Aside from the likes of a few strictly story-driven “cozy” games like Coffee Talk or Dordogne, cozy can feel more to me like “hey, let’s do busywork for dozens of hours as long as the vibes are kind of chill.” And it’s hard for me to feel invested in a world like that enough to care. While I’m directing no shade at those who spent hundreds of hours in Animal Crossing customizing every single thing to their heart’s content, to me it always felt a little too superficial. A world run by arbitrary rules with cute, cloyingly sweet characters, but no real meat to any of the interactions.
Wanderstop is cut from a different cloth, and seemingly targeted at a slightly different audience. It is, in some ways, a cozy game for people who don’t really play cozy games, and its commitment to its narrative and whimsical charm elevates it to something very special even if some of its genre’s tedium isn’t completely absent.
In the beginning of Wanderstop, we’re introduced to Alta – a fearsome fighter whose singular goal in life is to go eternally undefeated in battle with the help of her trusty, custom-made sword. To the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out being undefeated forever is fairly hard, and before long Alta suffers setbacks that make her feel like she’s utterly failed to realize her potential. In the game’s opening moments, we find her running through the woods, aiming to visit the elusive Master Winters who can help train her up to and beyond her former glory. And yet, on her way, Alta’s trusty sword starts to feel heavier.
Way heavier. Heavy to the point where she can no longer lift it and is devoid of the energy to continue. As her world fades to black, Alta’s feeling of defeat feels more palpable than ever.
It's not long before Alta awakens on a bench next to a man named Boro, the owner of a small, whimsically designed tea shop in an open section of the woods simply known as The Clearing. Alta wants nothing more than to return to her mission and leave Boro to his shop-tending, but her need for rest is desperately obvious. And so Boro extends an offer – stay for a bit. As little or as long as she wants. Help Boro tend the shop, make customers tea, and discover a version of living that demands nothing but a little rest and self-reflection.
I don’t want to say much more than this for the sake of avoiding spoilers, but Wanderstop’s setup is immediately compelling because of the great writing that permeates throughout the experience. Alta’s inner turmoil is overtly familiar for anybody subjected to the dangers of burnout, and her refusal to find meaning in life without constant progress visibly wears on her.
Her initial interactions with customers are curt and impatient, caring little for their weird little quirks and just wanting them to give her a tea order so she can get all this damned “rest and relaxation” over with. But Boro is a fantastic character that plays a stark contrast to her – he is generously patient, deeply perceptive, and subtly wise, helping Alta question what she actually wants and dredge up some memories that will help her figure it out. And how? By, of course, making tea.
In typical cozy fashion, nothing about making tea and serving it to customers is especially complex. But there are several steps to the process – first, you have to wander the clearing to collect tea leaves and dump them in a basket to be dried out. Then, you’ll have to use a small variety of colored seeds as well as guides in your recipe book to grow small and large hybrid plants that will give you more seeds to work with and fruits that you can use to flavor your tea in a variety of unique ways.
But Wanderstop is hardly content to settle for real-life flavors – rather, you’ll be making teas like Azzy Fruit tea, which tastes like the day you first met your best friend. Or Puffpod tea, which makes you nostalgic for something you’ve never experienced. The various flavors and effects of the teas in your handy recipe book will help you figure out what to make for a customer who may not be sure what they want, but know how they want it to feel. This makes many of the orders feel like a gentle puzzle, but one with no time limits or anything truly demanding to it. You’ll have to plant seeds in certain patterns to yield specific fruits, and the game will require you to experiment a bit in order to fill out your recipe book.
You have a few key tools to use for the job – a watering can to water your plants and instantly grow the fruit you need, some hedge clippers to take care of any nasty weeds growing around, a broom to sweep up any unsightly piles of leaves – you get the idea. It’s cozy, but it’s streamlined. It’s always pretty clear exactly what you need to do, and while the game encourages you to engage with all of its systems, it rarely demands it, and only asks that you do what you want and engage with its customers whenever you want to progress the story.
Once you have enough ingredients, the actual tea-making in Wanderstop is its own multi-step process involving a giant tea machine that feels so satisfying to interact with. You’ll climb a ladder to pour water, heat it up as efficiently as you can via a water-boiling mini-game, and then swivel your ladder around the machine to move the water through it, add your ingredients, and ultimately dispense them into a cup. Once your cup is used and dirty, you can put it on an adorable train cart that makes its way through a dishwashing waterfall and drops off the clean mugs in another room.
