Wanderstop is a game of patience and challenge. Patience, because it gives you plenty of downtime and encourages you to follow your own path, even if that means doing nothing. Challenge comes from a narrative that invites you to look inward, accepting that it’s okay to allow yourself a moment to breathe in order to nurture your own wellbeing. The question is how well does Wanderstop do this? And well, it does both to varying levels of success.
Are we defined by our mistakes?
The central premise of Wanderstop revolves around the pressures of modern life and how we often forget to allow ourselves the smaller moments, moments to rest and enjoy the world around us instead of forever pushing ourselves to greater heights.
In Wanderstop you play as Alta, a professional fighter who has wrapped up her whole identity in her prowess as a fighter, her desire to remain undefeated and prove to herself, and the world, that she is the best. But for Alta, time has caught up with her and after suffering a harsh defeat in the arena, she embarks on a quest to seek the legendary Master Winters and train to once again be the greatest.
This is where the game picks up, with Alta running through the forest in search of Master Winters, but as she journeys she finds herself growing increasingly tired, her sword increasingly heavy until she passes out and awakes at the Wanderstop.
Wanderstop’s narrative is a relatable one, the pressure that Alta puts on herself is something that many find themselves doing, I know I certainly have at times. Alta’s frustration is internalized, causing her to initially be angry and closed off with everyone you meet. She sees herself as a failure and is convinced that if she keeps working, keeps pushing herself harder and harder, then everything will just fix itself. The game disagrees with that philosophy.
The early premise of the narrative had me keeping in mind a quote from Star Trek’s Captain Picard that I often remind myself of when life feels a bit tough and things seem to be going wrong, one that I felt quite nicely summed up the game’s opening statement: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”
At the Wanderstop, the shop’s owner, Boro, encourages Alta, and by extension the player, to embrace the opportunity provided to her to slow down, take a moment for herself, and rest. He invites her to make use of the clearing around the Wanderstop how she wishes and offers to teach her the art of making tea if she chooses to.
From here on out you are left to your own devices to explore, serve tea to the other patrons that wander through, and progress the story at your own pace. Without giving away too much about the narrative, and spoiling the journey, Wanderstop’s story examines the the way we deal with not only the perceived mistakes and failures in our lives, but a range of common struggles and through Alta, explores how we come to terms with our inner demons and grow as a person.
It’s certainly a strong message and the narrative is absolutely the game’s main strength but that’s not to say the narrative is perfect. I found myself truly engrossed in Alta and her development throughout the game, but the same can’t be said for the side characters. These characters are often presented as representations of different struggles and through conversations and making them tea, they somewhat help guide Alta through her own journey of self discovery. The couple of characters that do this successfully, do it exceptionally so and are stand-out moments in Alta’s journey, but the majority of them are little more than jokes about situations and lifestyles whose stories either fizzle out and go nowhere, or who are ultimately just busy work.
While overall the narrative is one that I found to be powerful and poignant, it is in many instances overkill. Its message is simple and explicit but it’s often forced, and forced in a way that ends up detracting from the message itself. Sometimes a message needs to be on the nose but Wanderstop often crosses into pushing the message too hard and too frequently, something that might have been less of an issue if the cozy elements of the game were strong enough to support that message.
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Wanderstop’s gameplay is unfortunately its weakest element. The main gameplay loop centers around fulfilling tea requests for the characters that will wander through the clearing and in order to do this, you will need to grow various plants and merge them to create the different fruits available to flavor the teas, though some requests may have stranger methods of brewing.
When not brewing tea for the shop’s patrons, the game encourages you to brew tea, find a spot, and have a drink yourself. Each of the different fruit flavors evoke a different emotion and drinking these will provide snippets into Alta’s life prior to her arrival.
Outside of brewing tea, Wanderstop provides you with the clearing around the shop to do with mostly as you please. You can plant your crops pretty much anywhere and the game encourages you to cultivate a garden and tend to the clearing by sweeping up fallen leaves and cutting down weeds that will spread if left unchecked.
Brewing tea, discovering new combinations of plants, figuring out the combinations needed to fulfill customer requests, or even trying different tea flavors to see the memories they recall from Alta is a deeply satisfying gameplay loop, but Wanderstop, in its attempt to give the player complete freedom, it doesn’t offer enough of this loop to get stuck into.
