In the UK we have held firm to a single inalienable truth for decades. It’s a truth that has seen us through wars and political turmoil, through nationwide crises and disasters, and through personal tragedies that have threatened to undo us utterly. It’s a creed we live by, a comforting anchor in times of uncertainty, and it has gone ever thus: everything feels better with a cup of tea. In Wanderstop, new developer Ivy Road takes that ethos and runs with it.
Over the years, video games have tackled some pretty sensitive subject matter, from dealing with cancer, learning to live with grief, and overcoming crippling anxiety. As an interactive medium, gaming can present causes and solutions to all the above and more in a way that other entertainment can’t, giving us a greater degree of agency than if we were just watching someone else’s story unfold. In Wanderstop, Ivy Road turns their attention to the very real malaise we know as “burnout”, and invites us to tackle it not with sword or shotgun but with the gentle rhythm of a cozy production sim.
You play as Alta, a professional fighter in Wanderstop’s weird sort-of-fantasy, sort-of-present-day world. I describe it this way because it’s a world confirmed to have cars and trains and office jobs, but where someone like Alta can also be a professional arena fighter. Although, as you’ll discover fairly early on, a lot of Wanderstop’s narrative is allegorical, sometimes completely metaphorical, and ultimately it will all make sense.
Having gone undefeated for three and a half years, Alta suffers a sudden and humiliating loss in the arena. Further losses follow fast and follow faster, eventually seeing her retreat from the world to seek the guidance of a legendary fighter called Master Winters. But Winters lives beneath the canopy of a vast, dark forest, in which Alta soon finds herself lost and exhausted. So exhausted, she is unable to even carry the sword she has made an extension of her being for eight years. With the blade literally too heavy for her to even budge, she collapses in the forest, only to be found by gentle giant Boro.
Boro owns and operates the Wanderstop, a magical tea shop that sits within a whimsical clearing in the forest. Despite Alta’s protestations and simmering rage, Boro convinces her to stay a while and help him run the tea shop. She can’t lift her sword anyway, and she soon learns that the forest won’t let her leave – not until she has confronted her inner demons and learned to come to terms with her perceived failures. All of this is symbolised by her treasured sword, which resides against a tree stump in the centre of the clearing until she can lift it again.
There’s a wonderful juxtaposition to Wanderstop’s themes. On the one hand it’s a cozy farming sim where you’ll do chores, keep the place tidy, make tea and serve the customers who find their way to the clearing. On the other it’s a sometimes stark examination of Alta’s character and the demons she wrestles with. It’s damn relatable, too, for anyone who has found themselves the victim of severe burnout.
While Alta continues to bristle at all forms of stimuli, Boro’s gentle, honest, and above all innocent outlook slowly begins to thaw her demeanour. Much of this comes from the simple routine of the shop. You’ll begin with a handful of pink and blue seeds, which will eventually grow to encompass yellow and green variants. When planted in a line on the hex-based gardening grid they will create a “plant egg”, which you water to produce another plant from which to harvest more seeds. But place them in a larger configuration, and you’ll create a fruit bush and it’s with these fruits that you create different teas, for either Alta or her customers.
There are lots of different fruits, as well as mushrooms that grow in the clearing, and combining them with tea leaves in Boro’s huge tea-making “pouramid” contraption will produce a variety of unique drinks that elicit different emotions in the drinker. Some fruits energise, others evoke feelings of nostalgia “for things you never experienced”, others taste like the day you met your best friend, or exactly like your favourite childhood meal.
A large percentage of the game will be harvesting seeds and fruits, and keeping weeds and leaf piles to a minimum. Cleaning up often yields rewards like new cups (that you’ll need to clean, of course), trinkets to display around the tea shop, or pictures to put in the numerous empty frames that dot the walls. Sometimes you’ll find lost packages that you can mail back to the owner in return for more trinkets or books you can keep in the library.
Making tea is simple enough at first, though soon you’ll have more and more complex recipes. You’ll need a teaball made from gathered, dried tea leaves, a fruit or two, and sometimes a few other bits and pieces. You begin by climbing the ladder to the top of the pouramid and filling it with water, which you then heat with a bellows before infusing with ingredients, and finally pouring into a cup. I kept waiting for the recipes to get really complex and, while they do eventually get trickier, there really aren’t that many to worry about. You can concoct anything you want, but most of the time you’ll either make tea for specific customer requests, or to evoke a particular memory in Alta.
Part of her healing process is facing her past, and reflecting with a cuppa helps her do that, with these sequences spoken aloud by Alta as she regresses through painful or pleasant memories of her childhood and glory days. It’s only when she tries to leave the clearing, at set moments in the story, that Wanderstop takes some surprisingly dark turns, and a deeper meaning to the forest and the tea shop start to become clear.
There are times when the writing and musical score clash against the cozy, cartoony visuals to great effect, particularly where some of Alta’s customers are concerned. You’ll meet over a dozen through the course of the story, most prominently the “knight” Gerald, whose hand-me-down armour reveals a shirt and tie beneath, because he’s only trying to be a knight to impress a son who thinks he’s lame, and who is steadily conceding to a witch’s curse, or the young girl called Monster who arrives to cause havoc in the tea shop in the latter game.
By finding out what they require and fulfilling their needs, Alta slowly learns to fulfil her own, despite the best efforts of her fractured, self-sabotaging mind. This is all presented as stress-free as possible, too, with no time limits on customer requests, no fail states, and few restrictions. You can plant seeds more or less anywhere outside, and there are numerous places to fill your watering can or find tealeaves and mushrooms.
Because the customers and Boro are free to wander, there are rare moments when the AI pathfinding gets in your way, and I began to tire of the “puffins” Boro keeps (he says puffins but they look like penguins) coming up and croaking at me when they wanted a cup of tea or a cuddle. It’s cute at first, but becomes too regular after a while.
But that’s all I really have to complain about. There’s even a book in the library that literally tells you what to do next or how to make your customer’s tea if you need it, further reducing the stress. It really is an incredibly cozy, relaxing game that deals with its core issue head-on without ever feeling ham-fisted. Boro is a wonderful presence, and Alta herself is a complex individual elevated by some truly great writing. You can choose her dialogue and be honest, sarcastic, or indifferent to people, and they will react accordingly. Some of her greatest moments come from her encounters with Nana, a “rival” merchant who occasionally sets up shop in the clearing and who has Boro’s ability to withstand the effects of the forest.
Ultimately, Wanderstop is a lovely experience, occasionally shaken by a sharp left turn into much darker territory that feels all the more effective because of the contrast. Gorgeous visuals, solid character writing, and a relaxing workaday gameplay routine create a wonderful lens through which to view Alta’s burnout that encourages us to look inwards, and reminds us that sometimes the best thing we can do is slow down and stop fighting for a little while.
