Wanderstop Review: Learning to Trust the Good in Yourself
There’s something beautiful about the fact that there’s a drink out there that’s mostly just leaves and water. Sure, you can fancy it up a bit, but at the end of the day, when its gone through the ringer and spent hours in a cup that someone forgot about, it’s just leaves and water. Thankfully, the tea in Wanderstop has a bit more to it than that.
Wanderstop is a story-driven tea shop management game from Developer Ivy Road, which includes Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, Karla Zimonja co-creator of Gone Home and Tacoma and Daniel “C148” Rosenfeld who created the music of Minecraft. Wanderstop follows a fighter named Alta as she struggles to come to terms with two recent battle losses. She ventures out to look for a retired fighter to give her advice and collapses in a large forest. When she wakes she is greeted by Boro, the proprietor of Wanderstop, a tea shop in the middle of the mystical woods. Alta discovers that she can no longer carry her sword and Boro encourages her to rest at the teashop while she recovers.
Wanderstop takes place over four seasons. During each season, visitors will appear at the shop and request tea for you to make. Other times, characters simply wish to speak to someone or they may have other motives altogether. A woman who calls herself Nana, for example, sets up a small shop in the Wanderstop clearing and is determined to be fierce competition for Boro and Alta - despite the fact that the tea shop doesn’t make any kind of profit. Other faces include Gerald, a wandering knight determined to prove to his son that he is super cool and a slew of plain looking businessmen who refuse to drink anything but coffee. It’s a strange but interesting group of people who all seem to infuriate Alta who feels trapped at the tea shop, forced to interact with these people, and unable to move along to her next fight.
Once someone gives you their drink order, you’ll then have to brew it in the large machine at the center of the shop. This involves pulling a lever to fill the machine with water, heating it, adding your tea and any flavorings and, of course, pouring it into a cup. Eventually, orders get a bit complicated, calling for different temperatures of water or for ingredients to be put in the pot in a particular order, but with the exception of one order I struggled with, making drinks isn’t too difficult. Before you even make tea, though, you’ll need to grow and collect the correct ingredients to make it.
The clearing around the shop will provide everything you need for tea including the seeds to grow plants. Once you’ve collected a few different colored seeds you can plant them anywhere in the clearing, but there does happen to be certain areas around the shop with empty land begging for some life. Using a field guide that Boro gives you, you can see which plants you can grow with which seeds and in what configuration to plant them. When you’re holding a seed you’ll see a grid highlighted on the ground and you’ll be able to place them down to match the configuration in your field guide. Simple plants known as “small hybrids” will yield seeds when watered, “large hybrids” which are made up of different colored small hybrids, yield fruit. Sometimes things work out perfectly and you’ll have grown exactly what you need to fulfill a customer’s order and other times it feels impossible to find the seeds you need.
Wanderstop is a game that encourages you to take your time and slow down so it feels wrong to complain about the slower moments, but not being able to find a seed you need completely halts game progress and I had the issue more than once. Eventually, the plants that yield seeds will run out and no longer produce anymore. Once that happens you can sometimes find seeds in leaf piles scattered around the clearing. In my eight hour playthrough I found less than five seeds this way so trying to find them just by luck of a leaf pile dropping one, was frustrating. If you can’t gather the correct ingredients, you can always make someone the wrong tea, but the one time I did this, the character no longer spoke to me. Without replaying the game in full I have no real way of knowing if they stopped speaking because their story was done (it didn’t seem like this was the case) or if it was because I served them the wrong drink. So, while you can give someone the wrong order, it’s not the best option.
The only other nitpick I had with the game was having to wait for tea to turn into balls. To make tea, naturally, you need to include tea leaves. Thankfully, the clearing grows plenty of tea leaf bushes. Once you’ve collected enough leaves you’ll place them in a basket contraption in the shop that magically forms them into balls. But you have to wait…and wait…and wait for them to finish before you can use them. In hindsight, it’s probably only about three or four minutes of waiting, but the number of times I was almost done with tea and then realized I had to go and find enough leaves and then wait another few minutes for them to be formed into balls, was mildly infuriating. And with everything else in the game available instantly, seeds, fruit, etc. this four minute wait felt unbearably long at times.
Once you’ve finally collected your fruit, gotten your tea balls and brewed tea, you can then deliver it to the customer who ordered it. And don’t worry if it takes you a long time to get there, your customers are patient and their order is kept track of in your field guide. You’re also welcome, at any time, to share tea with Boro or make it for yourself. It’s lovely getting those little moments with the characters when you get a short break to hear about something from Boro’s past or to get Alta’s thoughts on her current situation.
At a certain point, when you’ve wrapped up conversations and tasks, the game will indicate its time to move on to the next clearing. This just means the area around the shop will change in appearance and any items you have or plants you grew will be gone. This is particularly heartbreaking when you’ve gathered up a bunch of knick knacks and gifts and have to say goodbye to all of these items. Some things survive, like books you’ve placed in your library or photos you’ve hung up on the walls, but most everything else is reset with each new clearing.
I could keep going on about the number of other things you can do in Wanderstop and, trust me, it’s a lot more than just planting and tea making, but it has so many little and big surprises you’ll want to discover them all for yourself. So let's talk a bit more about the story, briefly.
The lesson that Wanderstop teaches is one that we’ve all heard before. “Take your time.” “Stop and smell the roses.” “It’s okay to not always be moving.” But, despite the fact that it’s something we’re told all the time, it can often be the first thing we forget when our lives get busy and hectic. And Wanderstop handles the lesson beautifully with Alta’s story. She is struggling to understand why she can’t pick up her sword and fight as she normally does. She craves battle. She yearns for the constant movement of her life. Being in one place is painful for her. When she is stuck, she is forced to look upon herself and see who she is without her sword. She must learn to trust herself again and trust that she knows what is best for her. And if what’s best for her is a cup of tea, then that’s okay.
Wanderstop is a game about making tea, but it’s also a game about slowing down. It’s about trusting yourself and learning who you are. It’s about separating yourself from the person that others perceive you to be. It’s about enjoying friendly competition, embracing compromise and accepting that you can't always be in control. And also, there’s penguins. Ivy Road has delivered a great game that I, along with the many others who play it, will be talking about for a very long time.
Breakdown
Game: Wanderstop
Developer: Ivy Road
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Availability: PC, PlayStation 5
Accessibility:
Adjustable subtitle size
Dyslexia friendly font
Colorblind support
A motion sickness dot
Game Length: 8-15 hours
Reviewed on PC
Final Thoughts
Wanderstop teaches a valuable lesson that will have players reflecting about their own lives. Interacting with customers is so much fun and while some of the steps along the way to making tea are a little finicky, that’s fun too. When you bundle everything together, Wanderstop is a wonderful experience full of surprises. I got so attached in such a short time that I was sad to see the credits roll. As someone who rarely drinks tea, it made me want to brew a fresh pot.