I’ve said the word “whimsical” a couple of times already, but that’s because it fits Wanderstop perfectly. This is a game where every element of tea-making is reimagined and fantasized with such beautiful creativity that it’s impossible not to feel charmed. Helping customers heal their pain, restore their energy, or even just learn what tea is always feels satisfying since many of them come with their own problems and side stories that you learn about as you play. In that sense, Wanderstop often feels a lot like Coffee Talk if its scope was expanded into a more robust game where you have to actually source the ingredients yourself. But I want to be careful about this comparison because while Wanderstop has a lot of what I love about Coffee Talk, there is an overarching theme of transience that may drive some players crazy.
Nothing in Wanderstop, from its collectibles to its customers to the various plants you place around The Clearing, is meant to truly last. Customers will come and go with their substories feeling like they lack closure, occasionally blatantly so. And while I won’t spoil the narrative reason for this, each of the game’s five chapters takes place in a fresh version of The Clearing that’s mostly devoid of any souvenirs you collected or plants you placed in a prior chapter. Wanderstop is a narrative-first cozy game and it means it, so I wouldn’t get too attached to any specific arrangement of crops or any fancy mugs or souvenirs you find in the course of exploring The Clearing. While this is bound to frustrate some, I will say that the game’s final chapter allows you all the time you want building up and collecting things to your heart’s content before crossing the point of no return. But overwhelmingly, this feels like a cozy game that’s not meant for gamers into endless customization or satisfying farming mechanics. The tea-making process is cute and exactly as compelling as it needs to be, but this is, above all else, a heartfelt, Pixar-esque story about the importance of rest, the need to occasionally embrace change, and how to put aside the parts of yourself that don’t serve you.
While it probably doesn’t sound it by the way I’ve described the game so far, it’s also regularly, incredibly funny in a way that’s charming and innocent but also really smart. Some of the customers you deal with are really weird and will ask you to listen to their terrible PowerPoint presentations or to make them tea that’s as gross as possible just because you can. You can also discover a number of packages throughout the game called Lost Parcels, which will often be carried into the Wanderstop by cute penguin-like Pluffins that populate areas of The Clearing and like to steal things just to carry them around. Mailing back these Lost Parcels is one of my absolute favorite parts of Wanderstop, because not only are the letters you get in return often hilarious, but you’ll also receive in-game novels as part of a book club, like a series of stories starring the action hero Dirk Warhard, who keeps a card in his wallet in case he forgets his own name and destroys random objects in the name of ridding them of asbestos, apparently.
I was overjoyed every time I received a new Dirk Warhard novel in the mail, and though they only take about 5-10 real-time minutes to read, they’re consistently hilarious and an amazing small touch to include here.
In fact, a lot of Wanderstop is about the little things. It’s about all the different fully-voiced mini monologues Alta has when you give her a new type of tea, which gives insight into her character and the way she grew up. It’s about stopping to pick up a pluffin and pet them as they let out a squeaky squeal of joy. And it’s about exploring the beautiful Clearing and learning some of its secrets and mysteries. It’s a story whose focus on self-discovery makes it more concerned with the journey than the destination, and in the 12 hours it took me to see the credits roll, there were some aspects, small and large, that I wish were explained with more clarity. But it leaves itself intentionally open to interpretation, and ultimately, something about that feels appropriate.
Wanderstop is also a beautiful game, and one that makes me want to live in The Clearing surrounded by the vividly-colored trees of the forest, the great music playing in and out of the tea shop, cute little pluffins wobbling around and all manner of gorgeous plants you can grow. It runs really well too, though you will need to compromise on settings a bit with the Steam Deck. Capping the frame rate to 45 fps and using Medium graphical settings made for a very stable and polished experience that still looked great. While I did encounter a few bugs like two songs accidentally playing at once during the final credits sequence, a weed I could never manage to clip or a plant I could never manage to water, the overall experience is pretty stable and polished.
If there’s anything that specifically bothered me throughout Wanderstop, it was that if you’re not always on top of your resources, it can be easy to spend a lot of time wandering The Clearing in search of a very specific type of seed or mushroom that could be surprisingly elusive. Additionally, probably because I didn’t do enough leaf-sweeping and weed-cutting early in the game, there came a point where I completely ran out of tea cups and could not figure out where to find more. I did eventually find some by cleaning up The Clearing a bit and discovering places where the pluffins had clearly stolen a couple and moved them around, but it was a frustrating impediment to progress for a brief period.
Overwhelmingly though, Wanderstop is an experience that feels like the perfect intersection of profound, introspective storytelling and the sort of cozy vibes that made me want to quit my real-life job and run a tea shop in the middle of a magical forest. It feels like a game that’s near-impossible to dislike unless you need fast action in everything you play. But hey, even in between the more intense experiences, we could all use a little bit of rest.
GREAT
Comments