Review | Wanderstop - A Low-Friction, Restful Experience

This review contains spoilers for the first four hours of the game.

You start Wanderstop at a run.

Alta, a fighter, dashes through a dark forest, carrying her beloved sword at her side. After a time, she slows, and you’re given a choice: rest, or push forward.

Obviously, you push forward.

Alta trained for this her whole life. Early mornings, punishing workouts, all in preparation to fight her way to the top. And she did: she was undefeated, until she wasn’t. Now, in this dark and mysterious forest, her sword falls from her hands. It’s too heavy to lift.

She runs on, until she drops.

I was years deep into severe burnout when I finally quit my job. The rhythms of daily life had become disjointed. Something black pooled in my throat. When I woke up in the morning, I often retched. Eventually, the bile began to rise. Out running errands shortly before filing my notice, I found myself alone, choking in the grocery aisle.

But how could I quit? I asked for this. This was my career. I had laid out a path ahead of myself, but before I could settle in my stride, the trail twisted beneath my feet. Still, I had to keep pace. I had to push forward. Right?

There’s nothing wrong with ostinato. We live our lives in repeated rhythms. Each day ticks forward, and somehow you find the energy to make it through. That is, until you’re spent. Burnout is a repetitive stress injury. If you dig your heels in and refuse to address the root of the problem, something will eventually break, and it might not be possible to put it back the way it was before.

Alta awakes on a bench in a forest meadow, seated next to a large, bald man. The jovial figure, who introduces himself as Boro, found her and her sword and brought them both to his tea shop, the titular Wanderstop. He offers her a place at the shop, an opportunity to slow down for a while.

But why would she stop? She’s come to train with a master fighter who lives here, not laze about brewing tea. The sword is too heavy to take, but she can choose to return to the forest. With me at the helm, that’s just what she did.

Not long after, she faints again.

Wanderstop is the debut release from independent studio Ivy Road, helmed by Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable), Karla Zimonja (Gone Home), and Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld (Minecraft). The gameplay loop revolves around making tea: grow and gather ingredients, brew drinks, serve customers, repeat. It’s a game tailor-made for unwinding, eschewing friction in favour of creativity and exploration. In this way, it slots comfortably among the slate of releases commonly lumped into the diffuse category of “cozy games,” characterised by colourful, friendly games with mechanics that’ve had most of the edges sanded off.

The game’s painterly art style sets a whimsical tone. The clearing is awash in a rainbow of flora, with the tea shop taking pride of place at its center. Various fantastical plants provide prismatic splashes of colour — a favourite of mine is the bungler curls, a spray of spiral stems that tempted me to scour a local nursery for an albuca spiralis. The shop is clearly well-loved: paint shows signs of weathering, and moss creeps up walls and across cobblestones. Plush couches invite Alta to take a breather, with plenty of room to sit comfortably ensconced by a variety of throw pillows. However, Wanderstop’s myriad shelves are mostly empty, only housing a few simple mugs. It is up to the player to find trinkets and teacups to brighten the space.

The game’s piano-centric soundtrack — composed by Rosenfeld — is bolstered with colourful orchestration accentuated by sparkling metallic timbres. In my playthrough, Alta first entered the tea shop accompanied by the gentle twanging of kalimba — melodic machinery. Other music styles sneak in: the player can tune the shop’s jukebox to a variety of synth-heavy selections indicated by twee icons including a puppy and a cow wearing a slick set of shades, and a notable non-player character is scored with chiptune fanfare. The clearing’s soundscape ebbs and flows to accommodate its various textures, with no jarring transitions. At one point, I found myself delighted by the introduction of a flexatone in the arrangement — jocular warbles floating above the fray — until Boro informed me that the jukebox had malfunctioned, and what I’d been hearing (paired with a steady metronomic clicking) was the dial in misalignment.

Wanderstop’s gameplay is notably simple, with very little friction. Tea-making is straightforward and meditative. Pour the water, heat the water, infuse the ingredients, pour a cup. Enmeshed with a flowering tree, the brewing machinery dominates the center of the shop, and you’ll spend a nontrivial amount of time as Alta deftly spinning on a ladder around the apparatus fulfilling requests from customers, as well as making tea for Boro and yourself to drink. Even the game’s penguin-like pets, pluffins, will drink tea when it’s offered.

Gathering materials is a cinch. To collect tea leaves, you merely run the perimeter of the clearing with a basket, filling it along the way. There is no scarcity: you can immediately gather more tea without waiting for plants to regrow. You can also grow a variety of plants using coloured seeds, arranging them into basic shapes using a hexagon grid to create “plant eggs,” which sprout once watered. Different combinations create a variety of small and large hybrid plants, which produce seeds and fruits respectively. As you navigate the clearing, you’ll find small piles of leaves to sweep and weeds to cut, both of which sometimes drop trinkets and teacups. You can enhance the shop’s décor by placing these found objects on shelves and tables, and relocate plants from around the clearing to fill various planters both inside and outside the shop. While the shelving throughout Wanderstop appears expansive, it fills up more quickly than you’d think.

