes from the wacky NPCs and Boro’s ridiculously cheerful responses in juxtaposition to Alta’s more hardened view on life. In fact, the writing is so funny that I was going out of my way to read more of it; for the first time ever reading a manual in its entirety (why can’t furniture companies write their assembly instructions the same way as Wanderstop’s gardening beginner’s guide?) Lost parcels can also be found around the tea shop, which Boro says Alta can always keep, but he encourages her to return them to help people as what harm can it do? Upon returning these parcels, you will get some great responses from characters who actually desperately needed these items returned, including an ongoing series with a detective whose parcels we’ve returned happen to be vital missing evidence to some cold cases which even they have no idea how we found. But thanks to Alta’s kindness, innocent people are freed from jail. There’s also an ongoing series of book club novels which will come through the post following the ridiculous missions of private detective, Dirk Warhard, who cannot remember anyone’s name but his own and can shoot bullets really really quickly (as in he can somehow manipulate physics to make the bullet travel faster through the air rather than being able to pull a trigger quicker).
But Wanderstop also does an amazing job at covering its more heavy-hitting themes and I was genuinely moved by Alta’s journey. She goes from being a legendary fighter to not even being able to lift her sword in an instant and it’s heartbreaking to see her not understanding why as she’s pushed herself before and has “always been fine.” It’s even more upsetting to see people struggling to believe why she’s taken a break, suggesting that she’s doing so out of laziness. Her progress feels realistic, making a point that this isn’t just a case of taking a short pit stop and feeling better again after a cup of tea; Alta must come face to face with herself and the person she became to get to this point, with Boro acting as a brilliantly portrayed therapist in the process. He genuinely felt like a shoulder to cry on and I loved their scenes together.
Alta’s character development is also written into the gameplay loop. As well as serving customers tea, we can have Alta make herself a cuppa and sit on a bench, the effects of the tea creating a different monologue each time. Sometimes I did this to experiment with some of the funnier flavors I had discovered, such as one that has you remembering made up song titles, while others gave us deeper insight into her story and her outlook on certain topics. We can also serve Boro cups of tea, and he will offer similar monologues based on the flavor.
While most of the dialogue is presented through text, certain scenarios have voice acting for limited characters, with Alta being one of them, voiced by Kimberly Woods. Woods really brings Alta to life and absolutely nails the more emotional scenes, this is already one of my favorite performances of the year.
Of course, C418 has Wanderstop’s soundtrack covered and having composed one of the most iconic game soundtracks of all time (Minecraft), it’s unsurprising that he delivers again here. Wanderstop’s soundtrack is calming and moving when it needs to be, completely taking my breath away when partnered with Woods’ performance and the beautiful writing. Not only this, but it’s also really varied and you rarely hear the same soundtrack twice, making it perfect for the ritualistic gameplay where you would notice when a soundtrack is becoming annoyingly repetitive.
In terms of visuals, Wanderstop looks exactly how you would expect a cozy farming sim to look, with a gorgeously vibrant color palette and soft textures and character models. The environment does evolve over time and this was part of the enjoyment in progressing in the storyline to see how our surroundings will look as we move through each segment.
If I was to nitpick Wanderstop, I would say that it would help the gameplay a lot for the player to be able to pick up seeds accidentally planted in the wrong place. This is especially the case considering some seeds may have run out and can be hard to find again if the player doesn’t have a small hybrid ready to harvest more, so accidentally planting and wasting a seed can mean the player then has to spend more time looking for another.
But otherwise, I surprisingly enjoyed Wanderstop considering I usually dislike farming sims. In fact, the repetitive nature of farming sims didn’t bother me at all in this case as the in game chores didn’t feel so much of a chore to play as I was enjoying progressing the story to see how certain NPC’s stories unfolded and the next step in Alta’s recovery. Wanderstop was incredibly moving and held some deep messages behind learning to take care of yourself, even if it means changing our direction in life and, most of all, learning the value of boredom and the quietness it brings.
Jess reviewed Wanderstop on PC with a provided review copy.
