Wanderstop Review

Awkwardly straddling the line of commentary on and capitulation to the broader trends and concepts of the self-proclaimed ‘cozy’ genre, Wanderstop finds itself somewhat stuck. Following a series of emotionally devastating losses, world-renowned warrior Alta succumbs to a chronic bout of burnout and depression. Compulsion and habit propel her into a magical wood in search of a fabled warrior, but Alta soon finds herself ‘trapped’ in an idyllic grove, replete with a fully functional teashop and doting owner, Boro. Clocking Alta’s deteriorating mental health, Boro posits a new challenge; hang out. In his waning years, Boro gives Alta free rein over the tea shop and some basic gardening tools, emphasising just how little it matters when or how she accomplishes this new goal.

In this way, Wanderstop is fairly loudly declaring itself as an antithesis text to the average cozy experience. Replacing the constant churn of tasks and rewards found in the genre with a total lack of schedule and active ruminations on the nature of labour as it relates to personal satisfaction is a radical position to put the player in. Penned by Davey Wreden, Wanderstop establishes itself early as a balm to the creeping existential dread buried inside these seemingly quaint simulations. There’s admirable intentionality to it, but Wanderstop struggles with arch thematic work and tired motifs while feeling withheld by the mechanical loops of the genre, unevenly implemented and with a grating sense of chagrin.

Perfect pour

Alta’s day-to-day will see her pottering around the garden, planting fruit trees, gathering tea leaves and generally maintaining the space between short brewing sessions at Boro’s Wonka-esque, room-sized kettle. The garden operates on a hexagonal grid system, different plants sprouting forth based on how you align combinations of seeds and fauna, while leaves need to be dried before eventually all of your green thumb efforts are distilled into a petite cup of soothing tea.

Wanderstop’s core loop is indistinguishable from the genre, consigning the player to reflect on the potential folly of such chores while uncritically requiring them to progress the narrative. There are concessions; roaming customers will arrive periodically at the shop and make requests for tea, some of which can be outright ignored in favour of whatever tea you feel like making, but later stages restrict this freedom and lock the player into a familiar supply and demand loop. Elsewhere you can snap photos for the walls of the shop, read some genuinely delightful paperbacks, or simply make a cuppa and plop down to contemplate Alta’s journey.

Wanderstop is evidently pondering the innate reward/satisfaction mechanism built into the genre, explicitly reminding you that the mere act of wholesome fussing about isn’t enough to heal the soul. But instead of the genre bending to the game’s vision, Wanderstop eventually begins to orbit the exact tensions it seeks to comment on. The titular Wanderstop and its customers will endlessly prod at you, the quirky sound effects accompanying requests, speech, and daily chores an eventual Pavlovian trigger to let you know that your downtime isn’t ever really yours. Systems are also littered with mechanical frustrations (Alta’s inability to easily pick things up is borderline diabolical), to the point where I began to wonder if the mounting strain I felt with the game was the genre commentary.

Makes you think

To reach that far for meaning in Wanderstop is perhaps the most damning critique I could level at it. Wreden’s work is totemic, the praise often laureled on the inventive comedic work of The Stanley Parable, but it’s the emotional density of The Beginner’s Guide that solidifies his importance to the medium. A bracingly earnest mirror held to the ways we often insert ourselves into the lives of an artist, or even other people, The Beginner’s Guide is as prescient today as it was when it first released a decade ago. This body of work inevitably casts a long and deep shadow though, Wreden is not shy about the burnout he felt around development leading into Wanderstop, and the weight of expectation on art is burdensome and often unfair. Likewise, it is impossible to fully detangle the importance of his previous works from his next, and it’s here that Wanderstop cools beyond lukewarm for me.

There’s a seemingly widely held opinion that Wreden’s work (and that of his Wanderstop collaborators Karla Zimonja of the excellent Gone Home and Bioshock 2 DLC Minerva’s Den and C418 of Minecraft fame) is defined by a twist. A catastrophic byproduct of audiences learning the word ‘subversion’, the keen-eyed search for the hidden meaning in Wreden’s work is, to my mind, both unengaged with the texts as they are and borderline parasocially unhealthy, as seen in the fallout from The Beginner’s Guide. To this end, criticism of Wanderstop is likely to be met with accusations of players bringing too much of this expectation into the experience, looking too closely for the subversive element. But Wanderstop isn’t unsatisfying for its straightforward take on its premise so much as how little depth it attempts to extract in the process.

Alta’s struggles with societal and personal mental health issues are not unwelcome, especially in this space, but neither are they particularly insightful. There are nuances peppered throughout, and Boro’s kindness in the face of deep self-loathing and the work required to even face that pit is consistently pleasant. But Wanderstop never ventures beyond that pleasantness, relegating Wreden’s historically pointed pen to the digestible, blunted edge of a well-meaning Pixar production. Flowers will be given for the game’s platitudes about needing to slow down in life, screenshots shared of its affable capitalist jokes, and Wanderstop will be largely forgotten in a year’s time.

You’re hearing this more and more

I keep returning to the possibility that these contradictory narrative intentions and frustrating systems are sincerely the point, Wanderstop a scathing experiment in just how far players will go in the name of formless art direction pastels and Instagram-ready commentary. But the game is neither insightful enough to warrant such an experience nor mechanically satisfying enough to enjoy as a subversive take on the pacing of a cozy, small business title, let alone for ten or so hours. For all of its issues as a genre, cozy games are typically remarkably well tuned for play, and at the best of times capable of extracting societal commentary in harmony with rewarding, player-driven pacing (Stardew Valley remains undefeated). Taken as an earnest attempt to use the language of a genre to comment on it, Wanderstop is only ever able to achieve a distressing palatability within the space, its lessons out of sync with its systems to such a degree that a short essay and a cup of English Breakfast could get the job done much cleaner. 

Final Thoughts

Toward the end of Wanderstop, a rather brash character returns to the grove and asks Alta for a uniquely annoying cup of tea. This moment follows several narrative revelations, Alta and Boro having reached a point where they at least understand not everything can be fixed with a cup of tea but it might be worth still trying anyway. Alta, barely coping with this new way of life, asks Boro what she should do in these final days at the Wanderstop, to which he characteristically replies whatever she feels like; the point of this moment in time being that there is often no should do, simply what you wish to do for yourself.

Looking over the extensive ingredients required for that last cup of tea, I finally took Boro’s words to heart. Wanderstop had achieved its lofty goals in perhaps the most abstracted way possible as I simply put the controller down and called my partner to listen to inane details about his day while the game uninstalled and I moved on with my life.

I’d tell you I made a cuppa too, but that would be a lie.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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