Review: Wanderstop Is Pretty, but Fails to Capture the Challenges of Healing

When the PR email for Wanderstop arrived in my inbox, I didn’t know how to feel. The description included that it was a “narrative-centric cozy game about change and tea,” and some of those words—narrative-centric, change, tea—appealed to me. As did having Davey Wreden’s name attached; I loved The Stanley Parable and have heard wonderful and intriguing things about The Beginner’s Guide, though I haven’t played it yet.

Sidequest was provided with a copy of Wanderstop for PC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

But there was that word: cozy. It’s not that I don’t like cozy games, but it’s also not that I do. I want to like them, and other media billed as cozy, but without conflict or struggle I tend to find them cloying and irritating. It’s not for me, simply. I’ve stopped playing games billed as “cozy” without a personal recommendation, but having Wreden’s name attached, when I know him from the dry, almost bitter humor of The Stanley Parable, intrigued me. Would that humor be enough to offset the rose-colored disconnect I tend to associate with anything branded cozy, or, worse, wholesome?

Wanderstop starts off with promise. You play as Alta, a fighter who has begun losing fights. Her body gives up as she runs through a magical forest to seek her master for more training. She’s certain her weakness is some flaw she can stamp out. She faints, then wakes up at a tea shop run by Boro, a charmingly sweet and stubbornly positive man who runs a magical tea shop. He insists that she take some time to rest, and that she recuperate by helping at the tea shop, which she begrudgingly does.

 

Unlike many cozy games, there is no incentive to be nice in Wanderstop. I played Alta as prickly, defensive, almost mean. She’s in pain, having lost her ability to pursue the activity—fighting, and more importantly winning—that brings joy and meaning to her life. People like Boro, the well-meaning, relentlessly positive type, can be a little irritating when your life feels like it’s falling apart. And the game lets me play Alta as a person who is annoyed, and doesn’t necessarily get less annoyed over time. Whether these dialog options have any impact on the game isn’t really important; it’s just nice to be able to play a character who isn’t quite ready to heal yet.

Wreden’s comedic writing, alongside the beautiful, candy-colored visuals, fun character models, and C418’s lovely soundtrack, are the highlights of the game. The humor keeps the story from being cloying—characters like Nana, a hypercapitalist shop owner who keeps giving Alta books about economics, alongside Alta’s own potential prickliness, balance out the somewhat saccharine premise of a magical tea shop. One of Wanderstop‘s side stories is about a hard-boiled action series following a character named Dick Warhard, which were legitimately funny enough (including the academic criticism of the in-game novels!) that I looked forward to receiving each new installation.

And Wanderstop is gorgeous to look at. I played it on my Steam Deck, and found that, even on the small screen, the environments and characters popped. The environment changes over the different stages of the game, separated by Alta meditating and returning to the forest to seek her master. These light refreshes—mostly in color palettes, but also in how different areas of the tea shop grounds are arranged—give the player a sense of exploration even in familiar environments. And they look nice! Some feel more springlike while others burst with fall colors, and one memorable section strips away some of the color for a foggy, somber mood.

But that, unfortunately, is where my appreciation for the game begins to fade. I had hoped that Wreden’s wry script and the incisive, humorous commentary he demonstrated in The Stanley Parable would be enough for me to finally, truly immerse myself in a cozy game the way other people seem able to do with ease. I like stories about healing! I like flawed protagonists! I like tea, a lot, dammit!

Alas. The more Wanderstop wore on, the more I found myself making unfavorable comparisons to Becky Chambers’ Psalm for the Wild-Built, a sort of solarpunk-y novella set in a post-capitalist, post-industrial world where robots gained sapience and left humanity to fend for themselves, pushing humans toward a more collective and less profit- and productivity-focused way of life. The protagonist, Dex, leaves their comfortable life as an urban monk to pursue a more wild life, and more specifically to find real-life cricket song. They become a tea monk, a person who prepares tea for people undergoing stress, trauma, or any other reason one might need a cup of tea, and talks them through their problems, before meeting a robot and kicking off the real plot.