The overabundance of materials could seem to pair poorly with players accustomed to farming sims, who may be tempted to hoard resources. What the shop lacks among its furnishings, however, is storage. This game has no chest or box in which to squirrel away items, and Alta’s pockets quickly fill to the brim. Rather than store ingredients, you’re encouraged to gather only enough for what you need in the moment. If you run out of supplies, it will take no time at all to get more.

Wanderstop is laugh-out-loud funny. The writing is unapologetically goofy, which at times belies shrewd satire. This is a game that asks you to “yes, and.” Sure, you can shut down NPCs and tell them to leave you alone, but where’s the fun in that? Alta’s propensity for snark lends itself to the humor — I decided to always choose the silliest dialogue option available, to great effect.

One of the first visitors to the clearing is Gerald, an armoured knight with a broom head festooned to his helmet. Gerald’s foot is also emitting purple smoke, the apparent result of a curse. The errant knight, however, is unfussed. If you let him, he’ll show you a lengthy series of photos of his beloved son, Timothy. Forget about the rule of three — you’ll be yes-anding well beyond it.

Alta begrudgingly brews tea for Gerald and others who make their way to Wanderstop, whose requests are at first straightforward but start to take a turn for the obtuse, as things tend to go in games like this. Another sanded off edge: in addition to a set of Field Notes that spell out gameplay mechanics, Wanderstop provides a Book of Answers to the player, which states exactly how to fulfill pending requests. You won’t need to turn to an online guide, as it’s integrated into the game itself.

After a while, though, the shop’s patrons fall silent, and a confused Alta turns to Boro for help. Here, Wanderstop takes an unexpected turn. Boro sets up a shrine at which Alta meditates, and after a cutscene her focus returns to the clearing, now transformed, rendered in a new colour palette. With this change comes erasure. All the plants Alta grew, the trinkets and teacups collected, and even the tools and resources stowed in her pockets, have vanished. Additionally, landmarks have also moved. The pluffins’ coop, a small garden, and other notable pieces of scenery have taken new positions, undoing any muscle memory you may have developed up to this point.

The ground has shifted beneath your feet.

Alta, understandably unmoored, confronts Boro. She presses him, jarred by the loss, and he responds: “I am sorry that you have had something taken from you, it is not a kind feeling. But perhaps you will join me in standing up, and moving forward into the new shop that is before us.”

As the player, you may think, why bother doing it all again, if it might again be erased? Well, the clearing provides abundance, and now you have a fresh slate to redecorate as you please. New visitors will arrive soon. That’s why you’re here, right? Isn’t that why you’ve chosen to play this game?

Wanderstop’s mechanics aren’t the only thing sanded to a smooth finish. The Steam version of the game runs well on PC, though it prioritises a controller over mouse and keyboard, as well as Steam Deck. Bugs were inconsequential — I encountered the odd floating teacup and experienced a few unresponsive inputs, such as weeds that couldn’t be cut with the pruning shears. Sometimes the controls felt a bit fiddly and I faced minor difficulties positioning Alta to pick fruits or pour tea, but the control scheme was comfortable overall.

Alta isn’t the only one who rests at the tea shop. The game is paced meditatively, encouraging the player to take it slow and spend time gardening and decorating, rather than rushing through requests and pushing forward the plot. Ivy Road estimates playtime at 10-15 hours, but I spent 19 hours completing the game.

In truth, I wish I had the chance to play Wanderstop a few years ago. At the peak of my burnout, I could no longer absorb narratives. Books, movies, and television alike — I couldn’t maintain focus. In my downtime, I gravitated towards games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and the only TV series I kept up with was the panel show Taskmaster. Wanderstop would have been accessible to me even at my most exhausted. Sure, friction is important in games, but what if you cannot take on any more friction?

Throughout the game, Alta spends much of her time frustrated. Stubborn, abrasive, and highly driven, she has trouble slowing her presto pace to Boro’s comfortable andante. She knows, however, that something is awry, and accepts his gentle offer of help. Her time at the tea shop may feel like an unwarranted pause, a hiccup in her true journey, but she has no choice. She must rest — her body demands it.

Unlike many cozy games, Wanderstop is not about wish fulfillment. Alta cannot bootstrap herself into newfound strength by brewing the perfect cup of tea, and she cannot heroically swoop in and fix everyone else’s problems, either. She must accept loss — of the fights, and of who she thought she was — and whatever transformation that may bring in its wake.

My body, too, demanded rest. While I did not have a Boro, my path out of burnout was not possible without support. I may not be fully recovered, and I am most certainly changed, but my feet are now steady beneath me, and I will walk — maybe, eventually, run — into whatever future lies before me.

Wanderstop is out now on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.