There are a few stages of the game, dictated by story progress, and each only provides a small handful of requests from customers and drip feeds the expanding variety of fruits to make tea with, so it can be a relatively quick and easy process to complete all of the tea activities for each stage with a feeling of less and less new things to discover with each stage.
Further still, the splitting of the narrative into distinct stages had the side effect of completely disincentivizing the downtime activities that the game is so eager for you to engage with. Remember, the premise of the game is to take time to relax and enjoy the little things, so the game gives you plenty of downtime and the opportunity to do your own thing. You have the freedom to grow your garden however you like and removing weeds and leaves from the clearing will occasionally reward you with additional seeds or trinkets that can be put on display to decorate the shop to your taste.
Clearing weeds and leaves is a boring task, but it should add to the feeling of tending to a space, looking after it as an extension of looking after yourself, much like growing and tending to a garden in the game is exactly the cozy gameplay elements that would work so well with Wanderstop’s narrative.
After completing all of the requests for each stage of the game, Alta will find the world silent and be encouraged to meditate by the clearing’s shrine, a process that moves the narrative forward and shifts the Wanderstop into a new clearing. If you had spent time cultivating a garden, tending the clearing or decorating the tea shop with the trinkets found for your efforts then that’s all gone now.
The first time this happened to me, it had been unexpected and it came at a time when I had really been starting to embrace the game’s request that I take my time and do my own thing. I had plans for my garden and had spent time running around and tidying up the clearing, carefully placing the trinkets I had found in displays around the tea shop. The game was starting to feel cozy and it was relaxing, even if some of the tasks by themselves were a little boring. The reset does somewhat make sense within Wanderstop’s narrative – a subtle encouragement for both Alta and the player to embrace letting go and moving on, but a point that I think could have been handled in a less jarring manner.
Once this first change had taken place, the downtime activities really took a hit for me, while the majority of the tasks could do with fleshing out further, tea brewing included, enough of it was there for it to be enjoyable when part of the whole experience, but when the game spends so much time pushing the virtue of taking time for yourself and making the most of your downtime, even if that means doing nothing, it felt completely at odds to then remove the results of the player embracing that because, for me at least, outside of brewing teas for the story, the downtime elements became chores – tasks done for the sake of doing them, because the game said I needed to do them.
My garden became the bare minimum needed to discover fruits in the field guide and to brew the teas requested of me, while leaves were left unswept and weeds allowed to grow into large patches only cut when waiting for the next stage of the narrative to present itself.
The most disappointing part of it all is that Wanderstop does a lot of stuff really well. The game’s aesthetic is beautiful and artistic and at times manages to capture the mood or feeling most present in the narrative while remaining cozy and charming. The small amount of voice acting provided for Alta is effortlessly and powerfully natural and emotional, and the writing while often touching is equally witty and humorous.
The art and direction of Wanderstop is matched only by C418’s incredible soundtrack that perfectly encapsulates the emotion of the narrative, feeling both melancholic and hopeful in a way that only C418’s signature refined simplicity can accomplish.
In fact, it was C418’s title music for the game that initially set the stage for Wanderstop to have a great first impression as moving through selections in the game’s options menu plays a range of piano notes that seamlessly blend into C418’s music. When paired with a deep and satisfying controller vibration, it created a strangely endearing moment where I found myself enjoying a game of my own making in the menu, riffing along with C418’s music.
It’s not all praise though, as I did find myself encountering a few bugs and other issues during my playthrough, including positioning for interaction prompts with certain items being a bit finicky or not showing up at all leaving objects like weeds unable to be interacted with, audio mixing also being a little off when transitioning between rooms causing a short bump in volume for certain sounds and the occasional item floating when dropped.
Final thoughts
Wanderstop has a lot to say and, for the most part, does a pretty good job of doing it. It boasts an exceptionally strong narrative but at times struggles to reign in its own enthusiasm for that message. However, while the narrative is strong, it’s not quite strong enough to completely overlook the gameplay elements that end up feeling a little undercooked.
Wanderstop is not a bad game, but it needs a little further refinement. The gameplay present would benefit from being a little more well-rounded and fleshed out, while some of the design and narrative choices ultimately serve to benefit the narrative strength of the game but at the cost of undermining the core gameplay loop and its biggest draw as a cozy game.
The Review
Good