It’s not hard to see the comparisons. Wanderstop, too, is primarily about a character who wants something but can’t get to it right away, and who works through it by preparing tea for others and, importantly, listening. While Psalm for the Wild-Built is a lovely little book, I picked it up because so many people talked about it as something life-changing, as something restorative, a perfectly brewed cup of tea to soothe the pains of late capitalism. And I believe it was that for many, maybe even most, readers. For me, though, it didn’t quite land—the world of both Chambers’ novel and Wanderstop are so far removed from our own circumstances that I couldn’t immerse myself the way I wanted to. I want to know how we get there, not what it will be like when we do. I hold the picture of a better world in my mind already. It’s achieving it that’s difficult.

Likewise, as much as I love the restorative power of a good tea (my personal go-to for a bad day is a peachy oolong) and have had positive experiences with talk therapy, I still find both stories’ approach to problem-solving a bit lacking. Neither suggests that talking things out over a cup of tea is the solution to all problems, at least not entirely. And in the case of Wanderstop, it’s serving, not partaking, that helps Alta begin recovering. But still—it seems so simple. Serve tea, heal, repeat. There’s little mention of the difficult, unglamorous work that comes between. The backslides, the frustration. The people who don’t want to heal, or the people who don’t want to move away from capitalism, or the people who harbor hate in their hearts because they are frightened or cruel or ignorant.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that these kinds of stories don’t land for me. I want them to. I want to be able to indulge in cozy media the way so many other people seem to be able to, but that’s not how my brain is wired.

I had already checked out of Wanderstop by the final act. I knew what kind of review I would be writing, even if the ending managed to turn things around, because story aside, playing the game was not particularly enjoyable for me. It lacks the sense of flow that does allow me to immerse myself into games; the pace was too slow to channel something like Cook, Serve, Delicious! and not smooth and regimented enough to draw me in like Stardew Valley. I grew frustrated with the tedium of planting things in the right configurations, running around looking for ingredients, my character saying the same phrases when I made her a cup of tea because she’d already had one of its five ingredients. Matt Thorton’s review sums up some of my frustrations well, citing the game’s somewhat overly complex tea-making mechanic (though the tea-making contraption was one of the things I liked engaging with most, actually) as a particularly frustrating example of how the game fails to make you want to play.

But what really cemented things for me was in fact that final act, which introduces a child character. I found her incredibly annoying, even as I liked the story the game was telling with her—that sometimes we sit on the edge of a precipice, and one nudge will steer us down one life path or another. Sometimes we are that nudge for another person. The character annoyed me and I didn’t like interacting with her, but, worse, she becomes the hinge on which Alta’s journey turns. Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, Alta is faced with a choice to be passive or to take violent action. There is only an “or” there: passivity or violence. And make no mistake—it is violence: the language used in this encounter is not only violent in nature, but purposefully so. The game suggests, through this choice as well as all the previous ones, that to choose it is a setback in Alta’s journey toward healing.

The alternative, to me, was a worse choice than sabotaging Alta’s journey. But why was the active choice framed as violent? In healing, and in trying to move away from being a workaholic (a journey I am very familiar with), being active is not actually the issue. Rest is important, yes. But choosing to rest is active. Choosing to help is active. Choosing to act is not choosing violence, not against someone else, and not against yourself, either. The lack of nuance here, the suggestion that to act rather than to wait must be violent, turned my frustrated but not particularly intense dislike for the game into outright irritation. Days later, I’m still fuming a bit over the framing of the choice.

I knew long before that moment that Wanderstop wasn’t for me. That’s okay. Maybe I’ve already made it through the part of my life where this game would have soothed and reassured me. I’ve read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. I’ve coached myself out of depending on validation from social media or other sources that don’t know or care about me. I’ve moved away from work, work, work—from success, a fickle and uncontrollable metric—as proof that I deserve to be alive, as proof that my life is worth something. I’m not Alta, not anymore. Like Psalm for the Wild-Built, this mode of thinking doesn’t challenge me anymore. It doesn’t even reaffirm what I already know. Instead, it irritates me—I believe, truly, that even an earlier version of me who would have benefited from this message would also have benefited from a nuanced, challenging perspective on how to make choices that are both healthy and active.

The thing about negative reviews is that they are sometimes better at explaining why a game might appeal to an individual than a positive one. It is possible and even likely that some readers of this review are balking because every thing I’ve complained about is something they loved, or because the things I dislike are things they need to hear. There is skill and intention behind the choices in Wanderstop, and I hope it finds its audience. It just so happens that that audience is no longer me. Maybe it never was.