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Boiling water hitting a cool ceramic mug; gently rising steam; the first deep gulp. The simple ritual of making tea, and the act of drinking it, is one of life’s great pleasures. But is it enough to heal Alta, a once-great fighter reeling from a string of career-ruining defeats? Are soothing brews just what she needs to make her long-awaited return to the arena?
Wanderstop’s set-up is equal parts cloying whimsy and dark YA novel. The game opens with our protagonist falling to her knees in a shadowy forest. Alta is exhausted; her legs are leaden. We hear snippets of her back story: “I’m weak, I’m a failure,” she says of her professional collapse. Unable to move, she passes out before waking to an ostensibly wondrous scene — a quaint forest clearing of winding paths and rainbow-coloured shrubbery. A tea shop called Wanderstop, too twee even for a Disney movie, sits at its centre. Boro, the friendly bald chap who runs it, encourages Alta to stop a while. The fighter agrees, albeit begrudgingly.
So begins her rehabilitation. Boro shows Alta where the basket is to collect the tea. There is a set of shears with which she can cut thorny weeds and a watering can to tend to fruit-producing plants (used to flavour the infusions). Actual tea-making is a small wonder of design and choreography: the camera sweeps elegantly alongside Alta from the top of the gigantic brewing contraption to the bottom where the infusion arrives with a satisfying gurgle.
The problem is that Alta, unlike the guests who visit this tea shop — including fairies, mischievous children, and the embodiment of life itself, a shimmer called Zenith — cannot leave this tiny, perfect world. Certainly not until she has recovered. And so a question presents itself: is this a playground or is it purgatory?
Wanderstop asks these questions knowingly. Writer and director Davey Wreden made his name with a pair of acclaimed metafictional titles, 2013’s The Stanley Parable and 2015’s The Beginner’s Guide. The latter is especially wonderful, evoking the emotional rawness and intellectual slyness of a great Charlie Kaufman movie. Wreden is rightly sceptical of the restorative, self-care potential in making tea. The game is not so pat as to suggest that putting the kettle on will fix everything.
Another, more fundamental question looms as the game wears on: what is Alta really suffering from? Wreden has said Wanderstop is inspired by his own feelings of burnout, yet the game fails to articulate this. In fact, beyond her surface-level, overachiever’s suffering, Alta is thinly drawn. We’re only given fleeting insight into her career insecurities, such as a memory of her father becoming unemployed when she was 14.
None of what makes burnout such a commonly discussed problem in the real world (especially among millennials) exists in Wanderstop’s bucolic fiction: it is devoid of precarious employment, oversaturated social media and rising rents. This fantasy setting is too broadly drawn for its tale of personal struggle to be either affecting or effective.
In its brightest sequences, this slight game deftly synthesises the wry cartoons of Adult Swim and Studio Ghibli’s soothing pictures. But then we must endure another 10 minutes of vague therapeutic platitudes. The tea-making is nice but it’s not enough — for the player or for Alta.
★★☆☆☆
On PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S
