I was told that for my preview of Wanderstop, I was allowed to discuss anything up to a specific narrative moment about 40 minutes to an hour in. I reached that point two hours in because I was enjoying taking my time in the game’s world so much. But before I get to that, let’s talk about Alta.
Wanderstop is Alta’s story. In a beautifully illustrated montage, we learn that Alta is a renowned fighter who’s forsaken everything, pushed herself to her limits day after day, just so she could be the best in the world. And she was, until she wasn’t. She was defeated once, then again, and again. Unable to recover, she looks for a legendary fighter, Master Winters, to train her back up. She runs through the woods, convinced that as long as she does this, she’ll get back on track. But she’s exhausted. She collapses in the forest, afraid, exhausted, and alone.
When she wakes up on a bench, she finds Boro – a huge, bald, relentlessly cheerful man – smiling at her. Boro tells her that he carried her back from the forest, offers her a cup of tea, then asks her if she would like to join him in making the tea. “The making of tea, it is good for the soul and body,” he says. “Perhaps help you recover.” It’s entirely her decision, he says gently, before leaving. Instead, I have Alta run straight back into the woods where she came from, where she promptly faints again. Boro watches her wake on the bench again, repeating his offer. I make her try to leave, again and again. Eventually, she gives in and makes the tea – resentfully, but she does it.
Make Tea, Find Peace
Wanderstop’s world is colourful and beautiful, full of cottages, plants, and strange contraptions. Boro walks her through the tea-making process. You collect tea leaves from bushes outside the tea shop in a basket, and leave them in a bowl to dry. Once they’re dry, which takes a real-world minute or two, they turn into a tea ball, which you can then toss into a massive, overly complicated tea brewing contraption that’s almost Rube Goldbergian in nature.
When I say massive, I mean that you need a ladder to access all its components. You yank on a rope to put water into the giant flask, then climb down to the bellows, which you whack a few times to ensure the water boils. Then you kick a valve and move over to the infuser, where you toss in the tea ball and other ingredients, like fruits. Kick another valve and the finished tea is transferred to the “Pouramid”. Place an empty cup below it, pull the rope, and the cup will fill with tea. It’s a long, complicated process, one that requires time and deliberate movement. There’s no rushing the process. That is, of course, the point.
It might be easy to assume that Wanderstop is just about making tea and serving customers, but it’s really not. There’s plenty to do outside of that, and none of it is mandatory or stressful. You can plant seeds in the garden in a hex grid to create hybrids that produce seeds, and larger hybrids that produce different fruits. Experimenting with different seed combinations will create new fruits to toss in your tea.
Apart from that, you can roam the grounds and snip weeds, water your plants, or even return lost items by putting them in the mail. You can even make yourself a cup of tea and sit on a bench, where you’ll mull over a different memory depending on what fruit you put in the brew.
Your watering can looks like a frog. It’s very cute.
Your Job Is To Rest
Everything in the game is designed to be the opposite of stressful. Customers are happy to wait as long as you need for the tea they’ve asked for. Gathering resources takes time, prompting you to wander as you wait. You don’t get in trouble for messing up a drink, you just try again. There’s never any pressure to do anything immediately or perfectly, which is the whole point – Alta needs time and space to rest and recover, not extra responsibilities. You don’t even have to memorise anything, because there are tons of handy guides to get you through anything you might need to do. It’s as chill as a management game has ever made me feel.
But Alta has to wrestle with this, because she feels like without struggle and pain, she’s not being productive. She desperately wants to find something, anything to do. She harangues one approaching customer because they don’t really want tea at the moment, and she doesn’t understand what the point of a tea shop where your customers don’t order tea is. She occupies herself by serving customers and helping them see their own stories through – as she puts it, what else is she doing right now?
And these customers are wonderful. One is a man pretending to be a knight because he thinks it’ll impress his teenage son, who he has an astonishing amount of pictures of on his person. He’ll show you all of them, too, if you care to ask. His son clearly thinks his dad is a dork, but never mind that, the knight is on an adventure!
Another is a demon hunter who doesn’t actually hunt demons – there aren’t that many left, as they tell you meekly. They mostly try to offer assistance to communities through social work now, but as Alta keeps telling them, this isn’t a community, and nobody needs their help. This demon hunter, too, is trying to find their place in the world through their calling.
Wanderstop is a very funny game, even if its writing of Alta sometimes errs on the side of being heavy-handed – we get it, Alta, you really want to be the best fighter in the world. Boro, your guide and companion, has a wonderfully weird way of phrasing sentences, and he’s so easygoing that you can’t help but find him endearing.
For example, at one point, he tries to improvise a joke for Alta, and it turns out to be a meandering affair with an entirely irrelevant setup. Alta protests – what was the whole first part of the joke for, then? Boro beams at her, and says it makes you empathise with the characters. Alta refutes this. Boro agrees to workshop his material, but is clearly very proud of himself. He’s not stupid or oafish, but instead has the wisdom not to take things so damn seriously. He reminds me of a Buddhist who’s let go of all material desires. He’s chillin’.
As someone in the midst of trying to recover from their own burnout, I can’t help but feel like Wanderstop’s completely stressless environment is exactly what I need right now. It never feels directionless or aimless – there’s plenty of story here that I’m not going into detail about because of spoilers – but it does feel like I’m at liberty to take as much time as I need with it and wander where I like. It feels like a treat to come across a game like this, and I’m excited to see Alta grow like the plants in her garden.
Wanderstop
Adventure
Indie Games
Simulation
