‘Wanderstop’ Review: A Tea Shop Sim That Puts the Healing Power of Brewing in Your Hands

Alta is an accomplished fighter, an arena champion who’s dedicated and driven to be the best—until a string of losses throws her off her game and she’s sent searching for answers in a mysterious forest. She isn’t, in other words, the sort of person who might normally slow down long enough to work in a rustic tea shop. But that’s exactly what the warrior does in indie game developer Ivy Road’s charming Wanderstop, and not quite by choice. When she finds herself unable to lift her sword or even travel out of the forest, she begrudgingly agrees to take it easy under the serene tutelage of the tea shop’s zen-like owner, Boro.

Shop, though, isn’t quite the word. A shop suggests money changing hands, and the drinks at Wanderstop are free of charge for whoever shows up in the forest clearing where the establishment is located. All the ingredients are grown right there in the clearing with a minimum of fuss, with fruits and vegetables hanging off vibrant plants that require only a specific arrangement of seeds and splash of water to instantly reach full size. From there, the ingredients go into the towering tea-making machinery that Alta navigates with a rotating ladder in order to throw the levers, work the bellows, and yank the pulleys.

The process is involved and tactile, but it’s also meditative and unhurried. Every customer waits as long as they need to for their drinks. The only element that’s timed is waiting for the tea leaves to dry, which provides players with downtime to spruce up the place and maybe find some special decorative cups or trinkets by clipping weeds or sweeping away leaf piles.

Alta isn’t exactly stopping to smell the roses, but her time at Wanderstop is meant to be a reluctant reprieve from burning the candle at both ends in her career as a fighter. We’re pointedly not grinding out experience points, working down a skill tree, or upgrading our gear; a good conversation or a nice-looking establishment are their own rewards.

True, there’s something purgatorial about Alta’s situation, as she performs what amounts to unpaid labor because she can no longer lift her sword or even spend too much time out in the forest without collapsing from exhaustion. But anyone familiar with Davey Wreden’s work on The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide would do well to check their expectations. Alta may be vocal in her skepticism, but her reluctance never crosses over into the meta terrain of Wreden’s previous work. Wanderstop is quite sincere, a game where the protagonist learns something about herself in the process of brewing drinks and chatting with customers.

Wanderstop’s mechanics are complex enough to support a surprising number of variations yet never too daunting, and never so simple that the actions become rote. The same can’t be said of its narrative, which doesn’t support the 10 hours that it takes to complete. We get the point about burnout and unhealthy work habits long before Alta does, and the game foregrounds her conflict to its detriment. The dialogue is funny, and there’s no shortage of memorable oddballs passing through Wanderstop—namely a grouchy old capitalist who sets up a shop of her own—but we never get swept up in anyone else’s story because we’re often circling back to Alta’s glacial progress at self-enlightenment that will allow her to pick up her sword and leave.

While Alta’s frustrations with her newfound powerlessness give the story more verve than one with a protagonist who’s blandly happy all the time or an outright blank slate, the focus on her struggles becomes more repetitive than the actual repetitive tasks that players perform. The impact might have been softened if Wanderstop ever managed to make us feel like participants in Alta’s story, but her internal conflict always seems to be happening around the edges of the tea shop sim. It’s in this respect that, apart from its winning sense of humor, Wanderstop is most of a piece with Wreden’s previous, narration-heavy games, as the writer-director’s latest tells us what’s happening and what we ought to be feeling rather than making us feel it.

We never experience the exhaustion that’s ground Alta down, because it’s all something she’s looking back on in retrospect. Her fights and her training are seen only in flashback illustrations. The closest we get to witnessing her burnout firsthand is whenever she collapses in the forest, but even those sequences only require us to navigate text boxes. Funny and enjoyable as Wanderstop may be, it suffers from its inability to juxtapose Alta’s healing process with any of the hardship that made healing so necessary in the first place.

This game was reviewed with a code provided by popagenda.