Farming sims, shop management games, and all around cozy vibes are no longer hard to come by these days. Wanderstop is another one of those games, for sure, but its killer lineup of developers had me suspicious that there was more to it than just wholesome tea-brewing - and, now, its Steam Next Fest demo has me convinced.
Wanderstop is the work of Ivy Road, a new indie studio formed by Davey Wreden (Stanley Parable's co-developer, The Beginner Guide's creator), Karla Zimonja (known for Gone Home and BioShock 2's incredible DLC), and C418 (Minecraft's iconic composer). For a group of developers with such an emotionally heavy gameography, you might be pretty surprised to open the game's Steam page only to find lush, storybook greenery and characters with adorably off proportions. But rest assured, Wanderstop will still hit too close to home for some people.
It's about an ex-warrior called Alta who's spent her entire life training non-stop to hold onto her undefeated status until two back-to-back defeats put her in a funk. She can no longer get her mojo back. Her familiar sword becomes far too heavy to carry. And even jogging through the forest for a couple seconds, while looking for her old mentor, is enough to make her faint. (I told you this game hits close to home.) That's when she's almost forced to take an extended break at a tea shop run by a cuddly, docile man whose not-quite-right grammar just makes me love him more.
And that's the biggest twist of all: this is a cozy game about someone who hates the cozy lifestyle. A game about unwinding starring a character who has never known a day of rest in her life. A tea-brewing sim built around rituals and repeating loops of action, with a protag that swipes at tea leaves like she's being animated to hit something. Once the story of burnout reveals itself, you can suddenly see how it connects to The Beginner's Guide, at least.
Its brilliant Steam Next Fest demo only takes half an hour or so to finish, and it spends most of that runtime setting up the characters, the stakes, and putting Alta into a position where she would realistically stay in the tea shop she outwardly dislikes. But we also get glimpses of the more traditionally life sim-y bits. The shopkeeper teaches us how to breed plants by placing them in certain positions along a hexagonal grid, gather and then dry the tea leaves we've nurtured, all before we get to the genuinely breathtaking tea-making contraption that requires a ladder-on-wheels to operate. The demo obviously only has enough room for us to make one basic tea mixture, though I can imagine things get ever complicated as you discover new recipes and customers come in with more unusual requests.
While the management bits aren't anything groundbreaking - massive, twisting tea machine aside - that's not really what I'm invested in anyway. Wanderstop makes quite an impression in 30-minutes and it's almost entirely fuelled by Alta fighting back against her burnout, the shopkeeper convincing her that there might be something more to life than work, and the audience desperately hoping she recognizes what's wrong before it's too late. Because, really, "cozy" games are built entirely on a post-modern fantasy: knowing where your food's grown, befriending all your neighbors, having enough garden space to build a chicken coop. And wouldn't we all love a bulky bald man to pick us up when we're burnt out and offer us sanctuary in a magical forest?
We'll see if Wanderstop's hiding any left-field twists when the game comes to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on March 11. I haven't let my guard down just yet.
Want more demo recommendations? Check out what we've been playing in Steam Next Fest.
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